January 19th – On the way back, I passed Chesterfield Lodge on Raikes Lane. It always looks so peaceful and welcoming at night, but on Victorian maps, this was marked as a workhouse. Whether it was this actual building or a predecessor, I never quite worked out. I’m still hoping Kate Cardigan of Lichfield Lore might weave some of her investigative magic here and find out the truth one day.
It’s an absolutely gorgeous house, that’s for sure.
January 14th – Endless rain. It seems generally OK in the mornings – except today there was rather challenging black ice in abundance – followed by a wet commute home. I really am at my wit’s end with it. I just want a decent dry spell for a change, to let me, the bike and the countryside dry off a little.
On the footway beside the Black Cock Bridge the rain and the streetlights collided beautifully.
January 14th – Spotted whilst hurrying through Butlers Passage in Walsall in the rain, so excuse the poor picture quality. It’s impossible to get a good angle on, too. Great piece of Star Wars themed street protest art on the side of a trainer shop; note the Nike logos.
No idea who did this, but it looks quickly and well executed. I like it.
January 12th – No sniggering at the back. If this was deliberate, I condemn the mischief but salute the wit; since these signs were erected (fnarr fnarr) as nothing more than willy-waving by Hammerwich, I found this one, at Barracks Lane, rather amusing.
January 10th – I don’t know where the rain came from. It had been a decent day, but I’d not taken any photos, but then I came to ride home and it rained quite heavily. For the second time this week I was caught without waterproofs, and I was not amused.
As I crossed the lights at Shire Oak I noticed the pub was busy. Apparently recent changed hands, it looked welcoming and friendly on an otherwise wet and grim night.
January 10th – Time for another cycling tip. This is one I repeat often, and is very important, so it bears repeating. Following the rain we’ve had, the roads are currently filthy. This isn’t just country lanes, but major roads, too; the Chester Road up to Shire Oak from Stonnall northbound has a band of wet silt stretching nearly a metre from the kerb for several hundred metres, and it’ as slippery as hell. In the country lanes, the wash down has deposited grit, marbles and hedge-flailings containing sharp thorns into the road, right where we cyclists normally ride..
Watch where you’re going. Beware of puddles that could hide deep potholes. Corner carefully, and maintain your space on the road, so you have somewhere to move to if an unseen hazard appears. Carry spare tubes or a means of repair.
Take it steady out there, folks.
January 9th – The journey home was similarly blessed; the weather was good, and the trains on time. At Walsall I got that Late Night Feeling thing again, and couldn’t resist a shot of platform 1, which always feels a bit like Walsall’s very own platform 9 and three quarters.
I even had a decent exchange with another cyclist at the lights in Rushall. Can’t be bad.
January 7th – ‘New’ New Street Station concourse this morning. The Christmas tree erected here at an annoying, but rather apposite list way back in December is still up.
This is pretty crap, really. Couldn’t they schedule engineering work to take it down?
Only 50% of my train services today were cancelled or delayed, so there was some solace. On Monday, it was 75%.
January 6th – It was a beautiful morning, but with a heavy, harsh southwesterly wind. It took me longer than usual to cycle to the station, and I ducked through the backlanes to get there, the high hedges offering some shelter.
As far as the wind would allow, the air was soft and very slightly misty, and it made the countryside of South Staffordshire look beautiful in the watery sunlight.
I saw these trees in Forge Lane and recalled Joni Mitchell’s line ‘Trees are shivering in a naked row’.
Here’s to less aggressive weather for a while…
January 2nd – First day back to work, and a lovely commute. The roads were quiet, and the weather reasonable. I just got time to take a quick shot of the dawn over Hill Hook and the Sutton Transmitter. It’s somewhat out of focus, but not too bad. I felt good, and despite the trains being abysmal, it was good to be back.
It felt doubly magical, because this is the second birthday of 365daysofbiking. I actually started the project in April, 2011 in order to ride every day of the 30 days of April, mainly to stop fellow twitter cyclist Renee Van Baar from nagging me about it. At the end of that month, i was enjoying the thing so much I carried on, and vowed to make it 365 days.
Sadly, over the new year of 2011/12, I suffered bad food poisoning, and was off the bike for two days. I was gutted, and so feeling cheated, I started again. 2nd January 2014 – today – was the second anniversary of that resolution.
Last year I agonised over whether to continue, this year I don’t. The eagle-eyed may have noticed I installed a hit counter here a couple of weeks ago – just under the search box on the right. That tells me lots are still reading this, so it seems worth continuing, and it’s part of me now. The urge to get off the bike, stop, and look around is now so habitual that I don’t think I could really stop.
Statistics for this year gone have been a tad more modest at 8,732 miles. That’s still about 24 miles a day. A remarkable total of 15,356 photos have been taken. On the journal so far, there have been 2,212 posts. I have cycled continuously, every day, for 730 days. It seems wrong not to at least make the 1,000.
In total, the journal has run for 1,003 days from the start, and something in excess of 25,000 miles.
Thank you for riding it with me. As long as people are enjoying this, I’ll keep doing it.
Your comments are, as ever, welcome, even if it’s just to tell me to shut the hell up…
BrownhillsBob's #365daysofbiking 