Hello Tash Appreciators!

Tash Friday is back. 

It’s been about a month since the last installment and what a month it’s been. 

Howdy Tash Appreciators,

This will be an end-of-season edition of TF before I leave these persistently rain soaked shores for a star-spangled super-dream of sky-scrapers, winding roads and sparkling blue sea. 

Speaking of super-dreams, I have to mention the events on the Champs-Élysées last Sunday. I think this sums them up:

There are dozens of things I could write about California, but I think Robert Plant summed it up when he sang about California being a place where you could stand on a hill but still be surrounded by mountains of dreams. I can’t think of anywhere I would rather go to to chill out, enjoy summer for a while (get dragged round dozens of shops in various cities) and plan TF’s next assault on the Friday mornings of like-minded Tash aficionados the world over. 

If Robert Plant best summed up what being in California is like, he looked and played the part well too. Led Zeppelin would fly into LAX in their Starship and they looked every inch the rockstars they were. Naturally, Mr Plant has rocked a Tash (and goatee) for about forty years:

See y’all in a few weeks.

Cheers.

Good morning Tash Appreciators,

Team Sky was founded in 2009 with the specific aim of winning the Tour de France within 5 years. Everything they have done since then had that aim in mind and, after a flawless display in the mountains this week, it looks like they might manage it a couple of years early. 

The results of these efforts are not what I’m interested in today (although attempting to assassinate Hitler and being the first people to walk on the moon are solid efforts). It’s the plan and execution of them that I’m bothered about. 

Although the scale of each is not comparable, all of these plans had three things in common: 

1. They all set a timescale within which they wanted to achieve their goal;
2. They all involved a large group of people but ultimately came down to 1 or 2 individuals; and 
3. Within their respective fields, the chances of success were seen as improbable at best. 

As I see it, the morale here is that It doesn’t really matter whether it’s Dave Brailsford working his magic on British road cycling; Von Stauffenberg deciding that action had to be taken to save Germany; or JFK challenging a nation to do what seemed impossible; it’s all about having ambition and the determination to see it through. 

It’s maybe easier to work towards a clear goal (it doesn’t get much clearer than looking out your window at night, looking at the moon and saying “I will go there”) and it’s possibly hard for us to sit down and think what we want to do in the next 5 or 10 years. 

I don’t have a plan. Not even a vague one. In a way, that’s good as my “options are open” but is it not easier to achieve a goal if you know what it is? 

After looking at messers Wiggins, Von Stauffenberg and Armstrong, it’s clear that whatever goal I want to achieve, I’ll need to have a plan to match it. I’ll also need to find some like-minded folk to have a bash at it with me. After all, as John Donne said back in the sixteenth century, “no man [or woman] is an island”. Naturally, being a man of intelligence, Mr Donne had a Tash:

Anyway, if anyone has a grand, improbable/impossible plan to do something interesting in the next 5-10 years, hit me up at tashfriday@me.com. 

Have a great weekend folks!

(ALLEZ WIGGINS!)

Bonjour Tash Appreciators,

On telly-boxes, interwebs and newspapers around the UK, people are hearing the name Bradley Wiggins and about his exploits in the Tour de France. Of course, Tash Appreciators were alerted to the chances of him winning the Tour some weeks ago and this is everyone else trying to catch up. 

Unfortunately, even after learning his name, they are still behind the times. As soon as Wiggins was given a shiny new jersey on the podium atop la Planche des Belles Filles, after ferocious 750 metres of “wall” with a 20% incline, the Tour ceased to call him Monsieur Wiggins. He then became le Maillot Jaune (the yellow jersey). 

To understand the Tour you need to understand le Maillot Jaune. 

In cycling, the jersey is everything. Unlike football or rugby fans, who wear the colours of their favourite team, if you see amateur cyclists out on their bikes I can almost guarantee that they won’t be wearing yellow. The reason for this is that they know the yellow jersey has to be earned and cycling fans know what goes into getting the chance to wear it. 

Being le Maillot Jaune is similar to winning an Olympic gold or the world cup. It is the highlight of any cyclist’s career to wear the jersey and, during the stage(s) where they have the honour to wear it, they push their body to the absolute limit in the hope of defending it. 

Last year, a Frenchman called Thomas Voeckler went through sheer agony for 10 days to keep the jersey even though he knew he could never keep it all the way to Paris. His efforts during the penultimate stage of his time leading the Tour will go down as one of those legendary shows of determination that often happen when a rider is chasing/defending yellow:

He climbed the Col du Galibier, a proper mountain which happens to have a road to the summit, like a man possessed and, in a way, he was. All the greatest cyclists have worn the yellow jersey and you’ll often see cyclists exceeding themselves while wearing it as if they are channeling the strength of past champions. 

Bradley Wiggins’ team mates know exactly how difficult it is to win the Tour and most of them know that they do not have what it takes to stand on the Champs Elysées wearing it themselves. They also know that if they can’t win it themselves then the next best thing is to be on a team which works for someone who can. Because the Tour cannot now be won without the help of a team, the team mates of the winner enjoy a degree of reflected glory (see Chris Froome this year).   

After the stunning combined effort of Sky yesterday in getting him to the summit of La Tourssuire, Wiggins could not be better placed going into the final week. I don’t think the UK has enjoyed such a glorious ride round France since the “Tour” of summer 1944 when they, along with Charles de Gaulle et al., taught the traitorous Petain and his fascist allies a lesson by coming ashore with the Free French Forces and the might of the free world. Naturally, General de Gaulle rocked a Tash throughout:

I’ll end this week by wishing le Maillot Jaune bon chance for the remainder of the Tour and advise you that chanting “ALLEZ ALLEZ ALLEZ UP UP UP” whenever you see a Sky rider on telly is now compulsory for all Tash Appreciators. Wearing stupid costumes, waving flags/tridents and running or jumping up hills while chanting it is optional but very much encouraged. 

Amicalement,

Tash Vendredi

Ciao Tash Appreciators,

I’ve been watching The Sopranos this week. As I’m sure you know, it’s about the mafia. 

The classic business of the mafia is the protection racket. They tell their victims that if they agree to pay cash, the mafia will stop any “criminals” from hurting them. They effectively sell a solution to a problem that they themselves create.  

This week saw the resignation of Bob Diamond after it emerged that his bank was involved in manipulating the Libor (the interest rate at which banks in London lend money to each other) in 2008. 

I won’t bore you with stuff you already know, but the high Libor partly kicked off the credit crunch and caused the markets to stagnate. Since then, difficulties in obtaining credit have led to a constant cycle of dumping unintelligible amounts of money into the banking sector to ensure that the unimaginable cannot happen and the banks don’t go under. After all, who would protect our money if the banks went bust? (like we have money these days!)

You could say that this cycle of effectively paying for “protection” from a banking collapse sounds a bit like the classic mafia protection racket. But this can’t be right, can it?

Mafioso all come from the same background and are connected to each other. Just because these chaps in the City all went to the same universities and schools and know each other through the old boys network doesn’t mean they’re part of a criminal enterprise, right?

Even if the banking industry is demanding that we pay them extraordinary amounts of money to ensure that we’re “protected”, it’s not like we’ve given them the money and still ended up in crisis after crisis with nothing happening other than the money disappearing.   

The mafia use their influence with politicians etc to ensure they remain free from prosecution. Just because David Cameron said this week that he sees no need for a judicial enquiry – let alone a criminal investigation – into what was clearly fraud doesn’t mean he’s in the pocket of the banking industry. 

….hold on, maybe it does.

David Cameron tells us that an enquiry by MPs will suffice. I’m sorry, but having read up on banking fraud, particularly international fraud this week and the difficulties in obtaining convictions, I have no faith in MPs having the competence to pull it off. And even if they did find wrongdoing, what would the repercussions be? You need experts to investigate this stuff. Experts who can jail folk – the serious fraud office would be a start. 

Interest rates are one of the keys to this entire economic mess. First it was banks that couldn’t afford to meet their interest payments and now it’s whole countries. Is someone fixing Italy’s rates too? 

This is organised crime on a scale neither Tony Soprano nor Don Corleone could imagine. The banking sector has been hiding behind a (very) thin veil of respectability for too long. It’s time we saw them for what they are – a racket!

With all this ranting about the mafia, this week’s Tash could be only one man, Vito Corleone:

Bonjour Tash Appreciators,

Cast your mind back to the last time you were really out of breath and sore following some kind of physical exertion. It might be running, lifting weights, swimming – anything. 

Now make the breath harder to catch and the pain several times worse. Then make it last three weeks with alternating days of crushing pace or morale sapping climbs. In fact, let’s add some numbers and context. Imagine you were going 3,497km and climbing the equivalent of Mt Everest… thrice. 

If you can imagine that, then the picture in your head is very similar to the Tour de France. It starts this Saturday and it’s hard to be hyperbolic about just how tough it is. It’s not got the steepest climbs or longest stages but only the best cyclists attempt the Tour and so the pace is unrelenting. 

This year’s Tour is different because a British rider has a genuine chance of winning. If you haven’t noticed already, this guy is getting a lot of coverage:

That’s Bradley Wiggins, he’ll be riding for Team Sky this year and he could win it. To those not familiar with it, cycling may look like an individual sport. But it’s not. Wiggins is only 1 of 9 riders. Hopefully he’ll be the one in yellow (the leader’s jersey) but the other 8 riders (including a world champion and at least one national champion) will all be riding for him. 

It wasn’t always like this. In the past, riders used to work on their own far more than is usual now. They would have heavy bikes, hellish gears and no electronic gizmos to help them. They were hard men. 

Take Eddy “the Cannibal” Merckx – the greatest rider there has ever been. He won everything and he did it in style. On the 1969 Tour he achieved what would now be impossible – he won the yellow, green and polka dot jersey. That means he went round the 3,000+km in the shortest time, won the most sprints and climbed the mountains quicker than anyone else. Lance Armstrong, for example, only ever won the yellow jersey as overall winner. Merckx was class:

Unfortunately, riders couldn’t possibly rock a Tash on Tour. They can’t have hair on their legs and even Wiggins’ side-burns are pushing it. 

The fans, however, can. In a past Tash Friday we saw El Diablo (the German chap who dresses up like a devil and follows the Tour round) but this week’s Tash is a Merckx fan:

What struck me about this was, have you ever seen an elderly chap wearing a Real Madrid top with Ronaldo on it? Or with any other sportsperson’s name emblazoned on their clothes? I haven’t. Maybe that’s because the older generation are harder to impress and there aren’t too many genuine hard men around these days…

I’ll keep you up-to-date over the next few weeks about Wiggins’ progress.

Ahoy Tash Appreciators,

I trust you all enjoyed the extra day(s) off this week!

I enjoyed the days aff but I didn’t enjoy the Jubilee stuff. It was the concert that bothered me most. 

Como estas Tash Appreciators,

Hola Tash Appreciators,

Change your clothes; change the records spinning in your homes, cars and iPods; move your dining room outside; and get the cidre sur la glacé – it’s officially summer!

Some of you may not be aware of this but Tash Friday is inundated with emails asking for advice in relation to important decisions in the lives of Appreciators. As one might ask for the advice of a financial boffin if one was thinking was making a financial decision, Tash Appreciators write in to ask how they can use opportunities to become more like the Tash toting paladins that grace these emails. 

One topic we regularly get asked about is in relation to lads who are thinking of changing cars. For example, Bruno Iksil from Paris wrote in this week saying: