We don’t really know who this guy Leonard is, he just turned up at the office one day and hasn’t yet taken the hint to leave. So we started sending him out for coffee, made him clean the toilets and wash our bikes. Not easily deterred, Leonard offered his “services” to those of us whom he deemed “in need of some life advice”. We politely declined but Leonard took it upon himself to trawl through the boxes of letters for Aunty Flow and Uncle Dug, and answered the tough questions whether they (or we) liked it or not.
Q. Dear Aunty Flow and Uncle Doug Leonard,
I’ve been riding bikes for three years, but lately things have fizzled out. It always seems the same. The trails around here are great, and I do like riding them, but at the end of a ride I no longer feel satisfied. It used to be so much fun! What should I do?
Yours, Disinterested
A. Dear Disinterested,
I know exactly what you mean. It reminds me of the time I struck up a torrid affair with a mature and enchanting woman whose mail I delivered in my brief time as a postie. Do you remember the first time you cleaned a demanding section of technical singletrack? That was me, 11 o’clock in the morning, hammering one home with my walk bags and short shorts bunched around my ankles – bank statements and postcards spilling to the floor – making that old bird croon. It was rapturous.
This went on for a few months. Every morning at 11 o’clock, Monday to Saturday, while the Mister was elsewhere, I could reliably be found pouring my enthusiastic vigour into the desiccated shreds of her sexuality, ardently marshalling her sexual renaissance. But, eventually, once she had emerged blossoming from her sensual cloisters, she grew bored with me.
One day I turned up, mail in hand, and she wasn’t waiting at the drive running her finger along the spine of the letterbox with a look of moronic lust. Instead, at the window I could clearly see a lithe silhouette of tangled passions, bouncing and twisting against the crisp morning light.
The point, Disinterested, is that you need to figure out what you want from the sport. Is it a flash-in-the-pan hobby? Will you too grow bored and supplant it with another pursuit? Or will you take the more traditional approach, and wait out the lull for the passions to resurface organically? Because they will, you know. The decision is entirely yours, and there’s no shame in either approach.
Yours in the pursuit of excellence, Leonard
If you need some life and/or love advice, have a burning relationship issue or just want to know about the birds and the bees, email Leonard then sit back and wait for the knowledge to set you free.
God help us.
Leonard love spoke is clearly brigadier Bradly Choice in disguise….. Some will know who I speak of…….