I described the Kirmington bubble in the autobiography. The one-pub village I grew up in was the centre of my universe until my late twenties, when I moved out, and it stayed that way even when I was living in Caistor. It’s where I grew up; learned to ride a motorbike; learned to spanner in my dad’s chicken shed; and where I was taught important life skills, like how to lift heavy things and assemble Black & Decker workbenches, by our legendary headmaster, Mr Acum in the one-room Kirmington Church of England Primary School. But I’m well and truly out of the bubble now.
I have strong links to the place, because my mum and dad still live there, and my sister Sal and her two lads have even moved into their own house in the village. I have plenty of mates from that time that who I see when I can, like Shorty and his wife Hannah, but the strongest friendship, that goes right back to that time growing up, in my late teens and early twenties, is with the Maws.
I didn’t meet any of the Maws until I was 18, but I knew of the legendary Dave Maw. He was just leaving the Vale of Ancholme School as I was starting there, and it was a big deal for the school because he was already three times world BMX champion.
I never met him but, but I knew the name – everyone knew the name. Then, halfway through my time at the secondary school, he died after crashing a VW Beetle down Elsham Hill in December 1996. And that was all I knew of the Maws: Dave, this legend who died when he wasn’t much more than a teenager. That was until I left school and started going out with Sarah Chadwick, my first proper girlfriend. She was a nurse, real nice lass, and seven years older than me. I was with her three years, but she just wanted to settle down, I think, and it would be a long time before that was going to be in my plans. Anyway, she was dead good mates with Dave Maw’s older brother Jonty and Ruth, who he would later marry. So I got to know Jonty and Ruth about 2000.
Jonty was as good on a BMX as his brother, but he wasn’t competitive. He was great at styling it up on a bike, though. I became good mates with Jonty, and when me and Sarah split up, I kept in touch with the Maws. Now I see more of them than I do of my mum and dad or brother and little sister.
You should have got the idea by now that I’m either at work or working in the shed as soon as I get home, or at weekends I’m motorbike racing or mountain biking, and in between all that there’s the TV job, but I try to keep Monday as a night off, and I go to the Maws for a brew. If I’m training for a race, I’ll bike that way home and have my tea at the Maws, or if I’m not I’ll go in the van and take the dog, because Nigel likes both their dogs. Maximus, who is a Heinz 57 mongrel and is named after Max Biaggi, isn’t mad about my dog. But Roxy is a German Shepherd cross and she likes Nige.
Jonty is married to Ruth and they have two daughters, Georgia and Lucy, and a son, David. I’m godfather to Lucy, so I always try to remember her birthday, but I miss it every now and then. I don’t take the role very seriously, but I bought her a little Snap-On ratchet and I engraved a piston out of a Honda CBR600 with her name and date of birth for her christening, back in 2005. I also took Jonty to his wedding in my Saab, when he married Ruth in 2004.
Jonty’s a builder by trade, in the family business with his dad, but he’s in a digger most of the time because he subcontracts to the YEB, the Yorkshire Electricity Board. He has an auger on the back actor of his digger for drilling holes into the ground and he puts all their electricity poles up.
The Maws don’t care where I’ve been or what I’ve done, they’re just nice people and don’t annoy me in any way or ask me for anything, so it’s never hard work. I just sit down and watch a bit of telly, have a yarn with the kids, watch Nige try to shag Roxy, or go in Jonty’s shed and see the VW Camper he’s building. It’s not that I don’t get on with my mum and dad, I do, but I feel more at ease with the Maws than anyone else. I stay there till 10 or 11 at night, before it’s back into the work/shed/biking/filming/racing routine.
It’s not surprising that the whole Maw family took the death of Dave really hard, and I don’t know if that’s affected how Jonty views the world, because I didn’t know him before, but he’s not overly impressed by anything. That’s not to say he’s miserable or cynical, though. He’s just one of those boys that have no real ups or downs, it’s just the Maw. A constant. He loves his toys and hobbies. If I’m ever thinking about buying something and I can’t decide to go for it or not, I go to see Jonty and he always talks me into it.
It’s not so much that the Maws are a link to another time, but if I go anywhere else I sometimes feel like I’m under scrutiny and I’m getting quizzed about stuff. Monday nights at the Maws is a proper default setting for me, and I think everyone needs that. Jonty and Ruth would be the first to tell me if I was getting above my station, and ask me, What are you doing, dickhead? They did with my mistakes in the past, but they’ve met Sharon now and they like her and she likes them. Not that I need the Maws’ approval, but it does help. Ruth wouldn’t say if she didn’t like an other half of mine that I introduced them to, but I know when she genuinely does. And Ruth has cut my hair for years, so I manage to kill two birds with one stone.
There still aren’t many places I could live except for North Lincolnshire. I like it because I know if there’s something I’m struggling to do then there’s someone over there who knows someone who can do summat. I’ve got that web of contacts here, built up over 20 years, since I started working part-time for my dad. You can’t be an expert in everything, so you always need to know people you can rely on to do stuff for you. I can get just about anything done round here and I like that.
I think the only other place I could live and feel the same way is Northern Ireland. I’ve spent enough time over there that I know people in different trades that I could get things done, but I don’t have any plans to move away.
I’ve had a dirt track built on a local field, with the help of Tim Coles, and I needed a tractor to grade the track, keep it smooth and in good condition. At first I thought I’d buy a cheap, shitty old tractor, then I spoke to my mate Dobby, who is in the potato industry, and he told me how much he pays contractors to do tatie leading from September to October.
The tatie leader is like a tatie harvester. You have a tatie lifter, that lifts the potato out of the row, then puts them on a riddler, while someone is driving alongside in a tractor at 20 mph, and there’s a conveyor that feeds the spuds into a trailer being towed by the tractor.
They’re paying lads £750 a week during potato harvest, and I thought, I could do that. It’s an opportunity to get a foot in another door. I’ve already got plenty of feet in plenty of doors, but another one can’t hurt. So it got me thinking that I could buy a shitty old tractor to prepare and maintain my dirt track and that would be alright, but I could buy a decent one and earn a few quid out of it, renting it out with a driver.
I had a word with a few lads: Dobby, Tim Coles, Tim and Tom Neave, and everyone said the Fendt is the most expensive, but it’s the best. And the biggest of the Fendts is a 9-series. It’s bloody massive. It’s overkill for the dirt track, but it’ll do it and much, much more. So I had a word with Spellman, asking if he could get me one out of the TV bods at North One as payment for the new round of programmes, instead of pound notes, and he got it sorted out for me. So now I have a brand-new, dark green Fendt 9-series tractor.
It’s German, and I’m getting right into German engineering. The BMW I’m racing is impressive; the Metzeler tyre factory I visited to see where they made my racing tyres; the Fendt … Ja, das ist gut.
We’re not short of farmland in Lincolnshire and the potato harvest is 12 weeks a year. Before that, in July and August, is wheat and barley harvest. Then there are all these big digester plants being built round here. They produce methane by simulating what a cow’s stomach does. Farmers fill their digester plants, that look like a big white domes, with animal shit and silage, then agitate it as it’s rotting down. The process creates all this methane that is then purified, taking the corrosive elements out of it, before the methane goes into an internal combustion engine that drives a generator, that then feeds power into the national grid. I used to be dead cynical about ‘green’ and renewable energy, because it was hardly producing any percentage of Britain’s total power output, and I thought nuclear was the solution, but that’s changing – more power is coming from renewables – and my views are too.
The by-product of the digester plants is waste that can go on the fields as fertiliser. And there are so many organic digester plants round our way that they need people to spread the shit. I plan to learn the job inside-out, then probably put Sharon on it, in the Fendt. She sounds like she’s up for it, but first I want to know everything about it, so I can comment on it. If I don’t know what’s going on, I can’t say anything about how much diesel the tractor is burning or how long it takes to do a job. So I’m going shit-spreading in the tractor. I’m looking forward to it.