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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.…
Other bikes, that I once rode but no longer do, unless on a turbo, and given how much I despise using a turbo, they really are bikes-I-once-rode-but-no-longer-do. Yet, keep them I do. They saw active service in the mid to late noughties, and are typical of the period: aluminium frame with carbon fork, the Gios…
My son isn’t much interested in cycling. Through the influence of his mum, basketball is more his thing. But on occasion I can persuade him to accompany me on one of my ambles by bike, in fact, I managed it twice recently. The first was just a short jaunt, heading out to the local beach*…
We’ve all got one in us, and I’ve been busy writing mine. Fond of hours in the saddle, on the path less pedalled, it’s not unusual for me to get caught short: ‘A Defecator’s Guide to the Leaves of Britain’. A mixture of oak and bracken was the solution during the latest instalment of the…
I was anchoring a 4 by 1 relay, a few weeks before the start of my GCSEs, when it happened. A meadow of a grass track; “undulating” to say the least. In the lead, 20 metres to go, my right quad and pelvis had a disagreement, the resulting fracture causing me to collapse in a…
The most regretful people on Earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time. Mary Oliver What do I create? In a previous life, I worked as a medicinal chemist in the field of drug discovery, trying…
How much of it was necessary, I don’t know. But it got done: the cabinet for storing files was hung in the office; the wooden worktops in the kitchen were varnished; clothes were washed, dishes too; tasks in the garden – shrubs pruned and perennials flush with the seemingly daily rain cut back, bird feeders…
“And in some of the people of the town and the community surrounding it, one of the characteristic diseases of the twentieth century was making its way: the suspicion that they would be greatly improved if they were someplace else.” Wendell Berry This article on Bikepacking.com is the best writing on cycling I’ve read in…
I was a touch disparaging about The Red Bike a while back. Poor bike – a creation of my own hand, and yet I dump my frustrations with its build and looks on it. It works just fine, performing admirably on the rough stuff, but it’s somewhere off my idealised vision of what a cyclokairos…
Cyclokairos 