Do The Right Thing

I’m back at school again! Thanks to North Tyneside Council, I’m attending a four-day course on cycle instructor training. The aim is that at the end of it, I’ll be provisionally qualified to teach others to ride a bike safely on the road to the national BikAbility standards.
To make it more of a challenge though, [...]

Filed under: Bike Culture, Cycle, Ranting, Road Safety, Weather, Whitley Bay, helmet | No Comments »

I was away for the back half of last week & over the weekend on a teaching job in Croatia.
I took my camera, and enough other assorted electronics to ensure that my hand luggage got to go three times through the X-ray machine, flying out on Wednesday from Newcastle to Zagreb via Heathrow Terminal 5. [...]

Filed under: Bike Culture, Business, Unlocked Bike, Weather | 1 Comment »

That David Hembrow’s got me thinking again. He lives just across the sea from me in what looks like Cycling Utopia. I don’t mean that in a sarcastic way either - from the saddle I sit on, the Netherlands, and specifically Assen, look like The Real Deal.
Anyway, he posted some photos and a video over [...]

Filed under: Bike Culture, Bike to Work, Blogroll, Cycle, D-Lock, Environment, Music, Netherlands, Newcastle, Politics, Road Safety, Too Much Information, Whitley Bay | 4 Comments »

At that cycling conference I went to a couple of weeks ago (the one I keep going on about, as if I don’t get out much . . .), Philip Darnton, Chair of Cycle England laid down a challenge to everyone attending:
YOU have to recruit two non-cyclists, and get ‘em on their bikes by the [...]

Filed under: Bike Culture, Bike to Work, Family, Friends | 6 Comments »

This via Cyclelicio.us - an Aardman Animation (the folks who kept winning the Oscar for Best Animation a few years back) of Angry Kid on his bike:

Kinda funny. Till you see it happening for real. It’s easy for riding assertively to spill over into the kind of “F*** you” aggressive riding caricatured in the film. [...]

Filed under: Bike Culture, Silly Stuff | 3 Comments »

At the cycling conference in That London a couple of weeks ago, the nice people from Cyclodelic had a stand showing off fashionable yet practical things for wearing / carrying stuff while riding a bike.
I wanted to put a link to their site, but when I gooooogled it, lots of references came up & I [...]

Filed under: Bike Culture, Where I Shop | 1 Comment »

Wife’s away visiting a friend from university. So having walked Huge Dalmation, fed, bathed & put Daughter to bed, I’ve spent the evening Wwilfing. Amongst other things, I’ve found pictures from the Armistice Day services, The Great War (the war to end all wars), and a whole lot of bike stuff.
Which brings me to this.
It [...]

Filed under: Bike Culture, Bike to Work, Environment, Newcastle, Ranting, Silly Stuff, Whitley Bay | 2 Comments »

So I posted earlier about how these two guys have done over 100,000 bike miles, and how although this is a long way (a very long way), it’s actually quite conceivable to accumulate that sort of mileage through your regular life.
Well, here’s an example of what I mean, taken from last Saturday:

08:45 - meeting with [...]

Filed under: Bike Culture, Cycle, Goals, Motivation, No More Excuses, Whitley Bay | No Comments »

So there are a bunch of people doing amazing stuff today - Brad & Big Dave & a few others from sweat365.com are doing the Steelman Triathlon somewhere in and around Las Vegas. 2.4 mile swim, 112 mile bike, and then a full marathon.
Any race with those kinds of distances is tough, but for this [...]

Filed under: Bike Culture, Blogroll, Friends, Goals, Newcastle, Silly Stuff, Too Much Information, Triathlon, Weather, Woo Wooo woooo! | 2 Comments »

I had a meeting on Friday in York. That’s about 85 miles each way . . . even at my most mileage-obsessed, that’s [probably] too far to ride, so once again, I had to choose between the car or an alternative - in this case, public transport.
This was an economic argument:

My car’s good for 45mpg. [...]

Filed under: Bike Culture, Bike locking strategy, Bike to Work, Climate Change, Cycle, Environment, Global Warming, Newcastle, Photographs, Whitley Bay | 5 Comments »