Bike to Work

I’ve recently been reading with interest the cycling / cycling commuting tips from the land of Magic Roundabouts . These have struck a bit of a nerve with me, and made me realise that where I’m working now is currently outside of sensible-commuting-in-regular-clothes distance. The 35 mile round-trip is perfectly do-able, but the weight of...
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Notice anything odd about this sculpture, that’s adjacent to the cycle route between Whitley Bay and Blyth? Remember that cunning trick they did when filming the Lord of The Rings, that made the 6′8" Sir Ian McKellan look taller than the 5′3" Elijah Wood? Lots of really smart jiggery-pokery with camera angles to fool...
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I’ve had an unusual week. Full of highs and lows. On the plus side . . . My ride to work on Wednesday was just brilliant, despite the weather’s attempt to rain on that particular parade. And as I explained to the people from Sustrans - my skin’s waterproof. On that ride . . . I...
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I’m not talking about the kind of bonking that was discussed between bridesmaids under a table in Four Weddings & a Funeral (”Well, it’s kinda like table tennis, only with slightly smaller balls.”) No. I mean the sort that you generally only get when you do some serious endurance sport stuff, and just run out...
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Last weekend for Daughter’s birthday treat, we took her and her best friend to Edinburgh Zoo. We drove up on Saturday morning, spent the afternoon running from enclosure to enclosure, and stayed overnight at a nearby hotel. Driving back down the A1 on Sunday morning, the fuel warning light for the car came on, so...
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This was the soundtrack of my ride today - Out Ta Get Me, from Appetite For Destruction. (The bleeping out on this version of the song is really subtle - even if you’re not a G’NR fan, it’s worth watching for the awesome audio edit ) So, to my ride today - visiting a client...
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OK, so here’s the Prisoners’ Dilemma: Two guys are arrested on suspicion of being the pair behind an armed bank robbery. The investigating officer is cunning though, and separates them, making each an identical offer: Confess to the robbery, and thus provide the evidence to put your accomplice away for a long stretch, and we can...
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The hot spring news is that over in Copenhagen, they’ve just got their first bicycle police unit (I know - talk about ironic!) The photos of bicycle police posted on Copenhagenize.com got me wondering what bicycle police look like all over the world . . . so I did a trawl through Flickr’s Creative Commons...
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Siegfried’s fitted with a 5-speed Sturmey Archer hub, and a thumb trigger shifter like this: I’ve been riding Siegfried for about a month, and have always found that the gears are prone to step up - if you select first gear, it doesn’t take much of a nudge on the shifter for it to jump...
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I met my business partner for a quick lunch today in Jarrow - a place with an interesting history: In 1936, mass unemployment and extreme poverty in the north-east of England drove 200 men to march in protest from Jarrow to London. Their MP, Ellen Wilkinson was with them as they came south to petition...
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