Tag: 365daysofbiking

May 22nd – Leicester again. I love Leicester, it’s bustle and cosmopolitain air. One of my favourite aspects of this interesting and engaging city is the station – not huge, but a good, airy atmosphere, comfortable and excellent facilities. Every time I come here, the amount of cycle parking has increased – there are now 10 of the bike parking carousels here, and still cyclists are having to use the railings. 

This excellent provision – you’d not see anything like it in Birmingham, for instance – is reflected on the streets, where I see far more cyclists, despite Leicester Council not seeming to keen on cycle lanes or silly coloured tarmac. 

It just goes to show, build it, and they’ll come. 

May 21st – There’s a crucial bit of biking equipment I couldn’t live without – clipless pedals. Pedalling long distances on flat pedals is horrid, and your feet can slip in traffic. The old fashioned alternative was toe clips and straps, which were OK, but nasty if you had to get free quickly. In the 1980s, as a solution, Shimano developed the SPD clipless system.

I have sevral pairs of SPD compatible shoes, which have screw mountings on the sole under the ball of the foot. There is a metal plate embedded above which floats for adjustment. On to the plate is screwed a ‘cleat’ – a metal key block that engages smoothly with a spring-latched mechanism in the pedal. This provides a positive, hassle-free engagement which is predictable, adjustable and secure, yet twists free instantly when required. They ensure your feet are always in the best, comfiest position, and the pedals are double-sided, so you never have to think about clipping in. You just do it without looking.

Clipless allow you to ‘pull up’ with one foot while pushing down with the other, and even pedal one-legged while scooting through traffic. This small, drop-forged block of steel – about half the size and thickness of a small box of matches – transmits all your pedalling force in an absolutely tiny contact area, yet fits flush in your shoes in such a way that you can walk all day in a pair of SPD shoes and never feel the cleat.

The intense concentration of force in one small component and two 5mm screws is so great that it wears quite quickly. Tonight, my cleats had developed such a sloppy fit, I couldn’t put up with them anymore. After 5,000 miles, it was time for a change.

It’s easy to do; cleats come with pedals, or can be brought separately. You usually have to drill out one or two of the old screws due to the heads being fouled, but once you get them out, the cleat leaves an impression in the shoe that the new one locates in. A blob of grease on the screw threads, and crank them up. 

The fit is so good, it’s like riding a new bike.

My compliments to the inventors – these really are a great invention.

May 21st – It really is about the flowers right now. On a weary homeward commute I noticed the honeysuckle at the Black Cock Bridge in Walsall Wood was coming into bloom – and the buds are prolific and dense this year. The unsung heroes of the scrub and verge, the buttercups, are also prolific on the canal banks, commons and heaths, providing welcome food for bugs and bees.

At the moment, every journey is rewarded with new flowers to see!

May 20th – In Leicester today, I noticed this graffiti on a railway bridge. The original text says ‘Small minded vandals’ and some wag has added underneath ‘wearing socks with sandals’ – top marks though for the Anti-Nazi League stencil, and the remarkably detailed stencil of a woman on the capstones.

Graffiti can be a pain in the arse, but I do appreciate it if it’s creative, witty or makes its environment more interesting.

May 19th – In Telford for the day, and what a day it was. Bright, warm and sunny, the flowers and greenery have come on here apace. I noticed my first ox eye daisies of the year, replete with spiders, and cotoneaster in flower, still with some berries from last year. I’ve never seen that before – the fruit is beloved by blackbirds and other songbirds, but the shrub is so prolific here, and the crop so abundant last year that I just don’t think there were enough birds to eat it all.

It makes an attractive display, for sure…

May 18th – Since the sad passing of young cancer patient and charity fundraiser extraordinaire Stephen Sutton, his home town of Burntwood has been spontaneously bedecked in yellow ribbons as a token of mourning and support. I’ve never seen anything quite like this – at least since Diana died – and the floral tributes and book of remembrance at Chase Terrace School, where he was a pupil, are sombre and touching.

It’s worth taking a trip up there to see this, as you can’t capture it in photos. It’s like air air of sadness is perched upon the town. And one of pride, too.

It’s interesting to see how the public have taken to this story, and constructed narratives around it. Propelled by social media and human goodwill, it has been an astounding thing to witness.

You can donate to the Stephen Sutton appeal here.

Cancer is a filthy thing, to be sure. 

May 18th – I like it when things here resolve themselves and intertwine. Way back on April 28th, I spotted an unusual, willow-like tree growing by the canal I’d not noticed before. What snagged my attention were the curious, spiky, flower-like growths, and I asked at the time what the tree might be, and were the ‘blooms’ flower or seed?

The wonderful fellow cyclist Wilymouse kindly pointed out on the original post that the tree was Grey Sallow (or Grey Willow). I learned from a link supplied that what I had seen was the female flower of this tree; the male being the familiar pussy willows.

Check out Grey Sallow here, and the images down the right hand side of the page.

Moving on, Rose Maria Burnell sent me some photos this weekend of seed fluff blowing around Chasewater. Rose assumed it was from dandelions, and I think a lot of it is… but also, it’s coming in huge amounts from grey sallow trees – the spiny flowers I photographed have seeded and are shedding wind-born material into the air, and coating everything with fluff. 

The trees seem particularly dense around Fly Creek and the dam, although they’re all over Chasewater, and the atmosphere is thick with little seeds. At the creek by the boardwalk crossing, the water is white with seed fluff. It’s really quite eerie.

So, mystery solved – thanks to Wilymouse and Rose for the input!

May 17th – I think this is a first for 365 days of biking. This is a photo of something that is no longer here.

This is a cellphone mast, located just off the A38 at Efflinch, near Barton under Needwood. Up until recently, there was a another transmission mast here with a very specific function: it broadcast a non-directional radio beacon for aircraft. The transmission was continual, incessant and could be picked up locally at the very end of the longwave band on a normal transistor radio; it broadcast the morse tones for the letters ‘LIC’ (for Lichfield) continuously in a mysterious, musical tone. I was transfixed by it as a kid, because I had no idea what it was.

If anyone back then had shown me a numbers station, my wee head would have exploded.

The station stopped transmitting in 2010 when the beacon was decommissioned, but I think the mast has only recently gone – I used to watch for it coming home along the A38. Cycling this way, often at dusk, I knew that from here, I was only an hour away from home.

When the relentless, inscrutable morse died, so did a tiny bit of my childhood.

Find out about the end of the LIC NDB beacon here.