Omigodddd....
Noooooo!
Omigodddd....
Noooooo!
Blimey, I'd really half
forgotten that this thing still existed. It's a bit like that piece
of toast you dropped behind the fridge five years ago, except thanks
to the awesome anti-bacteriorological properties of the interweb,
it's been miraculously preserved, untouched by decay. The trouble is
that peanut butter and pate toast wasn't actually that good five
years ago, and well, you get the gist. In truth this thing was always
just a bit of a throwaway joke, but, well, no, I'm going to sort the
thing out. Some time. This year. Add some bikes and some trekking
pics. Maybe some words. In the mean time, please bear with me and if
in doubt, read Calvin and Hobbes. And Jesus, don't those animated
GIFs just suck like a Dyson. Oh the shame...
MoiHi, this structureless splattered splurge of a page is coming at ya from Glossop, a small but arguably scenic town which has been plonked down on the edge of the Peak District National Park in Derbyshire by bad-tempered aliens with a perverse sense of humour. It's beautiful round here, but most of the time you can't tell that cos it's raining too hard. Still, as an exiled Londoner, I'm not complaining. Or at least not as much as I would be if I were still wedged under someone's stinking armpit on the Northern Line, but don't let's start on that one.
Good things about Glossop include its 65 million pubs, proximity to the Dark Peak and the choking traffic which effectively seals it off from the horrors of Manchester. This is frontier land you know, though it's still only 30 minutes to Picadilly on the train.
Just next door is Royston Vasey, sorry, Hadfield, the location of the BBC's League of Gentlemen TV series. Hadfielders are getting a tad sensitive right now and seem to think that the frankly barking spread of freaks, weirdos and assorted northern nutters is somehow based on them. Wonder why that would be ...
WorkCheck out OUTDOORSmagic, where I'm the site editor, responsible for the editorial content and other less fascinating stuff. We're just launched and while there's a way to go yet, it's going to be good. If you fancy having your own news feed just like this one on your site for free click here.
I'm a journalist and have written for an assortment of publications over the years. Until recently I was News and Gear Editor of Adventure Travel Magazine, a UK mag mainly about trekking abroad along with some basic mountaineering thrown in. An odd little publication with a strange penchant for prefixing everything larger than a sheep with 'mighty' as in: The Mighty Andes, The Mighty Himalaya, The Mighty Inca Trail, The Mighty Tatras, The Mighty Blister. You get the idea.
I've written extensively about walking and mountaineering in South America, as well as Nepal and a variety of other destinations. As a result, I now have a lot of fleeces, but you can't eat 'em, the fibres get stuck between your teeth.
In the dim and distant past I spent five years as a staffer on SuperBike, Croydon's finest motorcycle magazine, in the days before it was inundated with piccies of topless totty and crammed with endless roadtests pitting R1s against ZX-9Rs and CBR600s in every decreasing permutations
My work has also appeared in brass, the magazine for the northern creative community - if it still exists, brass that is, not the northern creative community - FHM, Climber, BIKE - the motorcycle version - MCN, Condé Nast Traveller (no, really), Sport Rider in the US, Maximum Mountain Bike, now sadly defunct but the link points at BIKEmagic - thanks Cabal - and The Guardian newspaper and a heap of other publications in the UK and abroad including, er, South African GQ. No, really. Still haven't seen that one.
I'm still available to write for print publications, just drop me an e-mail if you want to commission something or just discuss and idea. I mean, fat chance, this has never, ever happened, but you never know...
StoriesI'll be updating this section in the nearish future - and I bet you've heard that one before eh? - but right now you can take your pick of:
An interview with mountaineering writer Joe Simpson - in my opinion the best author in his sphere and an interesting guy. This article originally appeared in Climber.
A description of the Illimani Circuit trek in the Cordillera Real of Bolivia - there was me, Maria my partner and the spectre of my stupid competitiveness. And she still hasn't forgiven me ...
If you've ever wondered how much power the Kawasaki Ram Air system actually produces, you can read all about it on Jeroen de Roos's splendid ZZ-R1100 page. All testing for this was done on our private test strip (and the Pope rides a KR-1S, oh yes indeed!)
Or just take a look at OUTDOORSmagic, it's great, oh yes.
More up to date stuff
coming soon. Honest. And now I have a scanner too. How does that work
then?
MotorcyclesAs a sort of virtual
hangover from my days on SuperBike, I've accidentally created
two motorcycle web pages. The first is a sort of homage to the BMW
K1, in the shape of the Awesome
K1 Page and the
second is dedicated to my ex-SuperBike longtermer
Kawasaki
ZXR750 a sort of
large scale souvenir of my time on the magazine and still going
strong. Or at least it would be if I could find the time to put the
carbs back. There's also a page dedicated to my, er, VW
Polo.
The least said about that the better.
South
AmericaThe best place on earth, period. I spent nine months there in 1997 travelling in Ecuador, Bolivia, Peru and Colombia - 'You want grass? You want coke?' Did a load of climbing, trekking and suffering on long bus journeys, met my partner and basically remodelled my brain and my life.
I might never have gone there if it hadn't been for my friend and sometime climbing partner Yossi Brain, a La Paz-based guide climbing guide and author who was tragically killed in an avalanche in the Apolobamba area in September 1999. Yoss was a good mate, a charismatic figure and an inspiration to many who climbed in South America. He wrote two excellent guidebooks to Bolivia, one covering climbing, the other trekking which are published by The Mountaineers in the States and Cordee in the UK. The world seems a smaller, less colourful place without him and we miss you mate.
If you're looking for a good adventure agency in Ecuador, try Safari Tours in Quito. And if you're off to Bogota and need a great travellers' hostal complete with free coffee and internet connection then you can't beat the incomparable Platypus, run by the brilliant German Escobar.
Finally, check out Granite Arches, the guiding service run by my American mate Swis Stockton. Swis is the nicest person in the continental United States and an all round good guy and good guide. He has trouble telling the difference between plastic and leather, but then hell, don't we all?
e-mail me at jon@nozzer.demon.co.uk
Last but very definitely not least, I'm into climbing, hillwalking, scrambling, mountain biking, mountaineering, fell running (though not competitively) and snow and ice climbing, that's it, I think, for now.
I am a member of both The Goats Mountaineering Club, a little known and frankly ridiculous group of errrm, goats and (sometimes) The Innominata Mountain Club, who are a nice, Stockport-based bunch and meet every Thursday night at the Dog & Partridge, Buxton Road (A6), Davenport from 9 pm.
This page comes to you courtesy of my aged and dog slow Apple Macintosh, which has just been pensioned off and replaced with a brand, spanking new iMac. Hallelujah!!! And seeing as I now have a scanner, it won't be long until there are a few pix around here. Well no more than a year or two anyway.
That's the number