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The solace of interiority, Geoff Dyer’s description of reading. I’m claiming it for cycling. An act of journeying outward that journeys inwards. Hours alone in one’s head. Rarely a bad thing when out there – is it the forgetting, the escape from what dwells in other circumstances? Familiar sites of late – Edstone Aqueduct (England’s longest…
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May and one of the driest on record. Weather for lifting the dust sheet and taking The Green Bike off the garage wall. It may have mudguards but the filth of winter roads have to be long gone before it’s ridden. Back when the bike was built, the handlebar tape started off yellow and it…
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The spray can said burgundy. It’s not, is it? Not enough red, right? Some sort of purple – Aubergine? Plum? Queen of Night Tulip? Maybe not that deep a purple. They are out in force in the garden. Late April, through into May, my favourite time for the garden – pre-summer-slouch-verdancy to the fore. My…
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In this article, acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton describes silence as “…not the absence of something but the presence of everything”. On a daily basis I encounter plenty of noise that drowns out everything – a classroom full of pupils, a commute that takes in a busy stretch of motorway. I sometimes wonder how I got here,…
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At the start of ‘Braiding Sweetgrass’, Robin Wall Kimmerer speaks of a conflict. The one when the children of Eve met the children of Atahensic. Eve, banished for eating a product of the land, came to see the natural world as alien, something passed through before reaching heaven, her true home. In contrast, the natural…
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Wireless electronic derailleurs. Ugly. Modern cranksets. Ugly. Fat forks to accommodate the breaking force being so close to the hub. Ugly. Full suspension mountain bikes. Ugly. Add a motor and are they even bicycles? In fact, forget the motor and they still look closer to a motorbike. The Black Bike has a modern crankset and…
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Grant Petersen’s Blahg led me to a New York Times interview with Jose Mujica. The central message: limit your needs to necessities, and work only for these. With our ability to create a vast range of “needs”, the market responds, feeding ever increasing consumption. We work too much in order to fund the consumption, and…
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That’s The Black Bike just shy of Bwlch y Groes (Pass of the Cross), second only to Gospel Pass in the terms of highest Welsh mountain pass that’s a sealed road. The view is back down the valley through which the River Rhiwlech flows before it joins the Dyfi. The source of that river is…
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The title is a line from Philip Larkin’s ‘Wires’. A poem in which youthful idealism gives way to adult pragmatism, age bringing disillusion. Relevant to this blog post? Maybe not, but I like the sentiment of the line, and I use bike rides to get beyond the wires, escape the everyday (before it sucks me…
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Term time is frantic. The holidays in contrast, a chance to slow down. A chance to let things proceed at their inherent pace – eigenzeit. In finding ways to live slowly, a look east is common for me. ‘The Abundance of Less‘, the latest vicarious taste. Not the eigenzeit-lite approach I take, but a document of…
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