Coffeeneuring: the Aftermath of Ashley

Coastline arcing around a bay under cloudy skies, headlands barely visible through the mist in the distance
From swerve of shore to bend of bay…the view from Vico Road.

There were a couple of fine days in the wake of storm Ashley, and I rode out on Tuesday morning under blue skies. For reasons opaque in retrospect, I decided to take on Cupidstown Hill en route to Naas, crawling up its 18% ramp in a minuscule gear. Barry O’Driscoll used Cupidstown for an Everesting, climbing it 75 times over the course of thirteen hours, which surely earned him a plenary indulgence…my modest single ascent merited nothing more indulgent than an espresso and a flapjack at PS Coffee Roasters. The barista regaled me with his childhood memories of going mountain biking with his dad, but admitted that surfing was his sport these days. Evidently lugging a surfboard to Sligo is more fun than climbing Ticknock on a full suspension mountain bike.

By Thursday the wind was picking up again. Feeling lazy, I took the road south along the Dublin coast to examine Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown’s latest “innovations” in cycling infrastructure. I took the morning cafe stop at Hatch Coffee in Glasthule where they squandered points by checking whether I wanted my espresso “for here”, then handing it to me in a paper cup regardless. I sat outside, watching mourners streaming out of the church across the road, thinking back to my grandmother’s funeral and carrying her coffin from Quinn’s funeral home up the street to that same church.

I grew up in Sandycove: the poles of my book-obsessed childhood were the library at the bottom of York Road in Dun Laoghaire to the north, my grandmother’s bookshop in Bray to the south. The equator was Eamonn’s Bookshop in Sandycove village, which I visited any time I had ten or twenty pence to my name, in the hopes that a hitherto unknown Famous Five or Biggles book might have appeared on its shelves. I was pleased to see that it still endures, and Eamonn himself too, if the white-haired gentleman sitting at the front of the shop was he.

Despite the bookish tone of my reminiscences, I bypassed the Martello tower that was home to Buck Mulligan and Stephen Daedalus in favour of a straight run through Dalkey and up the Vico Road to Killiney, the vaunted resemblance to the Bay of Naples diminished by the grey skies and choppy water. The wind was at my back as I cut inland to Kilternan and Tibradden before dropping back down into the city.

Coffeeneuring: Strawberry Beds and Self-Deception

Bicycle leaning against a wooden picnic table, outdoor coffee shop in the background
Mugg Uggly, Hallowe’en appropriate

With the hour changing next weekend, it’s time to put the good bike away for the winter — dry roads are already a distant memory, and every ride leaves a rime of grit and leaf mould on the drivetrain. Last Sunday I pulled the fixed-gear out of the shed, chipped away the thick crust of agricultural filth remaining from the spring, and drenched the chain in thick, green lubricant.

The following day I took it for a shake-out ride along the Strawberry Beds. Hugging the north bank of the Liffey, it’s a beautiful stretch of road, the slow-moving river glinting in the sunshine. Nonetheless, I rarely ride it because, in a remarkable feat of road engineering, the council have managed to squeeze no fewer than twenty-six speed bumps into a distance of 2.5km, with another four as an amuse-bouche when you join the road at the Knockmarroon Hill. The velvet smoothness of the tarmac in between them comes more as a taunt than a relief.

Gingerly checking that I still had all my teeth, I stopped into Coffee Works in Lucan village. It was fairly thrumming with activity on a Monday morning, the tables inside and out filled with people deep in conversation. Points awarded for checking whether I wanted the espresso in a ceramic cup (yes, always yes…espresso  is a paper cup is an offence in the eyes of God) and giving me a glass of water to accompany it. The roast (courtesy of Groundwork from Celbridge) was a bit dark for my taste, but their hearts are clearly in the right place and I finished the rest of the ride with a song in my heart.

I suspect many Dubliners are unaware of quite how much the city is sheltered from rain and wind by the arc of mountains to the south-west. But every cyclist knows that no matter how sunny and still it may be when you leave your house, thirty minutes later you can be battling through sideways rain against a malevolent wind bent on your destruction. If you can feel the breeze down in the city, it’ll be a gale up at Sally Gap.

Thus it was with some trepidation that I watched the wind merrily tossing the leaves around the back garden as I ate my breakfast on Thursday morning. I headed up Stocking Lane more in hope than expectation, the calm in the lee of the hill offering fertile ground for self-deception. But there was no hiding from the truth when I got to the Featherbeds, unpredictable gusts aggressively shoving the handlebars left and right. I staged a tactical retreat down the Glencree valley.

There was a long line at the Bear Paw in Enniskerry (more power to them) so I pushed on to Mugg Uggly. Tucked away behind Glencairn LUAS stop, Mugg Uggly is an oasis of conviviality in a desert of blank suburban roads and newbuild apartment blocks. Screened by trees and high walls, you could imagine yourself far outside the city, the roar of the traffic a muted and distant. The espresso was good enough that I can overlook (if not entirely forgive) the paper cup and the terrible name. While these autumn days stay mild enough to sit outside, it’s hard to imagine a better place to stop.

Coffeeneuring: A Dreadful Litany

Cup of coffee and slice of cheesecake with whipped cream, sitting on a copper-topped table
Double espresso and salted caramel cheesecake at Roundwood Stores

Proverbially, a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. But a journey of a mere sixty kilometres starts with a double espresso. It’s important to set a baseline for quality when embarking on a research project as rigorous as the 2024 Coffeeneuring Challenge, and Five Points is always my point of departure.

My lab assistant for the first ride was Rider’s Bloc. In recent years the block has become systemic, and he gets out on the bike only marginally more often than he posts on his blog, so we took it pretty easy on the way out to Blessington. Befitting two men in their middle years, 90% of the conversation went along these lines:

— do you know so-and-so?
— I don’t think so
— right. Well, she has cancer

and so on in a dreadful litany of terminal diagnoses, and distant acquaintances who woke up one morning dead as a doornail. “Sniper alley,” he commented sagely, “that’s where we are.” Only the offer of some cholesterol- and carcinogen-laden cake could prise him away from the subject of mortality and our precarious purchase on life.

We pulled into an unprepossessing driveway, signposted Brew 21. I was half-expecting yet another coffee truck, but no, past some picnic tables arrayed on an astroturf lawn I found the entrance to a sizeable cafe. The bar is straight out of the 3FE playbook: Victoria Arduino espresso machine, Puq Press automatic tamper etc. Decent espresso, but one star deducted for serving it in a paper cup. And the astroturf. We returned to the city warmed by the rare October sun.

I was solo on the second ride this week, a return visit to Roundwood Stores. Again the sun was out, but in the two days intervening the temperature had dropped by ten degrees and it was barely above freezing when I left Harold’s Cross. The reason for this became apparent when I left the warmth and bourgeois comfort of the cafe to head home, and spent the next two hours battling into a biting northerly. The brisk pace I set on the way to Roundwood should have tipped me off, but the delusional part of your brain always wants to think it’s that you have good legs, that you’re in great shape. Never that the wind might be behind you, waiting to sandbag you as soon as you change direction.

In the year since I first went there, Roundwood Stores has come to exercise a magnetic pull, dragging me in any time I pass within five kilometers of it. The coffee can be hit-or-miss, but the soups are invariably excellent, and the only thing that puts me off the rest of the menu is the massive portions…the drags over Ballinastoe and Djouce are all the more grinding after eating a slab of focaccia the size of your head.

 

Be Mine Tonight

Chasing Mailboxes announces the 14th annual Coffeeneuring Challenge. Last year I failed ignominiously after disappearing off to Le Guess Who with only five rides in the bag, and coming home too hungover to contemplate getting on the bike to finish it off. This year I will brook no failure.

Dean Roberts died a few months ago, far too young. He never seemed to receive the attention that his music deserved, despite releases on labels as storied as Mille Plateaux, Kranky, and Erstwhile. He probably tired of the comparisons with Mark Hollis and Talk Talk, but I can think of few artists who could bear the comparison so well, whose music matched that taut-nerved tension and haunted beauty.

Philip Sherburne’s comprehensive retrospective at Futurism Restated has disappeared behind the paywall, but Tone Glow and the Wire have reposted old interviews.

Drinking the Cole-Aid

After several years of intense focus on Go, studying, reviewing games, playing almost daily, I’m burned out. I barely play any more, and I expect the upcoming European Go Congress in Toulouse to be my last tournament for the foreseeable. I’m extricating myself from the affairs of the Association, winding down as tournament director.

In compensation, I’ve developed a raging thirst for other boardgames. After several years of intense focus on the classical, highly abstract, literally black-and-white world of Go, emerging into the densely crowded, richly varied ecosystem of modern boardgames feels almost hallucinatory. Despite the rival attraction of videogames, boardgames continue to sustain a community large enough to support development of complex, demanding, richly involving games.

In particular, I’m fascinated by the work of designer Cole Wehrle. Perhaps because his background is in wargaming rather than the eurogames I usually play, his games feel very fresh to me, a whole new world to explore. On the one hand, his work for Leder Games (Root, Oath, ARCS) conceals surprisingly vicious fantasy/SF conflict beneath the wonderful artwork of Kyle Ferrin (comparable to the most flamboyant of Bill Watterson’s Sunday pages for Calvin & Hobbes). On the other, the games from the company Cole runs with brother Drew, Wehrlegig (Pax Pamir, John Company), are alive with historical flavour and detail.

If I were to pick one, it would be John Company, in which players take the part of families jockeying for position within the East India Company, negotiating and scheming for prestige while the Company pillages India. It has the sense of historical sweep and development of the legendary (but unplayable) Republic of Rome, compressed into something you can finish in an afternoon. The gameplay is multilayered, offering several avenues to explore en route to the Company’s nigh inevitable collapse amid the corruption and self-interest of those who run it. The implicit critique of the imperialist project is underscored by the artwork, which draws heavily on period caricaturists such as Cruikshank and Gillray.

It doesn’t hurt that Cole is deeply embedded in the community, publishing extensive design diaries for each of his games on BoardGameGeek, actively participating in discussion and responding to questions online. His academic grounding in literature studies perhaps accounts for his interest in narrative and the stories players tell through the games they play, his games explicitly providing the hooks on which stories can hang without imposing a set storyline. And he’s not embarrassed to slip into theory mode, once memorably describing Root (a Game of Woodland Might and Right) as an exploration of Foucauldian biopolitics…which maybe it is, as depicted by Walt Kelly.

His current project is Molly House, in which players will “throw grand masquerades and cruise back alleys as a gender-defying molly in early eighteenth century London.” I foresee a few problems getting that one to the table, but I backed it anyway…it’ll be worth it just to see where he goes next.

Terrible People

“The deathhauntedness of the Irish brethren was frequently a complication in the working life of Sheriff Stephen Devane. Soaked in an ambience of death from the cradle, they believed themselves generally to be on the way out, and sooner rather than later, and thus could be inclined to put aside the niceties of the living realm. Terrible people, born of a terrible nation.”
— Kevin Barry, The Heart in Winter

The Firing Range (5.1km, 375m, 7.3%)

Map and Elevation Profile of the Firing Range climb

Strava

The climb to the Firing Range at Kilbride army camp is my favourite training climb, five kilometres sustained effort, much of it along a quiet, well-paved road. Although it’s a fraction of the length of the marquee climbs in the Alps, the gradients and smooth asphalt are comparable.

The first couple of kilometers follow the Ballinascorney climb. Near the summit, bear left onto the slip road (signposted for the Lodge, L7462) and stay left past the Famine Cross. The road levels out for a few hundred meters, then ramps up after a small bridge, briefly hitting double-digit gradients before settling at 8–9%. As the trees give way to open land on the left, the gradient eases and you can gear up for the short ramp to the top.

The road is narrow enough at points that cars will struggle to pass, but it’s little used and during the week you can expect to have it entirely to yourself. Settle into the climb and enjoy the ambient soundtrack provided by streams, insects, birds and sheep, and maybe the odd burst of gunfire.

Stone cross on a grassy knoll, commemorating the dead of the Great Famine
The Famine Cross

Afterbirth of the Cool

A highly entertaining interview with Kramer, stuffed with scurrilous detail on his time with Gong and the Butthole Surfers. Rick Moody (a name that hasn’t crossed my mind in two decades–plus) asks the questions. Hat tip to Rory for this one.

While we’re on the subject of the Butthole Surfers, Tone Glow offers up an equally exhaustive conversation with their guitarist, Paul Leary.

The Thin Line between Interesting and Boring

Over at Tone Glow, a typically in-depth interview with David Lance Callahan, formerly of the Wolfhounds and Moonshake. As Callahan comments, Moonshake were a schizophrenic band, the sneering edge of his songs rubbing up awkwardly against the breathy sensuality of Margaret Fiedler’s. For me, Moonshake were always outshone by the brilliance of her subsequent work with Laika, but listening to the songs laced through the interview reminded me that even if Moonshake weren’t the easiest band to listen to, they were consistently inventive, never dull. Stacks of interesting detail in the interview, the remastered Eva Luna went straight to the top of my shopping list.

Burning Ambulance runs the ruler over Sonic Youth’s first decade. It can hardly be controversial to suggest that their early work is far and away Sonic Youth’s best, a dislocating, psychedelic collision of noise, dissonance and rock. The further they travelled from their roots in no wave and Glenn Branca–esque drang, the more musicianly they became, the less individual they sounded, until the last reminders of their former abrasiveness and darkness were Kim Gordon’s vocals. The decision to hive off their experimental and improvisatory tendencies into the SYR series probably did much to keep Geffen on side, but surrendered the essential tension between pop and avant-garde that fired their eighties work. You could argue that the arrival of Steve Shelley was as much a curse as a blessing: without his power and fluidity, Sonic Youth could never have rocked like they did on Sister and Daydream Nation, but it’s hard to imagine they would have gone on to become so mature and assimilable with Bob Bert still on drums. In 1990, Sonic Youth were my favourite band by a country mile; does anyone say that about the Sonic Youth of ten or twenty years later?