Things That Go 'Add To Basket' In The Night.

Sleep can be very hard to come by sometimes when depressed or anxious, and when you do get some quality kip, things can still get a bit weird. Maybe it's the tablets, or I eat too much cheese, but some of the dreams I have can be quite dramatic, and not always in a good or interesting way. But I also appear to suffer from what I believe is a hitherto unknown problem of sleep shopping. It's a bit like sleep walking, but retail based. I wake up sometimes with the vague feeling of having had an interesting dream involving some web site or other I frequent often, and having been eagerly clicking through pages of goodies. Then a weird thing happens, as the following days go by, post starts arriving containing various desirable goods and... well, it's all a bit odd.

Take last week for example, I woke up one morning after a pleasant dream where I'd been enthuisastically looking at magazines. I could clearly remember the thrill of discovering new issues to read, and also previously missed back issues to add to my collection. As dreams go it was certainly one of the better ones, and a long way from some of the sweat inducing horror movies going on in my head some nights. But this is what this rambling post is all about you see, because a few days later and the postman started poking magazines through my over worked letter box. 

Hayup, it's the crappy photo pouffe again, in an equally crappy product pic.

First to arrive were a couple of back issues of Singletrack and also two issues of the long gone Privateer - a magazine I'd not actually read before, and difficult to track down at decent prices it seems. But in my dream I'd obviously been to the Tweeks Cycles site and done some clicking. But the sleep shopping hadn't ended there, as next to arrive was the tenth issue of The Ride, followed a couple of days later by the latest Boneshaker. My bank account had obviously taken some nocturnal battererings that night. 

As said, The Ride is issue number ten, but unfortunately could also be the last, as the team behind this excellent publication have decided to take an indefinite break. They've always said they aren't in it to make money don't pay themselves for their work, and therefore all profits go to charity, so it has been a labour of love, and no doubt, a very time and energy consuming one since they first decided to put their idea into action. 

The Ride and Boneshaker are both high quality independent publications, and offer something refreshingly different to the mainstream cycling mags. They're not for gear obsessed performance junkies, these aren't about the bikes themselves, more the experience of riding a bike, any bike, in all sorts of places and all sorts of reasons. How much that bike weighs, or costs, or how fast it bombs down hill or up some Alp or other isn't relevant, but what a pedal powered two wheeler gives the rider concerned in each story is. 

Anyway, I hope the lads and lasses behind The Ride enjoy their break, then get back to work on producing more 'cos I for one am a bit gutted to know this one may be the last.

Very odd this sleep shopping business though don't you think? Funny thing is, I was dreaming last night of some sort of white bike and having to remember... pedals... that was it, I had to get pedals... Weird eh?