things i am bored of
- helmet debates
- cyclists v cars arguments
things I am not bored of:
- chocolate
- taking pictures of cycle lanes
places I have been
- cambridge (full of tourists who STOP IN THE MIDDLE OF THE ROAD HELLO I AM TRYING TO GET PAST *BRINGBRING* gee I might I as well put my bell to permanent ‘on’ but then who would listen to it get me a super loud hooter already)
- lincoln (same as ever it is on a hill)
- france via portsmouth
Portsmouth was like, well, lots of places with cycle networks. It seems the cycle network between, um, fareham and the portsmouth ferry terminal is actually pretty good. But they don’t sign it properly. The A27 wasn’t too bad but it does go up and down a lot. I had to go down that way again recently and it is far, far, less pleasant at 7pm than it was at 10pm. They seem to be building more cycle path on it but the trouble with off-road cycle paths is things like overhanging nettles…
France, France was splendid. Maybe my French google skills are a bit lacking because I can’t find anything on the internet about the beautifully marked cycle routes I followed round Le Havre - mostly on road, but the roads had signs everywhere. Presence de cyclists! Partageons la route! Disembodied bicycles!
A cycle race overtook me. I tried to catch up with it but I was knackered and failed. Boo. I’m thinking of Turbo-charging my bike (so I can get more miles-per-gallon-of-chocolate).
There was a tunnel thing in Le Havre - under part of the town centre. It had a special lane for cyclists so I went in. Whoooosh.
These guys cheated 
Summer, people, summer. There’s all this fuel stuff and maybe Britain is getting back its bikes stuff and it’s slow but - my dad has sold one of his cars and is cycling more and maybe in twenty years the roads will look quite different.
I read this in “Around the World on a Penny-Farthing”:
…my bicycle causes the first runaway since the trifling affair at Lembach, Austria. A brown-faced peasant woman and a little girl, driving a small, shaggy pony harnessed to a basket-work, four-wheeled vehicle, are approaching; their humble-looking steed betrays no evidence of restiveness until just as I am turning out to pass him, when, without warning,he gives a swift, sudden bound to the right, nearly upsetting the vehicle, and without more ado bolts odwn a considerable embankment and goes helter-skelter across a field of standing grain.
The old lady pluckily hangs on to the reins, and finally succeeds in bringing the runaway around into the road again without damaging anything save the corn. It might have ended much less satisfactorily, however, and the incident illustrates one possible source of trouble to a ‘cycler travelling alone through countries where the people neither understand, nor can be expected to understand, a wheelman’s position”…
plus ca change…