Crazy hill-climbers

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Gordon Cobbold, also a biker

Gordon Cobbold

I am sorry to say that I did not know this man, although we share the same name. Our relationship, family-wise, is quite distant, but I feel a kinship with him for reasons obvious to anyone who has followed this blog for a while. I found this excellent tribute to him recently, written by Dave Stewart, who later also became a president of the British Motorcycle Racing Club (also known as Bemsee). I have very slightly edited it, but without major alterations. He sounds a good guy!

Gordon Cobbold on a Sunbeam at Brooklands

"Gordon's racing career began in 1923 with the Essex Club at the old Brooklands Circuit in Surrey where average race speeds in excess of 100 Miles per hour were attainable. By 1925 Gordon was a regular winner and also a works Sunbeam rider. By this time Gordon was a member of BMCRC who were at that time headquartered at Brooklands. 1926 was a good year for Gordon, culminating in him winning the Grand Prix run on the mountain circuit, which used part of the banking, the finishing straight and some of the service roads running between the Vickers works sheds and the old clubhouse.
 
In 1927 he had an exceptionally good year with many wins and records and this was also the year in which he attained his 100 mph Brooklands lap star. Averaging over 100mph is scary enough on machinery which was at the cutting edge of technology ( ie liable to dump the contents of its sump at any moment), but the safety wear of the day consisted of a WW1 leather flying helmet, a leather coat and army surplus boots!


Here is Gordon (number 15) overtaking on the banking at Brooklands.
 
In 1928 the Sunbeam concessionaire withdrew from racing and Gordon spent the next two years on a variety of other bikes with some success' but more failures mainly due to mechanical defects. At this point he decided to accept an offer to ride for the Crystal Palace speedway team " I could get £5 a night start money which was more than most peoples' weekly wages in those days. At the end of the 1930 season we were asked to go to Paris and take part in a speedway festival at the Buffalo stadium and we ended up staying over a year ". Apparently they used to freight out bikes, old Douglas' mainly, and do them up for speedway use "Then let the froggies rent them for a few francs per lap until they'd got the bug. Then we'd sell them a bike !" Gordon and his sidekick, who must remain anonymous to protect his good name, made a fair amount of money at this but Paris is a fairly easy place to spend money so they never seemed to have much left at the end of the month. At about this time they hit on the idea of having an international speedway event with all the worlds top riders invited, effectively the first ever world championship. " All these chaps arrived from New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, America and the like... I didn't have a bloody clue how it was going to work. I had the lorry parked out the back ready for a quick getaway if need be ". As it happened the stadium was packed to capacity and there was still a suitcase full of francs left over when everyone had been paid. Thinking they deserved a holiday after all thier hard work the lads went to Monte Carlo. "Two weeks later we were damned well broke again".
 
Gordon left England in late 1930 with £20 in his pocket and came back after a roller coaster ride of fun and trouble in 1932 with £15 in his pocket. "Wouldn't have changed a bloody thing though". And that is the nice thing about the man, he can truly sit there and say after 94 years that he would do it all again and would share it all with his late wife Rita who he sadly lost last year. Gordon is now our club president and I personally am proud to call him a friend I would thoroughly recommend a chat with him as a pleasant way to pass an hour or so. He can be found at nearly all of our meetings and after five minutes you can easily forget that you are talking to a man who was born while King Edward VII was on the throne. "

Here he is in 1998, still on a Sunbeam. Having been a long-standing President  of the BMRC, he lived on to be 100, so that makes at least two tons!



My favourite quote from Gordon is the one used in this comtemporary cartoon : " I don't mind breaking my neck, but I do hate to be ignored! "

Trains and windows

I am sure that I am not alone in enjoying, in that distanced, semi-detached way that the situation often induces, looking out of train windows. The beauty or otherwise of the landscapes, the variable speeds at which these develop in front of you in a kind of cinemascope/kaleidoscope, the notion of speed being accentuated by the stroboscopic effects engendered by lighting that flashes and fades as alternately obscured and then revealed by objects near the train.

There is also the fact that you are in the landscape and yet clearly separated from it, the constantly changing perspectives, alternately closing in then moving back and out. All this, plus the reverie sensations that the movement of a train so often induces (just look at how many people go to sleep in trains!).

Here is a short series of photographs I took recently through a train window, travelling through Burgundy under the snow. Might try this again sometime.

Baalbek, more than just Bacchus

For many (and this used to include myself until last Saturday, when I visited the place for the first time), the image of the fabulous Lebanese site of Baalbek, known in Greek times as Heliopolis and rebuilt by the Romans over hundreds of years as from about 200AD, boils down to the temple of Bacchus, shown above. And indeed this is probably the most complete of all Roman temples left standing today, despite the earthquakes that have partially destroyed much of the remainder of this gigantic sanctuary and city, including the larger Temple of Jupiter that lies above it and a whole lot more. Yet so much of this site remains clearly visible, with its incredibly rich and precisely carved hunks of architrave, frieze, cornice, columns and other elements scattered about like pieces of some giant, three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle. Baalbec (you can spell it with a "c" or a "k" at the end) must be the most impressive classical site that I have visited, together perhaps with Delphes and one in Turkey and maybe the Acropolis. Unlike the Acropolis though, Baalbek is blissfully free of crowds, at least in the winter.

 As often with religious sites, this one super-posed current deities on those of civilisations that had gone before. Jupiter succeded Baal-Hadad, Bacchus the anatolian Dionysios, and Venus, who also had her temple, took over from Astarte. Other deities, such as Mercury, equally had sanctuaries in what was the largest religious complex of the Roman Empire.

Much larger (and earlier) than the temple of Bacchus is that of Jupiter, whose six remaining upright columns dominate the whole site. Almost all of the superstructure of this has been shaken to the ground and a lot removed, but the whole base and layout is visible and one walks up the steps with a sense of awe at the scale of the work. The marble columns as above were apparently hauled there from Egypt, which is a very long way. Eight of them were removed by Justinian in the 6th century and re-used in Hagia Sophia, in Constantiniople. Not very near either. I guess it helps to have a few slaves around when this kind of labour is required!

As to the motifs of the carving, these are extremely variable and retain, even today, a degree of precision that seems quite amazing. I imagine that the pure and dry mountain air (we are at around 3800 feet up here) has done a lot to preserve the stone in this case. Vines with grapes on them, as surrounding the damaged figure of Cleopatra above (she literally fell from the roof during one of the tremors) or, below, on the frame around the entrance to the Temple of Bacchus, are signs that this area was then, as now, producing wine. But the history of wine is much older in this area than either the Ancient Roman or Greek eras. In fact we are not far from the probable birthplace of wine around 6000 years ago.



Another plant that seemed popular was the poppy, as below, but we do not know whether the Romans used it to produce opium!

On the way to Baalbec (or on the way back, heading towards the south-west Beirut and the coast, or south and inland to Damascus) you will need to stop and eat some of the delicious mankouché, which is a pizza-like preparation, on a much thinner bread paste and using primarily thyme as an ingredient. Variants can contain a goat's milk cheese preparation (you can see the lady in the photo ladling this on for our lunch) and/or vegetables. They are cooked on dome shaped open metal hot plates that used to be heated by charcoal or wood and now use gas (there is precious little wood left in this area nowadays anyway).

(all photographs by David Cobbold)

Do not miss Baalbec. It is a very spectacular site.

I have to thank my guides for this opportunity: Aziz Wardy, whose firm produces two of the very best white wines made in the Lebanon; Muriel Rozelier, a French journalist who works for Commerce du Levant; and Diana Salamé, an enologist who consults for a few of the top small-scale wine producers in the Lebanon, including Wardy. All of them gave me much information to help lift my veils of ignorance.

My seventh bike was a Norton Commando 750 Fastback

a 1967 (or was it a 1968?) Norton Commando Fastback 750cc

  

After the Harley period, it was back to British bikes. Maybe it was the fact that the Harley (indirectly) had me kicked out of art school. More probably it was the craving for speed and a bike that would take me around corners without the whole edifice shaking like a jelly-fish. Well, jelly-fish is an appropriate term to describe the way the 750 Atlas engine shook in the highly innovative Isolastic sustem that attached the engine and gearbox to the frame of the Commando. The idea was to stop the vibrations of this motor from shaking your teeth out, and it worked. This was a bike I really enjoyed riding, and I took it all over the British Isles, and sometimes two-up like to see the TT in the Isle of Man around 1971 with my then lady friend who was to become my wife.

The bike I owned looked exactly like the one in the photograph, colours and all. For the time (1969), it went like hell, accelerating beautifully and quite smoothly thanks to its torque. The cornering was good but the pipes and the centre stand tended to ground on corners taken fast and under compression. The brakes were the worst part. I did some stuff to the double-cam front drum, like changing the brake liners and being careful with the adjustements, but it would just run out of stopping power when you laid into them. Later models got a disc-brake. The sound was good too. In fact the Commando so stuck in my memory that I got myself another one some 25 years later. More of that in due course.

For the moment I am trying to get back from the Lebanon in order to tell you more about stuff I have seen and tasted there. Its hard to blog when you're on the run.

For your (Triumph) eyes only

I find that eyes are very important, and I am talking about looking at them, not out from them.

Which of these two pairs of motorcycle eyes do you prefer? (I have put them in low definition as it kind of gives an impression of speed).

Bikers will of course by now have recognised these front views of the 2010 and 2011 models of the excellent Triumph Speed Triple. Above you have the latest model, and below the one that has been superseded.

Such details may seem of total insignificance to most people, but they can, and do, generate empassioned debates amongst aficianados. I have never owned or even ridden one of these bikes, but I find them very attractive, and, judging by all the accounts I have read from journalists, they are excellent machines. The latest model has, also according to the accounts I have read, been improved considerably in many ways over the previous one. Yet one of these modifications seems to me to be superfluous, and indeed counter-productive: the abandoning of the "double round-eye" look at the front for a rather clumsy and bulbous squashed pentagon shape applied to the new twin headlights. 

Important things can sometimes lie in details, and the twin round headlights of this Triumph were, to me at least, one of the key elements that signed its visual identity. They had elegant simplicity, which is a precious commodity in the often cluttered  and "plasticy" esthetics of modern bikes.

I am sure that the new lights produce a better and wider beam pattern or something like that, but couldn't that have been done without producing ugliness as well? The old adage "If it isn't broken, don't fix it" would seem to apply 100% to this case. Triumph motorcycles, whose phoenix-like resurrection thanks to to John Bloor is one of the miracle stories of the modern motorcycling business, have made small mistakes like this before, and this will certainly not damage them much. But I feel it is a mistake nonetheless. Singularity is a precious element of any marketing mix, and diminishing it, as I feel thay have done by this little stroke of the designer's pen, is not the way to go.

At any rate, if I were to buy one of these machines, I would ask the dealer to change the headlights for the old model. I hate riding at night anyway. 

Why screwcaps should be preferred to cork stoppers for wine

various bottle shapes sealed by screwcaps

There are so many reasons for preferring screwcaps to any kind of cork (solid, compound or synthetic) as a closure system for wine bottles that I am simply amazed that more producers all over the world haven't yet made the change. The most adventurous, open-minded, or uncompromising on the quality of their wines have done so, to some extent. This is most evident in New World countries like Australia and New Zealand, where screwcaps are now in a clear majority. Their proportion is slowly growing in other countries, despite a rearguard lobbying action lead by the powerful cork producers which includes its fair share of red-herrings, half-truths and lies.

Many producers of quality wines who have not yet taken the leap are quietly experimenting in a hidden part of their cellars. Of the others, most are either ignorant or simply scared of public reaction in conservative-minded markets such as France and, it must be said, the USA. But if they all made the move at once then that would solve the latter problem instantly. I went so far, in my recent "6 wine wishes for the new year" (on January 10th) as to hope that screwcaps, or their equivalent, be made compulsory for wines in France. Obviously this will not happen and I am not seriously in favour of compelling anyone in such a manner.

So let's look at some of the issues here, point by point.

1). Wines no not age well through air coming in through the stopper. It is important to get rid of this commonly-held fallacy at the beginning. It was disproved way back in the 1960's by two eminent professors in Bordeaux, Paynaud and Ribereau-Gayon. And even if tiny quantities of oxygen can be beneficial to certain wines, a cork closure is not a reliable way of controlling this quantity, as solid cork, by definition, has variable porosity from one piece to another. Screwcaps, with the right underpad and closure system can do the job much better.

2). Variable oxidation from one bottle of wine to another within the same batch is the prime reason for consumers being disappointed with certain bottles of otherwise fine wines. Age 12 bottles of any wine for, say, ten years under cork (and often much less), then open all the bottles and you will see what I mean. Screwcaps obviate this problem (unless you bash them on the head).

3). Screwcaps cannot harbour the compound TCA, which is the prime cause of "corked" bottles of wine. Corks can and do, from time to time. So one can say goodbye to this problem, which affects an estimated 2% of wines sealed with corks, including the most expensive ones.

4). Screwcaps are easy to open, and just as easy to close, so less wine gets wasted and fewer people are frustrated and annoyed. You also do not have to carry corkscrews around with you any more. Bare hands will do fine.

5). Aluminuim used to make screwcaps is virtually 100% recyclable. It is also less bulky than cork to transport and so more ecological for transport. In any event, spending money and energy on producing and shipping bottles of wine that give no pleasure through cork-induced problems is a total waste of all kinds of energy and therefore fundamentally un-ecological. And before anyone statrs talking about cork being a totally "natural" product, maybe they should be reminded of the substances utilised in extracting, treating and preparing cork. Firstly there are all the fuels and other petrol-based products burned in getting into and out of the woods to strip the bark and carry the stuff around. During the production of bottle stoppers, chemical baths are used to condition the corks. Among the more popular are a chlorinated lime bath, followed by a neutralizing bath of oxalic acid, a hypochlorite bath which is then neutralized by sodium oxalate, and a peroxide bath neutralized with citric acid. One could also mention parraffin wax and other substances used to treat corks.

6). For those sensitive to sulphur dioxide, wines sealed by screwcaps require far less protection from premature oxidation by sulphur compounds. In fact adding no suphur almost becomes a more valid option, although I am not in favour of this as there is still a risk of the wine spoiling in various ways through latent bacteria, thermal variations, and over time.

7). Any wine spoilt by cork-induced problems is a rip-off for the consumer, a potential problem for the retailer and very bad for the image of the wine producer whose name is on the label. Therefore anything that removes this series of risks is a good thing.

8). Any minor technical problem that may be induced by incompetent use of screwcaps (slight reduction in some wines) is infinitely less noticeable than those induced by corks, and can anyway be solved, partially by using less sulphur, and partially by adjusting other procedures.

9). Screwcaps do not mask defects. It's a matter of "what you see is what you get". Hence competent winemakers, and good wines, stand out better from the rest under screwcaps.

my thanks to Luc Charlier and Vanya Cullen for a couple of the ideas in this article

        

Wine of the week 8 is a cider

THIS SIDE(R) UP is what it says on the label. The producer clearly has a sense of humour as well as a good eye for design. The packaging is impeccable, from the cork-free crown cap on top to the nicely-keyed and simple label and the smart name. All the useful information is on the back label. The maker is called Cyril Zangs. This cider was produced from the 2009 harvest. It comes from Normandy, since 14 is the number for the French département of Calvados (yes this is also where the apple brandy comes from), and a village with the curoous name of Glos. And it contains 6% alcohol.

Apparently this producer uses all kinds of forgotten varieties of apples to make his ciders

tasting notes
This is quite a deep-coloured cider. It is full-bodied yet essentially dry in its flavours. The aromas reminded me of apples and toffee, but not sweet toffee (of one can imgine such stuff). On the palate the fruit is quite scrumptious, ripe and almost chewy, tightly drawn to a finish which is dry without leaving the mouth dried-out (sounds paradoxical, I know, but there it is). In fact the mouth is left fresh and ready for another sip. Very good.

This costs around 9 euros a bottle in specialist retail stores in France which ain't cheap for cider but this is very good. I have seen it available in the US for around $15.

Wines of Lebanon 1

Lebanon is where I am right now. I have forgotten my camera-to-computer link, so no pictures yet, and just a very short story about the wines I am tasting and some of the places I have visited so far.

Lebanese wines go back a very long way in time. In fact one of the earliest wines whose origins were fairly precisely situated was Lebanese, since one of the wine amphoras found in a pharaoh's tomb in the Valley of Kings in Upper Egypt bears a mark saying something like this: "Black wine from the Mount Lebanon", adding a date and somebody's name. And this was about 1700 BC!

Since then wine has come and gone from this ancient region inhabited at the time by the Phoenicians, who were instrumental in spreading wine all around the Mediterranean. It was more or less wiped out by the muslims, but has hung on through the Christian minority and, since the end of the civil war, has gradually gained momentum again, to the point that there are currently about 35 wineries, of very variable sizes, operating in various parts of the country. About 90% of the production comes from the vast Bekaa Valley, which lies inland, behind a high mountain range, at around 900 meters above sea level. Here are the vineyards (and sometimes the cellars) all the main producers, whose wines are to be found on major export markets. These are Kefraya, Ksara and Musar. But there are many new wineries that have opened in the past ten years or so. Many are of very high quality.

I did an extensive tasting of Lebanese wines a couple of days ago and was very impressed with the reds (less so with the whites). I will be telling you in detail about these in a short while. For the moment, here are a few of my favourites from my tasting. The top wines for me are in bold type.

Château Musar 2001
Hochar Père et Fils 2004 (also from Musar)
Château Khoury, Symphonie 2004
Château Bellevue, La Renaissance 2005
Wardy Private Selection 2005
Château de Botrys, Château des Anges 2007
Domaine de Baal 2007
Domaine des Tourelles, Syrah du Liban 2007
Domaine de Tourelles, Marquis de Beys 2008
Massaya Gold Reserve 2008
Château Marsyas 2008

For the moment, I have been visiting wineries not in the Bekaa Valley, but in the coastal-influenced region north of Beirut, inland of Batroun. Tomorrow I head for the Bekaa for 2 days. More on this soon.

To read more about this and some conclusions from this tasting, you might look at my more recent posting, Wine of Lebanon 2

Shinya Kimura, motorcycle craftsmanship and creativity

A Ducati sportsbike (I think it is a 1198S) re-visited by Shinya Kimura. He calls it "the Edge". Must feeling like being there to ride it!

photo by Troy Critchlow

From time to time, and in most walks of life, one comes across individuals who seem to be totally original and true to themselves, rather than just followers of whatever the current fad may be in their particular line of activity.
In the field of modifying motorcyles, Shinya Kimura is just that kind of person.

Kimura riding "the Edge"



Kimura, who was born in Tokyo, currently works in California. One can get a good idea of the man's work from his very beautiful website:

http://www.chabottengineering.com/menu.html

He is obviously into esthetics. But I also really like this fine short film that was made of him, and which shows his patience at work.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGn6Reru5uk

Kimura is as much a sculptor as a motorcycle customiser. His work with aluminium is incredible. When I look at his bikes, I am totally impressed with the way he has a feel for shape and the way speed affects impressions of shape. The eye is, as it were, drawn into a tunnel of speed and sound. 

This Triumph-based bike is called "the Needle"

His bikes are also given interesting names, like the sculptures they are. I am not too sure that many of Kimura's machines are made to be ridden for long spells at a time. Even if they work, and probably pretty well, they mostly look to be best suited to a brief blast in a long straight line. But then that is part of the show-bike thing I suppose. Maybe I am wrong.

Attention to detail is quite amazing. Here is a more rideable Triumph, though I would not want to spend too many hours on that seat either!

And the man enjoys a ride himself too...