When I started riding fixed gear bikes about five years ago it was still pretty underground, hardly anyone knew what they were and the only people that spoke to us about them were old men who remembered them from decades ago.

Now though, practically all ‘serious’ cyclists think they know what they are yet they refer to them as fixies and are under the impression that everyone that rides them wears skinny jeans, has a moustache and uses super narrow bars. To those people I’d like to say FUCK OFF. Stop reading this blog, unlike the Facebook page and just crawl back under your embrocation creamed rock.

Stop arguing with me about wearing a helmet, running red lights, not having brakes and other boring bullshit. A fixed gear bike is not like your road bike and you cyclists that look at us as some kind of lesser sub-species are fucking ignorant, bourgeois, square pricks.

I don’t care about the law, rules, The Rules, safety, infrastructure or any of that other stuff you need to feel safe in your life; this blog is not about that stuff and it is not for you.

If there is one thing in the world that I don’t understand it is the idolisation of sportspeople. I have nothing against Chris Hoy, but he has just retired so I’m gonna use him as an example, live with it.

Sportsmen are essentially the modern version of the hunter-gatherer of the past, over the last few thousand years the need to go out and kill an animal for food has all but vanished, now people that are exceptionally fast or strong go into sport and when they win ‘we’ treat them as though they have brought home a sabre toothed cat for our dinner, it’s lame.

What was an essential part of life has now been transformed into one of the most selfish forms of employment on Earth: sport. I’m really not a competitive person which is why I have no desire to race my bike, I’m much faster than some and much slower than others, I already know this and don’t need to prove it to myself or anybody else. Sportspeople should not be idolised, nurses and carers and inventors and artists should be idolised.

Jobs and pastimes that use our brains should be on a pedestal above sport and it’s a fucking crime that they aren’t. People who take great pleasure from the sporting achievements of others could really benefit from a trip to a psychologist or a walk around an art gallery or some quality time reading Edgar Allen Poe’s explorations into the darker corners of the human condition.

Chris Hoy’s gold medals and trophies and sponsorship deals mean absolutely nothing in the grand scheme of things, his work with the Scottish Association for Mental Health is far more important but who is going to remember that? Nobody, that’s who.

Open your eyes and smell the Deep Heat, don’t train tonight, cycle to a gig instead, you’ll be better off in the long run.