Long and busy day yesterday. First off to AJP to meet up with Martin and my Irish Team Mate (my ITM) for a spot of trail riding on Salisbury Plain.

My ITM was a really friendly and jolly kind of guy from Dublin. Quick with a joke, and even quicker with a chuckle, and annoyingly good on a bike. I say annoyingly because he's only been out a couple of times and he kept up all day with the best that Martin could throw at us.

So a Scotsman, and Englishman and an Irishman walk into a pub, covered in mud. No, it's not the start of a joke, this actually happened at lunchtime.

Ruts, roots, slippery grass, mud, mud, more roots, jumps and a mountain bike course. My ITM took them all in his stride. Except for one nasty little slope where he decided that it would look rather cool to wheelie the bike up in the air and basically throw it up in the air whilst he was stood behind it holding on to the handlebars. It did look cool too - at one point I thought that he was going to spin the bike round to bring it back down the hill, it looked that well-planned. It was only when the bike landed on the deck that I realised that it may not have been that intentional.

The mountain bike course was crazy. Narrow tracks up and down really steep hills with very tight corners. I have no idea how anybody could pedal a bicycle up those slopes. OK, down the slope would be straightforward - gravity gives you this for free - but getting up them?

We rode over the plan through the artillery ranges and on to the tank obstacle course. Now when you think of the word "tank", you generally think of something weighing about fifty tonnes with huge caterpillar tracks. Tanks are things that are designed to get over pretty much anything.

When you think of the word "trap", you think of something nasty that is designed to stop things getting out of it once they are in it.

When you combine these two, you get a tank trap - something designed to stop fifty-tonne caterpillar-tracked monsters from getting out of it. They are sort of like huge bowls in the ground with soft sticky mud about two feet deep at the bottom. But you can't see the mud, because it is covered by about a foot deep of horrible brown water.

The mud is that evil Bond-villain special suction mud that goes right over your boots and stops you pulling your feet out. A bike going through it doesn't stand a chance. In fact, a bike won't go through it at all. A bike trying to go through it get stuck so deep in the mud that it will stand up ll by itself, an awful lot like this:

Not to worry. Martin produced a webbing strap which we could use to pull the bike out. He pushed the bike, my ITM and I pulled on the strap. This would have been OK except for (a) the mud which wouldn't let you move your feet and (b) the strap suddenly snapping off the bike - putting my ITM and I flat on our arses in the mud. Martin almost fell into the mud too, he pissed himself so much.

Martin took us to the top of a hill which he went down once, about two years ago. That was not a hill, it was a cliff. He was baiting me to go down it, and had a fairly plausible argument that you should do as much hard stuff as pssible because then everything else was easy by comparison. I had the equally plausible counter-argument that what is the point in doing things you don't have to. If you encountered a hill like this in an enduro then the choices are clear - down the hill in one piece, or DNF. When you are out trail-riding, you have the choice of not doing it, and avoiding the risk of hurting yourself or killing your bike. The old bull would have avoided the hill and saved his energy for enduro.

It started to rain and things got really really slippy. But still nobody came off. Martin tried to get up a steep hill and, em, laid the bike down for a rest. My ITM and I decided to give that one a miss.

We rode back to AJP in the rain. Not normal rain either, sharp rain. I dont know how raindrops can be sharp, but these ones were. I had to ride back with my hand over my face to stop them stinging.

My ITM then had to drive all the way back for his flight home at 10pm (which was late, so he didnt get in till nearly 2am). After a 4am start, and a dats riding inbetween, that's pretty close to a Dakar day. Multiply that by 20, and you've got the Dakar.

It was a glorious day by all accounts. The riding was great, more like a 6-hour enduro than trail riding. A nice change for Martin, since he got to ride at the kind of pace - on the kind of terrain - that suits him. A great day for me and my ITM, since we got to ride together. A great day for the tank trap, since it claimed a skull.

I did it all again today, well - sort of. It was much slower, with much more getting off my bike to pick people upout of bushes and ditches. We had Jason - a bee-keeper, Colin - a retired traffic cop whose 60th birthday it was, and Paul - an archaeologist who only passed his CBT last week and this was his second time ever on a bike. Since he was a learner, he couldn't ride the 200cc on the road, so I took him up to Salisbury Plain in the van.

Progress was very very slow. Paul was ultra-terrified and it showed - he was wobbling all over the place. He found it difficult to change gear, so stuck in 1st gear a lot of the time. Jason and Colin - both IAM riders - were much more confident on their bikes, to the point that Jason's over-confidence threw him on his arse a few times. Chalk, such as that on Salisbury Plain, is worse than ice when it gets wet. This is not a lesson that can be taught, it can only be learned.

Paul's reluctance to change gear, and the five minutes he spent fruitlessly spinning the back wheel in wet chalk to get the stuck front wheel over a rocky step, may have contributed to the resulting mechanical failure of his bike. When Martin couldn't fix it on the hill, it was time for a tow.

And it was here that I got the chance to teach something to Martin. Instead of tying the bikes to one another, wrap the webbing strap round the footpeg a few times and put your foot on it to keep it in place. If you need to break the tow for any reason, lift your foot and the webbing just unwraps. A nice little Dakar trick I learned from Zippy when he towed Patsy through the dunes. It is these little things that I will learn in Morocco - the riding is pretty much secondary. You cannot teach experience but, if you are willing, you can learn a lot from the experience of others.

The plan was to put the three guys in the pub for lunch, then Martin would tow me back to AJP to pick up a new bike. Bikes separated and joined by about 15 feet of webbing wrapped round the footpegs, off we set. We got about 6 miles up a B-road, me being towed by Martin who was on the Yamaha, and bumped straight into a police car coming the other way. He stopped in the middle of the road, so did we. The chances of bumping into a Policeman were very slim indeed. The chances of any Policemen so bumped into having a sense of humour? Zero, if not less than that. Horrified, the cop wound down his window and asked a fairly silly question:

"You're not doing what I think you're doing?"

The answer, of which there could be only one, was:

"Tell me what you think we're doing, and I'll be able to tell you if we're doing it"

The funniest part was that it didn't come from me, it came from Martin. Couldn't have put it better myself. I just started pissing myself, and what a look I got from the cop.

"You're towing a bike". You could see the cogs turning, asking himself what he could do us for - if anything - and whether the capture of these two dangerous criminals was worth being late for whatever it was he was on is way to.

"There's nothing illegal about towing a bike is there?"

"Well it's not clever is it?"

"But is it illegal?"

"Yes"

Martin though for a few seconds. I could tell that he too was weighing up the things we could be done for versus the need to stand firm. He also had to be aware that he had three guys sat in a pub up the road who, when they finished their lunch, would want to go back on the trails.

"OK, we won't do it then" he said.

When the cop went away, we debated on whether he'd be coming back. We figured that it was a cert he would do a u-turn to see if we continued towing the bike, and that if he did then hed probably take it fairly hard that we had opted not to listen to him.

Thing is, I have a hearing problem. I am what I call instructionally deaf - I hear perfectly well, unless it's somebody ordering me to do something, at which point I just don't register it unless they're telling me to do something I was going to do anyway. Even then, I'd probably change my mind just to prove a point.

We decided to dump the bike behind a hedge to avoid the temptation for passing vans to just nick it, and then we had to travel with me on the back of Martin's bike. A Yamaha WR250 is not a bike for carrying passengers. It has no footpegs, no handrails and a seat like a razor blade. If you're on the back of one, then you have to hold your feet off the ground (which kills your stomach muscles) at the same time as trying to hold on to the back of a fairly non-existent seat. We did about 5 miles back to the van, and it was agony.

We went back to AJP, wheeled out a new bike into the van and then set off back to the pub where the guys were. All in all, we were gone just over an hour - which is the time we would have stopped for lunch anyway so nobody really lost anything.

I don't really know what Martin would have done if he was on his own, it would certainly have been interesting. Knowing Martin, it would have been creative and - probably - bordering something that a passing traffic cop would not like the look of. Great minds think alike, they say, or is it that fools seldom differ?

I had been joking with Martin about how mental the world would be if Harley Davidson made off-road bikes. We'd have Salisbury Plain full of bandana-wearing Hells Angels on a Sunday. fate, who is obviously a Hells Angel or just has a soft spot for them, decided to teach me a wee lesson.

When we got back to the pub and got out of the van, there was about a dozen Harley Davidson bikes, and a bunch of bandana-wearing Hell's Angels to go with them. The bikes were all in Army green, had enduro tyres on them, and were covered with mud. Off-road Harley Davidsons. We had only chosen the same pub as the local Harley Davidson Off-Road Bike Owners Club monthly ride out across Salisbury Plain. OK fate, you win. Lesson learned.

We set off back the way we came - Martin and I having had no lunch because of the fun we were having getting the bike back whilst dodging Wiltshire's finest. Still, no drama really. Martin produced a pepperami and a packet of crisps - I felt 6 years old again, sat outside the pub whilst my Da periodically popped out with juice and crisps, shouted at me to stop doing whatever mischief it was I was doing, then disappeared back inside - leaving me free to eat the crisps before getting back to the serious business of mischief.

Everybody was getting really tired now, and the falls were becoming more frequent. I was off my bike every couple of minutes to help somebody up, or help them over an obstacle. I was complimented on the quality of my, em, "instruction", several times. Apparently people who are very good are not so good at teaching, I was told, and I was very good at teaching. This was from the ex traffic cop.

"Are you trying to imply that I am shit on a bike?" I grinned, fully in keeping with the banter and piss-taking that goes on when a bunch of guys go playing on bikes in the mud. I as assured that this was not the case.

Ayway, it greatly improves my riding when I go trail riding with learners. For one thing, I have to observe what they are doing that could be better - which means I have to have a very good understanding of technique (even though I am still developing the techniques myself). For another thing, I need to be ale to break that technique down into bite-size chunks so that I can explain it.

For example, Paul got stuck on some really slippy chalk with some steps going up it. His front wheel got stuck on a step, as did his back wheel. Despite all of his revving and roosting, it was obvious that the bike was going nowhere. I jumped off my bike and explained the technique to him - when there is no grip, it's all about momentum. There is no traction here, so you need to have all of your speed before you get here. I helped him pull his bike back down the hill, and explained about feathering the clutch, 2nd gear, weight over the back wheel to lighten the front end and help the back wheel dig in. A little tug on the bars as you approach the step, open the throttle, and up she goes.

He nailed it first time, and this was only his second time out on a bike. I then took my own advice and nailed it first time too.

When you are riding with learners, you also have to second-guess what they are gong to do. Chances are they will want the best line with the most grip - what looks like the safest path - so you have to be prepared to take the worst path with the least grip. Yo have to be prepared - and able - to switch from rut to rut in order to avoid slamming into the back of them if they come off. You have to be prepared - and able - to turn bikes around and get them out of sticky situations (like falling off halfway up a hill). These are excellent skills for me to learn.

I found myself hanging back a lot from the group, letting them get ahead of me, so that I could take a series of ruts (or mud) at speed. Not only was it a bit of a hoot, and poseable, it also felt much safer doing it with a little speed - less wobbly.

Jim Kouzes, chairman of the Tom Peters Company (one of those leadership and vision organisations that do seminars for Very Important People) says that "when I want to learn something, I teach it to somebody". There is an awful lot of truth in this. In order to teach something, you have to understand it very well indeed. It helps if you can also do it, but understanding is the key. By breaking down techniques into small chunks, I am giving myself greater understanding. By comparing my own techniques against these chunks, I am able to measure - and improve - my own progress.

It looks like I managed to blow out Witley on 7 October by having a late entry. Still, there's a Midwest racing the following week, which Jago and Martin are doing, so I'll try and get into that one.

Something that occurred to me on Friday, whilst out riding with my ITM and Martin. I started the day feeling really shit - it had been a hell of a week - and ended the day felling awfully good about things.

Martin also gave me a new 50-tooth sprocket for Queen Madge II since my existing sprocket is looking a little worn. He wouldn't take any money for it either. Thanks Martin. I will probably fit this next weekend, at the same time as doing a good bit of overhaul and maintenance and TLC on the young lady anyway.

Incidentally, tricyclics are a form of medication used to treat depression. There is eividence that they can actually make you worse, and I hate taking them. They really do impari your ability to function in ay meaningful way. How they work isn't important just now, but the translation is loosely "three cycles". So I went out on Friday feeling a bit depressed in the morning and had a day of three cycles - or tricyclics. Great cure for depression.

Book a trail ride at AJP - you don't have much time before Martin shuts up shop for the year.

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