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Down the road, close to home, in the village of Meriden, there is a memorial erected by the Cyclists Touring Club in honour of Wayfarer (Walter MacGregor Robinson). It was the destination for the inaugural ride of The Green Bike. There’s another memorial to Wayfarer, a little further afield from here, at Pen Bwlch Llandrillo in the Berywn…
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A week of warmth after a winter of wet that continued long into spring. Dried out lanes devoid of mud. Well apart from one down and away from the local brook. But car-submerging depths at the ford are long gone. Time for a change of bike – black to green. Since completion of its build,…
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*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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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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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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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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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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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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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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