Where I Shop

*Before you start typing a comment in green ink, please check this post’s categorisation. Thank you* It’s funny how these things happen, isn’t it? Da Square Wheel Man over at the Bicycle Diaries wrote a post this week about bicycle helmets from a Tweedier age, and only last weekend, I’d photographed the same sort of...
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I’ve been having a bit of bother with the back wheel on our tandem, Daisy. Basically, the bearing’s either loose, so that there’s some definite wobble in the wheel, and corresponding slack handling of the bike, or tight, so that the wheel doesn’t run free. Neither are good. So this morning before setting off to...
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I remember about, oh, eight years ago, I gave up my three vices for Lent - caffeine, chocolate and alcohol. It’s not that I’m religious at all, but denial of the senses is certainly good for the soul. Or whatever we have if we don’t have souls. I was expecting the end result of all...
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This made me laugh today - it was on Copenhagenize.com, and in a way sums up how it feels to ride to the shops instead of walking or driving: I don’t know if you think like me, but I was surprised by the second half - I thought the bike was going to disappear from...
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I popped into our local B&Q store yesterday to look at materials for constructing the tandem’s cargo module. I had to laugh at their cycle parking facilities: Maybe these are all cargo bikes? But I couldn’t see any pedals on them! You could of course think that the sign’s just in the wrong place, and it...
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It’s the bane of anyone who rides a bike. You get your trusty steed out, ready to set off to wherever, only to notice that you’ve got a flat. Or everything’s going beautifully with your trip, when you hear that dreaded hisssss, and the handling suddenly goes all weird. Punctures. Bah! You can probably guess...
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You can’t say that we don’t ask the big questions here! So. Here’s my problem. I have this image in my mind of a point in the future, where there’ll be integrated networks for people on bikes in all British towns and cities. It will be possible to get pretty much from your front door...
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Andy over at Carbon Trace is a big fan of the One Mile Solution. An astonishing proportion of the journeys most people make by car are within less than a mile of where they live, so the solution is to replace a few / some / all of these by walking or riding a...
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I’ve been called all sorts of things in my time, many of them not particularly flattering, though many quite justified. But I have thick skin - something that probably comes from being an engineer. Unless insults are printed out on tractor-feed paper & backed up by a lot of calculations, I just don’t understand...
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I had a whole lot of baking to do yesterday - bread, bagels and Christmas cake. But unfortunately we were out of bread flour, and most of the ingredients needed for the cake. The only option was to head off to the shop to stock up - I bake quite a lot of bread, and...
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