Tedious self-pity

Thanks, everybody, for a wonderful weekend. I discovered that I liked cycling at unreasonable speed through puddles full of black sticky mud, and that, whilst fine whisky is said to taste like peat, the loam of pine forests tastes nothing like fine whisky. Met new nice people without obvious livejournals - I must especially commend beckyc's taste in friends, and Michelle's marmite flapjacks. Got hopelessly lost, but fortunately mobile phones work in forests in the dark corners of Norfolk.

Started feeling under the weather Tuesday evening, went into work this morning streaming from the nose and aching in the throat, and had to go home early. Have been lying in bed since, sipping Lemsip and discovering that neither London Fields nor especially Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell are ideal books to read whilst the brain is lurgy-clouded.

I think Thetford Forest is doing something wrong in calling their black route difficult; seven people utterly innocent of mountain-biking, including one on a road bike, seem to have survived it without a fracture between them, so I fear it's reducing unwisely the terror to be attached to the term "difficult". I suppose it's hard to provide the fear of running away under gravity in a place as glacier-flattened as Thetford.

At least they put the warning signs at the right end of the trails (indeed, they put the large, verbose warning signs everywhere; someone in head office was clearly startled by a personal-injuries lawyer at an impressionable age). After a rather hairy descent with my father down a snow-covered scree slope in Austria, where the via ferrata fixed ropes had at one point been torn away by a landslide, we were nonplussed to see the "nur für Geubte" ['experienced people only'] sign facing away from us at the bottom.