-
Subscribe
Subscribed
Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
Right out of the driveway, past the scar of the HS2 building works, and then it’s a left. Another right and left, then stick to the same road before a final left: Meriden. Pleasant valley in old English. Still a nice village but there’s much traffic, and the rumble of the A45, as vehicles pass…
There’s a saying in education, “If you’ve taught one autistic pupil, you’ve taught one autistic pupil”. Well, if you’ve fitted one set of mudguards, you’ve fitted one set of mudguards. They each present their own challenges, or rather, each bike has its own idiosyncrasies. The plan was to go without on The Green Bike, but…
A Blue Bike ride. The Kenilworth Greenway was joined at the Balsall Common end, departed where it crosses the Coventry Road. A former rail line, the Greenway’s gradient is far from taxing. .City limits soon reached – first the latest, then a former. A slight climb up Gibbet’s Hill (no hangings today), the road so…
A long term – the longest? Tired pupils, tired staff. Running on fumes, on my knees – any of those expressions. Teaching feeling like a young person’s game. A tiredness so deep, it’s in the bones. The skies leaden, the days short – rain, grey, drab. The term went to the wire – once finished,…
The charge: fraud. The verdict: guilty. But I knew that already – this article only served to confirm. It lists motivations for minimalist living: an aesthetic sense (I like empty spaces and the tidiness it creates – clutter bringing me out in hives, sort of), sustainability (the impact of too much stuff on the environment…
The procession towards perihelion, beech leaves the measure. Once green, now yellow and orange, a precursor to brown. Hedging in the back garden a match for The Green Bike. Not that The Green Bike gets ridden. With no mudguards, not the bike for this time of year. Are the Autumns getting wetter? With storms now…
The Green Bike is complete. Of a style of which I am fond – skinny steel tubes, a threaded 1” fork with a pleasing curve, rim brakes, leather saddle, shellacked bar tape, and friction shifting, but no mudguards this time. A bike to be ridden on road, bridleway, in fact, looking at these two books,…
Autumn arrived. Storm Babet brought rain, and what was lane, and what was brook, the water cared not. A nudge to remind that nature ultimately holds the upper hand. Weather for riding the black bike, its Honjo mudguards and wide tyres perfect for mazy motions across wet, debris strewn byways. Back home an article on…
Early October and unseasonably warm (or, as a sign of things to come, seasonably warm?). The Purple Bike (that is also white) weather. Much still in colour in the garden: rudbeckia, aster, hylotelephium, and rodgersia in flower. In the lanes, autumnal hints, as chlorophyll green gives way to anthocyanin red – leaf, hip, and haw.…
More often than not, the bottle-neck of my bike builds is finances. I piece together parts as and when funds allow. The prosaic necessities of renewing my car insurance and new school uniform for my son has mopped up money of late, but I’ve picked up some bits and The Green Bike is taking shape.…
Cyclokairos 