Tales from the celebrity frontline and Cheshire-flavoured hills for Trevor Ward
We hit the lanes of the Cheshire Plain - and a surprise serving of hills
Andy’s wiry frame and the 32-sprocket on his bike are already ringing alarm bells
The view over the Cheshire countryside from the beer garden of my hotel extends all the way to the distant skyscrapers of Liverpool. There’s hardly a lump on the landscape as the sun sets over the Mersey. “Tomorrow should be a piece of cake,” I think, while savouring a piece of rather fine cake.
Whether it’s the late evening August sunshine or the sugar rush from my dessert, I have lost sight of the glaring contradiction to my assessment of Cheshire’s topography. The only reason I’m enjoying such a spectacular view is because my hotel is perched on a hill. A hill whose summit is a not inconsiderable 182 metres above sea level. And behind it are more hills.
It dawns on me that I’ll be needing my climbing legs tomorrow after all. I finish my cake and decide to get an early night.
“So, this is the Cheshire Plain?” I ask my corider Andy Spinoza hopefully when we meet the next morning.
“’I call it ‘Deepest Cheshire’” is his enigmatic reply, but his wiry frame and the 32-sprocket on his bike are already ringing alarm bells.
We set off down a narrow, high-hedged lane that twists and jinks for several miles before bisecting the intriguingly named village of No Man’s Heath and eventually arriving in Malpas. It’s an attractive town with a handsome medieval church, but there’s no clue that a piece of cycling history took place near here.
The 100-mile route of what was only the second-ever World Championship Road Race passed just south of here in 1922. From 14 starters – all amateurs – Great Britain took all the podium places, though that may have been a result of some confusion among the foreign riders who were surprised to find the event, organised by the Liverpool-based Anfield Bicycle Club, labelled ‘Private and Confidential’ and being held as a time trial. This was a hangover of the National Cycling Union’s decision to ban mass-start road races 30 years earlier.
Mover and shaker
If Andy had been around back then, he’d have probably been sniffing out some scandal for one of the tabloid newspapers of the day. Or he’d have been on the other side of the fence and putting some positive spin on it as a media consultant employed by the UCI.
Referred to by his contemporaries as ‘Mr Manchester’, Andy forged a career in his home
city as a major mover and shaker on the media scene. In the 1980s, he set up the influential City Life listings magazine and in the 1990s worked as the showbiz reporter for the Manchester Evening News. For the last 15 years, he ran one of the most prestigious PR firms outside of London, SKV Communications, until the events of 2020 led him to wind up operations. “It was a combination of the effects of Covid and the lure of early retirement,” he explains.
Andy’s been spending a lot of his new-found free time on his bike. As a recent convert to road cycling, he’s already ticked off some famous climbs – from Ventoux in France to Winnats Pass in the Peak District – but admits it took some time to conquer his fear of riding on busy roads.
“I used to ride a mountain bike mainly offroad, along canal towpaths, that sort of thing, but when I got my road bike, I started riding with a group and that really helped. There was one guy who always used to ride in the middle of the lane and I learned a lot about being assertive in traffic from him, which helped my confidence.”
Off the bike, Andy has never had a problem with confidence. He regularly had to ‘doorstep’ or ‘front-up’ A-list celebrities for his daily showbiz diary. “Manchester in the 1990s was booming. You had famous people – actors, singers, footballers – going out to the same places as ‘ordinary’ people. Mick Hucknall had just made the biggest-selling album of the 1990s and yet could be having a drink in the same bar as you. My editor said my job was to report the social life of the city centre, but a lot of the time I was pricking the pomposity of celebrities.”
Unwanted attention
Andy was also giving advice to those bewildered by their new-found celebrity status. “I once gave a ‘pep talk’ to Ryan Giggs. I told him that when he came into the city centre, I had to write about it, so if he didn’t want any press attention he should stay in his local neighbourhood.”
Andy had a network of sources – hotel doormen, club bouncers and bar managers – who tipped him off if anyone famous appeared on their premises. He takes pride in his many scoops, such as the night former New Order bass player Peter Hook got into a fight with the boyfriend of his ex, Royle Family star Caroline Aherne.
“It was at the opening night of a swanky new restaurant and Caroline was accidentally kicked in the fight. We got a photo that made our front page and was used by The Sun after that.”
All this showbiz gossip is riveting stuff but, as we glide through the latest in a succession of picture-postcard villages – this one, Coddington, complete with quintessential
We glide through a selection of picture-postcard villages. Coddington even has a duck pond
“Ahead of us, the green bulk of Cheshire’s equivalent of the Pyrenees is looming: the Peckforton Hills”
duck pond – we come across a rider in need of our assistance.
He’s stood next to his bike – a 1990s Gazelle Skyhawk mountain bike with a distinctive yellow frame and red wheels – and is consulting something even older: a paper map.
He introduces himself as Dirk Hein, a 55-yearold Dutchman from Utrecht who is on holiday. He’s due to meet his wife at Beeston Castle, but has lost his way. By the time we’ve found his destination on our hi-tech Garmins, Dirk has already located it on his map.
“I have grown up using maps,” he says. “My nephew makes cycling itineraries for tour companies and is always telling me I should get a computer or some such, but I tell him I have never been lost. Ha ha!”
We don’t know it, but we will bump into Dirk again later, when he will surprise us with something even older than his bike and map. For now, our immediate priority is to find a shop and some refreshment.
Deepest Cheshire, however, is turning out to be very deep indeed. We haven’t passed a shop or cafe since leaving Malpas. Ahead of us, the green bulk of Cheshire’s equivalent of the Pyrenees is looming: the Peckforton Hills.
It’s a shock to suddenly be on a road that’s ascending. This one drags on for two kilometres, with a final section that peaks at 11 per cent, before delivering us to Harthill village green and a restored Victorian building which now houses a cookery school.
We are definitely among the high peaks of Cheshire now, something I couldn’t see from my beer garden eyrie last night for the simple reason they were behind me. We finally come across a pub that doubles as a village shop and are able to top up our sugar levels.
As we skirt the eastern flanks of Cheshire’s ‘central massif’, the road may have flattened but
the sense of being in the middle of a rugged landscape is maintained by the appearance of some hikers wielding ski poles and accompanied by Labradors. They fleetingly materialise before slipping back into the darkness of the densely wooded slopes.
“Is that path rideable?” I ask one group of dogwalkers. “It is until you get to the big cobbles halfway up.”
We stick to the tarmac and shortly afterwards the road rises sharply again, but this time it’s only a humpback bridge over a canal where several narrow boats are moored.
After coasting past a stationary line of very expensive cars in the gridlocked town of Tarporley, we arrive in Delamere Forest, the northernmost point of our ride, and agree it’s time for lunch.
Star struck
At the Covid-secure Fishpool Inn, a masked waitress takes our temperatures before leading us to our socially distanced table in the beer garden. This is the first time Andy or I have experienced anything like this, though it pales into insignificance compared to one particular lunch during Andy’s newshound days when he found himself being assaulted and threatened by a future Hollywood actor.
“He was a rising star at the time and I’d written about his days at a local performing arts school,” Andy recalls. “When we were introduced, he picked up a glass of water and threw it in my face. I said to the rest of the table it was probably a good idea that I didn’t stay. As I was leaving the restaurant, he followed me, pushed me over a car bonnet and grabbed me by the throat. He said if I wrote anything about him again, he would ‘f*****g have’ me.” Rather than writing anything critical, Andy says he had been complimentary.
Other stars occasionally took exception to what Andy wrote about them, although their reactions weren’t so extreme. Mick Hucknall tried and failed to chat up Andy’s girlfriend. Eric Cantona turned his back on him. And Morrissey wrote him a letter saying he ‘seriously didn’t fancy his chances with the Moanchester News’.
During the remainder of our ride, the conversation turns from badly behaving celebrities to dangerous drivers.
“I go for a long ride every Sunday with some mates and there’s always some aggressive tooting and general antipathy from a minority of drivers,” says Andy. “It’s all very well for the government to be encouraging more of us to ride bikes, but few of them have ever done it themselves so don’t know what the experience of riding in traffic is like.”
“Few people in government know what the experience of riding in traffic is like”
As a successful PR, what ideas does he have to bring harmony to our roads? “If you wanted a slogan, it would have to be something between the extremes of ‘Share the Space Please’ and ‘Get the F**k Away, Don’t Kill Me’.”
Fortunately, the final challenge of today’s ride is nothing more hazardous than the steep climb to my hotel’s beer garden in front of a gallery of customers enjoying the late afternoon sunshine.
One of the spectators is Dirk the Dutchman, who excitedly wants to show us something “even older than my bike”. He leads us to the car park and his impeccably preserved 1981 Citroën CX featuring hydropneumatic suspension (which he proudly demonstrates for us).
“How was his ride,” I ask. “Interesting,” he says. “Most riders here seem friendlier than at home because in Holland no one greets each other. I think it’s because we have so many cyclists!”
We return to the beer garden and order some drinks. I look out to the distant skyline of Liverpool and then check my Garmin. Our accumulated elevation of 894 metres is hard to reconcile with the pancake-flat landscape stretching out before us.
But there’s no time to dwell on this. Andy has a great story about David Beckham and Sir Alex Ferguson he wants to share…