stevensreeves: 2013

Saturday, 26 October 2013

10 Drivers Every Cyclist Should Stay Well Away From

Car drivers and cyclists are like oil and water. They just don't mix, unfortunately. There's a battle of wills and words at least once during every ride.

Drivers seem to think cyclists should be somewhere else, or at the very least in the bike lane, or the gutter if there's no path. Anywhere they won't be in the way, frustrating the driver's need to be braking behind the car in front.

Cyclists should absolutely, definitely, not be riding two abreast, slowing down the cars behind, forcing a correct overtaking manoeuvre. That's a deliberate challenge to the motorists superior rights, to which they're entitled, by virtue of the road tax they pay.

From the other perspective, cyclists believe drivers should be patient and considerate of the cyclist's problems. The two wheeled, lycra clad athletes believe themselves entitled to ride on the roads, swerve to avoid the craters near the kerbside (left un-repaired by councils, because they don't bother car drivers), ride in groups two abreast so they can chat to colleagues, at speeds of 20 miles per hour, or less, to accommodate the weaker bikers.

Car drivers should absolutely, definitely, not pass by too close or too fast, honk their horns, pull out in front of, or across their path, act aggressively, or make up their own Highway Code.

Too often, the two sides only get to discuss their differences in the heat of a near miss incident, and the cyclist is always going to lose the argument.

That's why the No. 1 principle in anybody's Safe Cycling Strategy should be

'Assume every driver is a blind moron, until proven to be otherwise.'

Of course, generalising about people is a mistake. There are always exceptions which prove rules. For every ill-mannered, ignorant, aggressive driver there's a polite, considerate, generous and patient version.

But wouldn't it be nice if we could know which was which, and ride accordingly?

Personal experience suggests some drivers are more likely to be a danger than others. And they can be categorised by vehicle. You can know which drivers are more likely to be be 'Dickheads' by the car they drive.

Here's my list of the worst offenders:

White Vans.
Chelsea Tractors
BMW's
Audi's
Mini Coopers
Nissan Pickups
Old Corsas with big exhaust pipes
anything driven by a 'Blonde'
any car with a 'Baby on Board' sticker
any car with a Mountain Bike on the roof

Mind The Doors Ladies and Gentlemen

Illustration for door zone. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

One of the city cyclist's worst nightmares is an open door - on a car, as we ride by. Drivers and passengers almost never look to see who or what is passing before they open their door.

Any cyclist riding by at the time will get a very nasty surprise - at best being forced to swerve into the centre of the road causing all sorts of mayhem in the surrounding traffic. Even less attractive - they might just crash into both door and emerging person, causing serious injury to at least two people. But worst, they might get knocked off, into the middle of the road and under the wheels of a bus, or truck, or car which is passing the cyclist as the bike passes the car.

That's how the most serious injuries occur.

And it's the reason for one of cycling's most important safety strategies.

'Always give parked cars at least 3 feet of space as you ride by. If you can't allow that much room, because of oncoming or overtaking traffic, then stop, and wait until you can.'

It simply makes sense. Safe cyclists allow for stupid actions by motorists.

The article quoted below provides ammunition for any cyclist arguing with a driver about his right to open his door without worrying about you riding past.

It turns out opening a car door in a way which might cause injury is a specific breach of the law. Not the Highway Code, but The Road Vehicles (Construction and Use) Regulations 1986.

I wonder which other clauses in these regulations could help cyclists put ignorant drivers in their place?

Sarah Barth reports on road.cc

A woman has been fined more than £130 for opening her car door on a cyclist.

In a rare prosecution of this kind, Tracey McGarrigle, from Abington, Northampton, pleaded guilty to a charge of opening a vehicle door so as to injure a person.

Stephen Evans was about to go past her vehicle in July last year when he was ‘doored’, and Northampton Magistrates’ Court heard he suffered a chest injury in the incident, as he was unable to avoid the collision.

McGarrigle did not attend court, according to the Northampton Chronicle, but pleaded guilty to both the dooring charge and one other of holding a driving licence where an alteration to the name had not been notified.

She was ordered to pay a fine of £133 for each offence. She must also pay £35 costs and the victim surcharge of £20.

According to the The Road Vehicles (Construction and Use) Regulations 1986, “No person shall open, or cause or permit to be opened, any door of a vehicle on a road so as to injure or endanger any person.”

Under that law, a collision does not even need to take place for a charge to be brought, but in reality it is very rare for a prosecution to be made successfully.

In May, we reported how Kevin Fallon attempted to sue both the driver and the passenger of a car that doored him in the High Court for £200,000.

Mr Fallon, 48, was on his way to work in 2010 when a door opened on him in Dalston, East London.

Despite wearing a helmet, he suffered bleeding to the brain and says he still suffers headaches, mood changes, and low energy. The injury has also increased his risk of developing epilepsy.

And at the end of last year, we reported the case of a motorist from Surrey who was acquitted of manslaughter at the Old Bailey.

He was alleged to have opened his car door in the path of a cyclist, 25-year-old Sam Harding, without looking, causing him to be killed under the wheels of a bus behind him,

Kenan Aydogdu, aged 32 of Hindhead, Surrey had denied the charge of manslaughter at his trial, in which the prosecution maintained that visibility from the Audi car he had bought a month earlier had been reduced to 17 per cent of what it should have been after he applied tinting film to the windows.

In May this year, Barry Sheerman, MP for Huddersfield, asked the Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Transport Stephen Hammond, how many cyclist casualties were attributable to the opening of a vehicle door in the three years to 2011.

Mr Hammond replied that numbers had increased significantly over the period, from 468 in 2009 to 594 in 2011.

Of those casualties, the serious incidents had risen by 67 per cent.

Friday, 25 October 2013

Going Back to Abingdon

No matter where one moves to, there's never any going back. It can't make any sense. The reasons for leaving are still there.

That's always been my philosophy. It's worked out pretty well so far.

Well, we wouldn't know if going back would have been better than going somewhere else, would we. We've never done it.

Until now, that is.

Our 13 year holiday in the Highlands just had to come to end, sometime. The reasons for staying in Dornoch had gone away. It was too far - from too many people, from civilisation, from young people with a zest for living. It was too cold - at least a topcoat cooler as the locals would say. The scenery is heart stopping on the north east coast, and so is the weather when venturing outside on the wrong day.

So the decision to move was made, and returning to Abingdon was an option. It turned out to be the only realistic option.

We sold our cherished Links Villa to somebody who wanted to move in within 6 weeks.

So we drove to Abingdon, found a house we could live in, at a price we could stretch to, agreed to buy it, and returned to Scotland - all in less than a week.

The house we'd chosen was in a spectacular location - in the town centre, but on the river - 400 yards from the favourite supermarket, 800 yards from the favourite bike shop and banks and chemists and doctors and coffee shops and pubs, but secluded and private and personal and exclusive. There are no white vans parked around here overnight.

The story sounds sort of golden- told like that. But it wasn't.

The house had been on the market for months. Nobody would buy it. It was a mess.

Full of fitted furniture which had cost thousands, but left no living space for anybody normal.
Blue ceilings, red coving and red shutters on the first floor. Mustard ceilings on the second. All of the walls left with the original magnolia, now stained by pages of newspapers and posters once pasted there. Five plastic cherubs glued to the en-suite bathroom door. Office style light fittings everywhere. An entire wall of the kitchen covered by a mirror.

That's all fixed now. But it's taken three months.

Thursday, 24 October 2013

Zappi's Gran Fondo

What an experience this was - the Zappi's Gran Fondo sportive in August 2013.

These pictures show the 40+ members of Outdoor Traders Cycling Club waiting for the start of the 100+ miles trip around Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire

The head scarf, arm warmers and gilet suggest a cold, wet start - which it was.

Within a few minutes the rain started, making the first 50 miles a test of endurance and humour. Later the sun came out and the last three hours, we baked in hot sunshine.

In total, including the rides too, and from, the start, we travelled 125 miles.

Was this the beginning of the OTCC BadAss crew? Probably, but we didn't know it at the time.

Tuesday, 2 July 2013

Jackie and Gareth Same Jacket, Same Place January and July

Sunday, 31 March 2013

I Might Live Long Enough

Now 4 weeks without tobacco, 30 lbs lighter, alcohol down 80%, and riding 150 miles on the bike most weeks.

Doing everything the health police suggest!

Keep this up and I might live long enough to get Alzheimers.

That's life it seems.

Welcoming The Light

In the Highlands today we're welcoming the light. It's the start of British Summer Time.

We spend half the year wishing it would get light, and the other half wishing it would get dark.

In December and January daylight starts after 9.00am and finishes just after 3.00pm. But you wouldn't describe it as daylight. The sun, when we see it, never rises much above the horizon, and quite often the clouds hide it anyway.

After the Spring Equinox the change is dramatic, because we also switch from GMT to BST?

As if somebody turned on the light, the sun is now high in the sky, and its proper daylight from 7.00am till 9.00pm. By the end of of June it will barely get dark.

That's great news of course. Except for the next several months we'll be woken by the seagulls announcing the dawn at 2.00am.

But it won't last long.

By the end of August the dark will be descending again:.

Cycling Loch Brora

Easter Sunday 2013.

The road inland beside the river Brora and then beside Loch Brora is a fun ride in almost any conditions.

But when the sun shines the way it did today the views are very special.

The experience is enhanced by the lack of traffic and the (mostly) smooth clean road surface.

I don't know of a better location for a gentle Sunday morning saunter.

Wednesday, 20 March 2013

Guilt Free Smoking At Last

At last, there seems to be a credible alternative to smoking tobacco - the e-Cigarette. Something which presses the same buttons, but completely guilt free.

Unfortunately, accessing and adopting this alternative isn't as simple as it needs to be.

There's no advertising worth talking about, no promotional material in shops, and it seems to be much more expensive than it should be.

Wherever you find this technology, its always a limited range, offered where you'd least expect to find it, and sales staff don't have the knowledge or skills in the topic customers might benefit from.

Quite why this should be the case escapes me. Surely the market for this stuff is going to be massive, and massively profitable. Why retailers aren't doing everything they can to switch customers over from the real thing is bewildering.

Everybody knows smoking tobacco is bad news for them and others around them. Pressures to not smoke are irresistible. The price of smokes is penal.
And yet around 20% of adult populations in the developed world still do it.

Anybody interested in finding out a little about this stuff before taking the plunge might benefit from our own experience, and conclusions.

The Experience

First, and most importantly, this stuff works. It isn't the same as tobacco wrapped in a paper tube, but it's close. In some cases very close. Close enough to offer a genuine alternative.

The tactile experience, putting a tube in your mouth and sucking, inhaling and exhaling, gets close enough to satisfy the most 'oral' requirements. As you suck the tube sounds as if it's burning. It gets hot, and the tip glows.

The e-Cig produces a harmless vapour, laced with nicotine to be inhaled and exhaled. That takes care of the nicotine craving. The vapour even tastes, more or less, like tobacco smoke.

And it's social too. You can have a vape together in exactly they same way as you can smoke together.

The Technology

A Lithium battery in the white bit heat the air, glows the tip while the cartomiser releases the taste and the nicotine into the stream of heated air from the white bit.

Disposable e-Cigs come in one piece with both battery and cartomiser integrated. With rechargeable e-Cigs the white bit (battery) and tip (cartomiser) screw together. The battery is recharged via a standard USB connector. When the glow in the tip blinks its time to recharge, which takes a couple of hours. The cartomiser is simply replaced when depleted.

The Products

We've tried a range of e-Cigs which we bought

In our local pharmacy
At the Tesco petrol station
In the Tesco store
A display unit at the Shopping Mall.

and included these brands

10 Motives
Vapourlites
Socialites
AAAecig

The first three we've tried in both disposable and rechargeable versions.

The Verdict

10 Motives comes out on top. It's easier to find in Tesco Petrol Station, the refills are cheaper, it's available in regular tobacco and menthol, and it offers a more consistent smoking alternative experience.

The others all work. Try them all and make your own choice.

The Rich and On Benefits Insult to Pensioners

The Channel 4 programme - Rich and On Benefits - presented by 67 year old Michael Buerk reported how British pensioners are surviving the squeeze on welfare largely unscathed.

There's obviously a constituency where this message plays well - those Gen X and Gen Y conditioned by the New Labour bribes to want everything now.

But it misinforms and misleads. And it does diservice to the segment of society which over 40 years has gone without so as to look after itself when times got tough. And by the way, that cohort built a better world for all those who followed.

Successive governments, but particularly that bastard Brown, have subverted our investment in tomorrow by quietly taxing our savings, then taxing our income, then driving up energy costs and driving down investment returns. The only pensioners feeling good these days are the ones with public sector pensions.

Buerk focused on a small number of pensioners and pointed to the £250 (per household) winter fuel allowance, free bus passes and free prescriptions. Just quite how he thinks that compares with all the benefits claimed by the rest of the population wasn't clear, because he chose not to talk about all those on Job Seekers Allowance, Disability Benefit, Housing Benefit, Child Benefit, Child Care Allowance, Income Tax Credits.

That would have contradicted his message of course.

The truth is the State Pension in the UK is by far the lowest in the developed world and only supplemented by other benefits after means testing.

Retirement plans and life endowment schemes we've invested in for 40 years are delivering fractions of what was planned, as a result of Brown's policies.

The single biggest cost for pensioners is energy, which takes a much bigger share of income than for any other group, and that's increasing at more than 10% each year. Another direct result of Brown's policies. For most pensioners energy costs 25% of their total income. Households receiving other benefits are accorded special social pricing, but that doesn't apply to pensioners of course.

The truth is there are some pensioners who are rich and receiving benefits, but only in a tiny amount. Whereas there are millions of pensioners going without food and heating, marginalised by public services, and now being told they're parasites responsible for younger generations getting less than they want.

Meanwhile those same pensioners are still paying taxes to fund all the other benefits paid out by our warped welfare system. Their income is still subject to income tax. Everything they buy (except food) includes Value Added Tax. They also pay Fuel Duty and Road Tax for their cars.

And that's after 40 years of paying for the younger generations.

Tuesday, 19 March 2013

Brown Balls Budget Bollocks

It's budget day tomorrow. If the weather were better this would be a good time to go for a 100 mile ride, but it won't be, so I won't. I'll spend my day shouting at the TV instead, and at all the mealy mouthed media pundits pontificating about Tory cruelty toward the poor. Worst will be Balls doing his 'told you so' act, smug as a Cheshire Cat.

Osborne may not be the most empathetic of politicians, but then his job isn't a bundle of fun. He has to find ways of reviving the British economy after Balls and his mental mentor Brown did everything they could to destroy it. And he doesn't have any tools to do it with. New Labour sold all the tools, and spent the money.

When Osborne tells Parliament tomorrow that he's struggling to kick start the economy on fresh air, whilst having to tolerate universal, unfair and unearned condemnation for cutting welfare benefits, - he's right.

No wonder he's having trouble finding his sense of humour, when the media wheels out the Labour spendthrifts who want to fill in the hole in our finances, by digging a deeper hole.

You'll forgive me for the approximate figures I'm sure, so here's what the Brown Balls Miliband intellectual axis did, in round numbers.

When New Labour took over from the Conservatives in 1997, the public sector deficit was £12 billion. Brown had to commit to Tory spending plans in order to get elected so he did. But he broke even his own rules at every turn and, as soon Blair looked like retiring, opened the flood gates, taxing and borrowing and spending for all he was worth.

By the time the country threw them out in 2010, Labour had ballooned the public sector deficit to £160 billion. Annual interest on the £ 1 trillion debt amounted to £50 billion - more than 4 times the entire deficit they inherited.

Everybody with a credit card will understand how easy it is to spend today and worry about paying the bill later, and how difficult will be that paying when the bailiff calls. Unfortunately Brown Balls Miliband didn't, and still don't. For them the answer is borrow more, and then do it again, and again.

They dug a hole equivalent to £40,000 for each and every household in the country, with never a thought about how to pay it back.

Bad as that is, it isn't the biggest problem they bequeathed us. The benefits culture is.

New Labour created a paradigm in which everybody expected to benefit from government generosity. Now all of those something for nothings are squealing like stuck pigs as Osborne attempts to reset expectations. Led by the BBC, and the Unions, and the Charities, and the schools, and the NHS, of course.

This is the poison pill Brown Balls Miliband left for the coalition, and Balls wants the government to swallow it. Spend more to buy popularity and votes, and worry about the consequences later - just like New Labour did.

If that happens, Brown Balls won't be the only incompetents in politics.

Cycling Computers User Review

How useful is a cycling computer? And why buy something specific when today's phones offer multiple apps to do the same job? If there's a reason to have a discreet device how much should you spend, and on which product?

That's the journey I've been traveling for the last 18 months. Here's the story.

My rediscovery of cycling at the age of 61 is chronicled elsewhere. It wasn't a smooth process, and it wasn't inexpensive. But one thing I didn't spend money on was a cycling computer.

To start with, all of that data about dates, distances, speeds, elevations, routes, calories etc. wasn't relevant. Trying to stay on the bike and out from under the wheels of lunatic car, van and lorry drivers was challenging enough. That old saying about never forgetting how to ride a bike turned out the be true, but only just. It was intimidating, embarrassing, and quite frightening, to start with.

Of course that didn't last long. How far and how fast soon became important dimensions in each ride. But as for buying a computer? That wasn't going to happen.

My first computer was the Map My Ride app running on my Nexus phone. It worked well enough and posted data to home site for analysis and sharing. So far, so good, apart from the battery consumption. Using the phone for all this clever stuff feels really smart, until the battery runs out and that emergency phone call is impossible.

The transition to Google Tracks seemed the perfect answer. It does most of what Map My Ride does, but more on the server and less on the phone itself. But that GPS monitoring still eats battery. Even Google admits there's a maximum of 5 hours on a full charge, and that drops awfully quickly when anything else is going on.

But the biggest drawback with both apps is there's no ride information while in progress. Of course you could do that with a combination of mounts and cases, if you trusted them. But not me.

Next up was the Strada. I didn't buy it. The computer was already fitted to the Ghost.

The Strada must be simultaneously the most simple and also the most complicated cycle computer. The set up instructions are difficult to follow. The control buttons a long way from intuitive. Installing the correctly sensors is dependent on millimeters in positioning. They easily move out of synch and the whole thing stops working. There's no app for collecting, storing, analysing the ride data.

But it does a brilliant job communicating real time ride data to the rider. As long as it works that is. Mine stopped, and replacement batteries didn't fix the problem.

It turned out, for me, that the real time ride data added a lot of interest and fun to my cycling. Having an app to store and analyse the data was also something I wanted. And I wanted something which would work whichever steed was my choice of the day. Neither MapMyRide nor Tracks nor the Strada met the requirement.

Time to buy a proper cycling computer. It had to be a Garmin (not sure why) but which one? And how much?

The user reviews at Amazon were helpful, and concerning. A couple of guys reported their Garmins had given up the ghost after rides in the rain. Other than that they liked the functionality. And later it turned out Garmin had addressed the problem with a new feature.

So it would be a Garmin - but the 500 or the 800 or wait for the new 510 or 810. The price range was all the way from £160 to £550.

The difference between the 500 and 800 was downloadable (and expensive) maps and turn by turn navigation. Other than that the two collected the same data, and both worked with the Garmin Connect on-line app. The 510 and 810 were pretty much the same, except both will transmit data to a smart phone and beyond. The company's promotion video is enticing, but not enough to persuade me to spend £400 unnecessarily, so the new models didn't make the cut.

On reflection the turn by turn navigation wasn't important. It might well be for riding in cities, which I don't do, but not a lot of use on preplanned country routes, which I do. As for the maps? Well I'd always have Google Maps with GPS location in my pocket in the unlikely event I got lost.

That left me with a simple decision. The Garmin 500 would do everything I wanted, at the lowest cost.

So I bought it, and it does.

Monday, 18 March 2013

Why and How 60 is the new 40

Today's pensioners aren't the has been hanger ons some young people suggest.

They're baby boomers who've changed the world, making it a better place for those who follow on behind, and they're still doing it.

Fraser Nelson explains how.

Don’t attack Britain’s oldies – they keep the economy going - Telegraph:

When I worked at The Scotsman, news editors were always looking out for stories portraying Glasgow in a positive light. The newspaper was anxious to overcome perceptions of an Edinburgh bias, so there was great excitement at conference one morning over a study hailing Glasgow as the “youngest city in Europe”, with an average age of 36. Much discussion followed about the city becoming a cosmopolitan magnet for the young, until a Glaswegian colleague spoiled it all by stating the obvious. “They’re young,” he said, “because when they’re not, they’re deid.”

It was an inarguable point. To be a “young” city, or country, is no boast: it tends to mean poverty, sickness and low life expectancy. But the converse is also true: as a country becomes more prosperous, its people become healthier and live longer. To note that Britain is “rapidly ageing” is another way of saying that things are getting rapidly better. The air is cleaner, the roads are safer, our hospitals (for all their problems) can equip us with new knees or hips to keep us moving and working. The political panic about the “ageing population” is the equivalent of saying: Oh my God, we’re all going to live.

This, at least, was the reaction to the House of Lords report yesterday peering a little into the future. It found that, by 2030, the number of over-65s will rise by a third. The new Royal baby can expect to be writing a letter to himself (or herself) in July 2113, because half of children born nowadays will likely become centenarians. Cities such as Glasgow have their own problems, but most Brits will live longer than ever. That ought to be great news – in Westminster, though, it is seen as a “demographic timebomb”, and an impending avalanche of dribbling NHS customers.

The truth is obvious to anyone who has done any shopping and looked at the age of the cashier: the over-65s are not just fitter than ever, but working harder than ever and paying more tax than ever. Ten years ago, 500,000 pensioners were working, and by the peak of the boom that number was 700,000. But it didn’t stop there. Throughout the great recession, Britain’s grey workforce have been working harder than ever. Almost a million of them are now employed – behind checkout desks, at the office or even setting up companies. The proportion of elderly people in work has doubled over a decade.

Neuroscience has now proved what many long suspected: that the brain accumulates wisdom and older workers tend to make better decisions. In the old days, health could be a problem. Now, medicine has advanced to the extent that a 76-year-old with one functioning lung can be elected pope and 85-year-old pontiffs resign because death is too distant a prospect.

The nature of work is changing, too: the Church of England will next week enthrone a former oilman for whom religion is a second career. As retirement becomes a process, rather than an event, pensioners find themselves with more energy than ever.

There are two ways of seeing this. One is to salute the industriousness of those whose taxes built the welfare state, and still choose to keep at it. The other is to imagine that the “baby boomers” are now stealing the jobs of the young and burdening the NHS, having grown undeservedly rich from the property boom. In recent years, this latter argument has morphed into the “intergenerational fairness” agenda, which is worth taking seriously, because it is one of the more potent and sinister ideas of recent years.

The complaint of the generational jihadists is based on a valid point: that the housing boom of the past two decades has left pensioners living in properties worth mind-boggling amounts. Now and again, there is talk (even among young Tory strategists) about taxing the “unearned” income of the old and passing the cash to the young to address the elderly’s “unearned” boost in assets. The baby-boom generation have anyway benefited from free university education, runs the argument, and their legacy has been a massive debt that will take decades to repay. So it’s time for the taxman to impose a little “fairness”, perhaps with a wealth tax.

There is, of course, no moral justification for penalising those who have saved just because they happened to do so before an asset boom (induced, incidentally, by an easy-money policy that continues to this day). Nor would it be reasonable to begrudge NHS care, no matter how expensive, to those who built this country and, in many cases, defended it.

But if the Government is wrong to regard pensioners as charity cases, it is also wrong to dispense so much charity that it cannot really afford. The idea of free bus passes, for example, is hard to defend in the age of cuts. A minister in the last government told me that he started work on abolishing them, and envisaged £1 billion of savings. He was amazed to see David Cameron pledge to keep them – the first of many pledges to ring-fence benefits for the elderly, who were by no means demanding the concessions. The irony of last year’s Budget was that George Osborne was lambasted for a granny tax while giving the largest ever increase to the state pension. “We should have been telling pensioners: 'You’ve never had it so good’,” one Cabinet minister tells me.

The generational jihadists say that this generosity is because the baby boomers are now the most powerful lobby group in the country. But the truth is rather more mundane. Politicians, of all persuasions, seem to view pensioners with a mixture of fear and condescension – imagining that they do little else but stay at home, count their benefits and vote for the party that offers the most. A fear of the grey vote led the Coalition to make the most expensive ring-fence pledge of all: a “triple lock” on pensions, which have been rising far faster than salaries. This focuses pain on working-age benefits and, of course, students.

There is no oldies’ union that demanded a triple lock on pensions. It wasn’t in the Tory manifesto. It emerged because politicians panicked, and imagined that pensioners want greater welfare. And this sprang from a patronising and out-of-date view about how to please the over-65s – who, incidentally, account for a fifth of the increase in employment under Cameron.

Michael Caine, who turned 80 yesterday, spoke for many when he wondered a few years ago if the old were now carrying the young. “We’ve got 3.5 million layabouts on benefits and I’m 76, getting up at 6am to go to work to keep them,” he complained when filming Harry Brown. “Let’s get everybody back to work so we can save a couple of billion and cut tax, not keep sticking it up.”

The idea of a clash of generations is based on a false idea: that the working-age must support the pension-age. Each day, a growing army of healthy (and much sought-after) British workers over 65 is disproving this notion. The balance between tax and welfare will have to change, but the shifting demographics make odd grounds for panic. Britons are leading longer, healthier and more prosperous lives than ever before – as political problems go, it’s a good one to have.

My Favourite Bike

If I'd known about Steven's bikes I might have bought one of those, but unfortunately that wasn't the case.

Wouldn't it be cool to have a bike with your own name printed on the frame, but as it is I have to be satisfied with my ghost, instead.

Here's my favourite bike (for now at least) nestling snuggly in my office safe from the winter weather.

It's a Ghost (made in Germany) Race Lector Pro full carbon race bike with Ultegra group set.

Somebody made me an offer I couldn't refuse. This bike had been ridden for only 70 miles, bought for a ride with Lance Armstrong and sold on in favour of mountain bikes. I bought it for less than half the retail price :-)

Now I just have to learn to ride it properly.

When my favourite cyclist visits, he gets to ride my favourite bike of course.

Here's @twowheelpursuit with my Ghost on the bridge at Loch Fleet

And here at Loch Buidhe. It's the first week in January, and horribly cold with ice on the roads and the occasional snow storm to keep us looking at the sky for an early warning of unpleasantness to come.

A Simply Gorgeous Place to Ride

What a gorgeous spot, to ride a bike, or do anything else for that matter.

These are views across Loch Fleet one January morning in the Scottish Highlands. It isn't always like this, of course, but on the days when the weather is kind the views are simply stunning.

No wonder this is my favourite place to make the world go around, one push on a pedal at a time.

Here's the map

Cycling In The Highlands Xmas 2012

@twowheelpursuit aka Gareth visited over Xmas 2012 and New Year 2013. We spent a lot of time on bikes. Most of the time it was 3 degrees C feeling like -2C, but the settings in the Scottish Highlands were spectacular, and almost as good as the company.

Friday, 15 March 2013

Cycling in the Highlands

The marketing guys at Rapha do an outstanding job, which I guess helps to support the company's outrageous prices. This film is interesting from a couple of perspectives

It does a great job of positioning the company as a partner in exploring the extremes of cycling - location and weather. In this case the location is the Assynt Peninsular in the North West of Sutherland in the Scottish Highlands.
Riding a bike in the Highlands can be an exciting experience. We know, because we ride on roads like this all of the time. Unfortunately, in weather like this most of the time too. This shows other people get excited at the prospect of doing what we do every day.