• Bardolatry*

    *excessive admiration of handlebars not Shakespeare. When I had delusions of grimpeur, I rode a Gios Carbon V-107. It came to me via my grandfather in-law who mentored many up and coming Catalan cyclists, Josep Jufre included. The Gios was one of Jufre’s bikes from his time at Relax-Gam, where finishing fourteenth at La Vuelta…

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  • Telic like it is

    In ‘Midlife – A Philosophical Guide’, Kieran Setiya distinguishes between telic and atelic activities. Telic activities “aim at terminal states, at which they are finished and thus exhausted”; Atelic activities do not, “they have no limit, no outcome whose achievement exhausts then and therefore brings them to an end”. Telic activities are self-destructive, “….in achieving…

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  • Stirrings

    More than stirrings. It’s almost April, and although the rain continues, the days are lengthening; there’s even sun at times and something approaching warmth. The garden is working through the gears. Anemone blanda a horticultural chronometer – flowers slowly closing as the day wanes; Fritillaria meleagris, insouciant in its droop; and Tulipa praestans ‘Shogun’, quite…

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  • Finitude

     4000. Fewer then 1,500 left then.  What to do?  Oliver Burkemann argues the amount you do isn’t important but rather the quality of what you do. The same ethos as Jenny Odell’s choice of kairos over kronos. A jam packed to-do-list is never completed, it just refills, as one task is done another is added. In recognising the…

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  • Inauguration

    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…

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  • 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…

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  • Going, Going

    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…

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  • Winterlight

    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,…

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  • 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…

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  • 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…

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