January 24th – Despite the gradual shift to white LED lights, the colour of the urban night here is still sodium orange. It makes for interesting, haunted townscapes and renders corners of the town eerie in the monochromic light.

Here at Holland Park, normally a busy, bright, pleasant place, it looked empty, haunted and unsettling. It’s fascinating once you get used to it.

January 24th – A lost day to technical battles with the computer and other silliness. I got out late and shot over to Chasewater in the dark hoping for a decent moonlit night – but it wasn’t to be. All I got was light pollution, but it made for an interesting shot, anyway.

The lake is refilling well now, and I was intrigued to note all the separate swan families and their cygnets now dwelling on the lake had congregated together by the dam bridge. Not sure why.

Safety in numbers, perhaps? But from what?

January 23rd – A warning to fellow cyclists and walkers on the canal near Clayhanger Bridge in Brownhills. Some kind of work has been undertaken on the sluice set into the towpath, and the sheet steel covers now are proud with a void around the edges.

It’s a real trip hazard, and I can’t imagine what the people who left it like this were thinking.

Take care.

January 23rd – on a grey, murky afternoon I cycled down the canal from Aldridge. I’d headed for the canal as I often do to escape the traffic, which seemed overly aggressive as I’d hit it during the school run.

Passing the Weinerburger Brick marl pit at Stubbers Green, I took a look into the void through the fence. It doesn’t get deeper, but it grows steadily, by gradual removal, dumper after dumper of red marl heading to the moulds and then the kilns.

That’s a lot of bricks come out of there. And what a huge scar on the landscape. But the one ever-present thing here – the familiar, warm smell of bricks being fired – is, like Burntwood’s permanent smell of vinegar – one of the ways I know I’m near home.

January 22nd – I returned from Walsall early evening, in a better frame of mind. It was cold, for sure, but it wasn’t a bad night overall. Station Street and it’s taxi rank always looks good at night, with surprisingly good architecture if one looks closely. 

The Square outside the crossing at St Paul’s is also good in the dark, the lights of the bank and The Imperial Pub look welcoming and warm.

January 22nd – I passed through New Street mid-afternoon. The whole place was grey. It’s still chaos, and has been clearly designed with anything but the passengers in mind.

I stood waiting for a late train. Ever signal I could see was red. Sometimes, commuting feels like this. 

To quote Dexy’s, tell me when my red light turns green.

January 21st – another one for Bob’s big book of bicycle breakdowns. These are a pair of Shimano SPD XTR clipless pedals – the mechanism on them engages with a metal piece on the bottom of special shoes that means I ‘click in’ to them and can pull the pedals up as well as push down. 

These are considered a fairly high-end pedal, and have a platform – the black grooved frame – around them for additional foot support. They cost about £70 a pair, I guess and are generally good quality. This pair had done about 10,000 miles.

They are built around a cylindrical bearing held together internally by two nuts – an adjuster and a locknut, and this keeps everything adjusted and spinning without play.

Except when the threaded part snaps from fatigue, the bearing falls apart and the pedal tries to come off the spindle. The one on the right is normal, the one on the left, fatally broken.

Thankfully, it wasn’t far from home and was still ridable with care. That’s an unwanted expense in January…

January 21st – On a grey, depressing day, I stopped to check out the new magic bicycle symbols added to the footpath in Pleck just by the motorway Bridge on the Darlaston Road. I guess this is part of the commitment to safer cycling routes with the road improvement scheme here. It’s dismal.

A bit of tactile paving, blacktop some verges and a splurge of magic paint. A grim, shared use path hazardous for pedestrians and cyclists, along the front of a factory gates with little visibility.

The people who design and implement this rubbish aren’t cyclists. They aren’t thinking about cyclists. They’re ticking boxes on a form to satisfy a requirement.

This is why we can’t have nice things, people…

January 20th – I’ve been hoping for a decent fall of snow – not just to try my tyres out properly, but just for the novelty of it. Sadly, it seems I’m not in luck just yet.

As I left work, it was snowing quite well; the rate ebbed and flowed during the ride, and conditions got steadily harsher as I neared the high ground on my way back to Brownhills. 

On the canal, I realised the snow was settling well – not only on the path, but on the ice surface of the frozen water. 

Sadly, by the time I got in, the snow had eased off, and didn’t amount to anything much that evening.

Oh well, better luck next time.

January 20th – Another gorgeous but brittle cold morning commute. The ice and a very, very light dusting of snow were evident on the canal as I cycled up to Bentley Bridge, but the canal itself looked superb in the hazy sun.

Further on, the mystic curved bridge at Victoria Park looked stunning, too. In recent winters, we haven’t had many days like this. This year is really making up for the deficit.