Tag: time

#365daysofbiking Letting the light back in

March 31st – Well, here in the UK is the start of British Summer Time, for me the real start of spring.

I hate the clocks going back in autumn and the self-imposed hour advance in darkness. It’s a silly, pointless habit we started decades hence and have never had the balls to stop.

As I crossed the M6 Toll motorway near Hammerwich at well past 7pm, the sun was setting dramatically behind the forest of streetlights and made a movie scene of the traffic upon it.

I’m so pleased to have the light back in my life.

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#365daysofbiking Looks like I made it

March 20th – In the backlanes between Shenstone and Stonnall, on the way home from the station late on a sunny, warm spring afternoon.

Feeling the sun on my face, looking at the daffodils and green, and smelling the rising of the sap and the scents of earth and fresh growth, I realise I survived another long winter, and there’s nowhere I’d rather be than here, right now.

The winter hasn’t been a harsh one. But my goodness I found it tough.

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#365daysofbiking The world spins

March 18th – I keep banging on about equinoxes, and like the idiot I surely am, I thought I knew about them. It turns out like many things I think I understand, there’s so much more to it than I knew.

Today, the length of the daylight was near as damn it 12 hours: the sunrise was 6:16am and sunset a 6:15pm. Tomorrow, the daylight will be longer than night.

But this is not the equinox (when the sun crosses the equator). This is the equilux – equal light. Although, it’s not really equal at all: A number of factors including how we might use the three definitions of twilight complicate this.

I looked it up tonight and was fascinated. The equinox actually happens on March 20th this year – that’s Wednesday.

You can find out all the gory detail of how this stuff works at this excellent blog post here – the comments are worth a read too if you have time to spare.

You learn something new every day.

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#365daysofbiking A lifetime away

March 17th – On Lea Lane, between Newton and Admaston, a nice country house. Rambling, large, with half its garden oddly over the road, it’s a curious building.

What casual passers-by don’t realise in many cases is that this house, up until very, very recently, was actually a pub called The Wicket. In the middle of nowhere, I guess the pub had a hard time surviving, and closed like so many others. And now, you’d never know.

I went in there once. It was nice enough, but quiet as you’d expect. It seems odd now that I sat with a Guinness in what is now a total stranger’s lounge.

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#365daysofbiking Approaching equity

March 7th – Things that happen while you’re not looking.

The darkness is receding fast now – we’re gaining around fifteen minutes more light in the evening now every week, and soon it will be the spring equinox, when the daylight and night time are the same length – 12 hours.

The concept of the equinox fascinates me, and I don’t really know why. But within a fortnight the sunrise and sunset will occur at the same numerical time, but AM and PM.

And after the equinox comes the start of British Summer Time – this year cruelly not until the 31st March.

Still, it’s almost over.

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#365daysofbiking Crossover point

 

February 11th – Riding back from Shenstone Station in the region of 6pm. Still just about light at Fighting Cocks.

this time next week it will be merely twilight here at this time.

On the darkening lane, the trees and farm buildings silhouetted agains the western sky, this was beautiful, but chilly. I loved the effect of the passing cars.

Slowly but surely the daylight’s winning the battle.

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#365daysofbiking Gaining fast

January 16th – Although, on the way home I stopped to take a call and noticed that sunset was now over thirty minutes later the at Christmas.

Soon, it will be 5pm. And I will start to see fingers of the day creep into the skies of my journeys home.

Can’t come soon enough…

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#365daysofbiking Getting better every day

January 2nd – Back on the 21st December my heart was lifted, as it always its, by the thought that we’d had the shortest day of the year, and that now the sunset would get later and later and the night and darkness would retreat for another year.

Well, not two weeks later, and the sunset is already 10 minutes later than it was on that day.

Ten minutes may not seem much, but it’s significant. Although the timetable to which the day lengthens is fixed, the rapidity of the change is always impressive to me and the retreat of night, being loosely sinusoidal, accelerates as we escape winter.

That six hundred seconds of gleaned light mean that on a clear day, it’s not really dark until well after 4:30pm. Soon light will leak into my evening commutes, and all will be well again.

I so hate the darkness.

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#365daysofbiking Time is


January 2nd – I’ll start this with a note about this journal. Older readers will know I started this journal on 1st April 2011after being encouraged to do 30daysofbiking by ace cyclist and top Dutchperson Renee Van Baar. From the moment I agreed, the die was cast.

Sadly, I was very ill with food poisoning the following New Year,  so never rode a bike on 31st December 2011, and 1st January 2012. But I steeled my resolve, and I carried on, and I never missed a day since. Every day from 2nd January 2012 I have got on a bike and ridden somewhere.

From 100 mile plus rides in one day, to trundles to the shops, I have recorded my daily life as a cyclist, in all its ups and downs. That’s 7 years, or 2557 successive days (including 2 leap years), and about 63,000 miles.

I adore keeping this journal – both writing it, and creating the photos.I welcome feedback. If you have something to say – that I should stop, continue or do something differently, please get in touch by commenting or mailing me – BrownhillsBob at Googlemail dot com.

Today was my first day back at work and on my way back, I headed up the canal to Newtown. I had forgotten to charge my camera, and it was flat, so these are actually photos from an iPhone, which just shows how much phone camera technology has advanced.

When I started this journal in 2011, my phone would not have been remotely capable of images of this quality.

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#365daysofbiking Grimness:

November 29th – Although we’re approaching the shortest day – when the advance of night is defeated and light gradually seeps back into my life – this next three weeks are the hardest commutes of the year. 

This evening I noted from the bike computer that sunset is now before 4pm for the first time this winter, and it will creep almost ten minutes earlier as the weeks wear on.

The commutes will be heavy with seasonal traffic, there will be grim weather and the trains when used will be a mess.

It’s the same every year and I hate it.