Max Merritt lets it rip one more time pic Ros O'Gorman

Mike's Pith & Wind - To the Max..
I met up with Hugh McSpedden yesterday and we drove down to the Bentleigh Club to see if his Giant Edison Screw-type projections would be a feasible proposition (at the Breathing Space As Well EP launch on Sunday the 21st of this month). I asked him how his health was and he brought me up to date with his various ailments. It was quite a list and some of them were quite interesting - in fact Hugh confessed he was getting quite a bit of enjoyment out of a couple of them. He used to suffer from diabolical migraine headaches that could lay him out for a week. Since his heart operation he says he still gets the peripheral symptoms i.e. the flashing lights and the dizziness, but now he gets to enjoy them, because now he doesn’t get the headaches.
He grumbled about his Senior Moments, but we’re all having those aren’t we? Just yesterday I drove down to Camberwell really looking forward to a cuppa and a relaxed read of The Age and was disgusted to find after I’d walked into Choclatté that I’d left my wallet back in Mt Waverley - again.
Then just today I parked outside the Mt Waverley Safeway only to discover when I returned that I’d locked my keys in the van. (I usually keep a spare key in my wallet but for complicated reasons it wasn’t there this time). Anyway, I was relieved to find that I’d parked next to a cop car and anticipated the merry men in blue might be able to help me out, but when they arrived I found they were bloody useless, (‘we haven’t got our equipment’), and so I chose to walk home.. read more

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Dick's Toolbox - Tour de Rudd
I bought my new road bicycle well before Cadel won the Tour de France, but I should have thought more deeply about the hills and mountains that he and two hundred and eighty other riders went up and down with apparent ease. Old Men In Lycra do not have the same ability, though I have mastered the ‘falling off the bike bit’ with flair, élan and regularity. All it takes is shoes that lock onto the pedals and a lack of forward motion and you topple sideways in slow motion with a sense of powerless inevitability that stretches the brief seconds of your descent into the stuff that nightmares are made of. It also caused bruises and considerable embarrassment.
Where I live is a tad hilly. Leave the front gate and you have a choice of up or down and the up is very, very up and goes up for a long way. The down is short lived for we live in the edge of a large valley through which the Yarra flows and where the only exit is over one hill or another. read more