My silver bike, the hybrid I commute with, is nothing special. It is a Raleigh Pioneer with mudguards, a rack & straight bars. It has some honest components: Shimano hubs, Shimano derailleurs (front & rear) & Shimano crankset and SKS mudguards. I do not for a moment consider it a top-of-the-range bike, but rather a bike-next-door kind of bike, ... Read more

OK, so I liberated the title of this post from the creative genius that was Douglas Adams, but let’s not get stuck there and instead move on. I’d have liked to have started this post with something like “been doing some thinking” but the reality is I’m ALWAYS doing some thinking. Mine is a very ... Read more

My sister passed away two years ago yesterday, and I miss her. I’m not morbid, or in denial or anything like that – I just miss her. Have you lost someone and found yourself thinking of them? Then you’d know how I’ve been feeling these past few days. I suppose bitter-sweet would best describe the ... Read more

Two things happened recently:1) I’ve been thinking about cycling from Land’s End to John O’Groats as a charity fund raiser. As such I’ve been reading LOADS of blogs of people that have done either LeJog or JogLE (the other way round).2) I took my youngest cycling to Radford Park in Plymouth, where we fed the ducks. ... Read more

As the number of winters I’ve seen clock up I’m becoming more and more a fan of Open Source software. Many people mistakenly think Open Source = free, which isn’t always the case, but I’ll not spend any more time on that.Instead I want to talk about Openstreetmap.org, which is an Open Source site and ... Read more

A old friend of mine taught me something simple, many moons ago: whatever you focus on will seem bigger & more important than things you don’t focus on. And therein lies the problem: In my hometown of Plymouth I would dearly love for the cycling infrastructure to at least rival the best in the UK, ... Read more

OK, I know I said Friday night’s Midnight Ride in Princetown was going ahead regardless, but I cannot make it! I’ve had a small handful of people tell me they were  thinking about going, and one that almost guaranteed they’d be there. Given this rather less than overwhelming response, I thought I postpone it until ... Read more

I have an on-going disagreement with Plymouth City Council. It started after some blasted idiot nearly killed me at a then brand-new build-out on Ham drive. I enquired why no cycle by-pass was included in the design and received the following as reply: ” Due to lane widths available on Ham Drive and Fore Street ... Read more

I call it night CYCLING as opposed to night riding for fairly obvious reasons: I want to avoid any connotation with a seriously naff actor in an even more seriously naff 80’s TV show! Seriously, the Hoff is about as cool as Cliff Richard and Sir Cliff may be a lot of things, but cool certainly ... Read more

There is this recurring theme through Daily Mail articles: cycling is bad and cyclists should be burned at the stake. OK, they don’t actually say that in as many words, but with that idiot James Martin bragging about running cyclists off the road and other anti-cycling rants regularly appearing, they’re not far from it. The ... Read more

I’ll start by saying I make no excuses for who and what I am. If you find me too acidic, or too cynical, well I suggest you hit the “Back” button on your browser and we’ll part ways. The thing is I don’t suffer fools gladly and I have absolutely NO time for self-serving corrupt ... Read more

As a kid in in South Africa I was the proud owner of a 10-speed Raleigh road bike, complete with drop bars & skinny wheels. I absolutely loved that bike! Having grown up in a small town close to the Botswana border, I was free to roam in ways that my kids would never be. About ... Read more

It started with an innocent text message. Something along the lines of “My mate’s PC has a virus & I’m struggling to sort it. Can you help?”.99.999% of the time my answer is a simple yes, and this time was no exception.My mate dropped the errant PC off at my house (given that it is ... Read more

I’ll hold my hand up and admit I rant from time to time. I cannot abide wingeing or moaning, but I’ll accept a rant now and then. This is a rant. I rant because I’m passionate about things. I believe we CAN save this planet, provided enough people start doing something. Call me naive, call ... Read more

Tom Amos started a petition on NR10’s web site, and called it 3feet2pass. I signed the petition, as did a disappointing 2 600 others.What is important here is not the numbers, but rather the response. The Government’s response starts off by stating they will do nothing about the situation. It then continues with little gems like ... Read more

This morning, whilst commuting to work on the black bike, I had a hair-raising experience. I was going through a series of crossings by the Britannia Inn, on Outland road, when a car skipped the lights. The picture below is of the intersection. The yellow line shows where I was cycling, the red line shows ... Read more

I’ve been a fan of night riding for a long time now, but pretty much all my night riding so far has been done on well-lit urban roads. This is easy to explain: for proper night riding you need a decent light and I didn’t have one. Being a natural-born-geek one of my favourite sites ... Read more

Had to happen sooner or later! I’ve been commuting through all the bad weather we’ve been having in Plymouth, without a single mishap. True, we didn’t get the amount of snow as other parts of the country, but we still had a fair bit. Of course, we had the rain, which led to ice. And ... Read more

Well, not really! Nuh-uh! Not at all! I have however noticed a distinct pattern of blogging amongst several cycle blogs, which consists of something like this:“Outside it wasn’t simply snowing, it was chucking down ice-bergs (with pieces of Titanic still attached!) but I went cycling through it all! Of course people asked if I’m mad, ... Read more

Idiots – the planet’s one commodity that is becoming ever more plentiful. Take for example this site: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Theres-a-perfectly-good-path-right-next-to-the-road-you-stupid-cyclist/190080667052 – God only knows the depths of depravity that spawned the mind that felt compelled to create this rubbish. And Facebook is washing its hands in an admirable Pontius Pilate impression. “Freedom of speech”, “No violence against ... Read more