Images

April 8th – Heres a cycling one for the tech heads. Sorry, but it may save some folk hassle.

Disc brake pads. Don’t skimp on them, it’s just not worth it.Two of my bikes have Avid BB7  units fitted. One bike has original factory-fitted Avid brand pads, and the other, which is older, after the originals wore out had some Kool Stop ones, which were good at first but glazed over, reducing the stopping performance. I replaced those with some cheap ones from Decathlon as I was passing at the time and it was easy. They were awful. I was noticing that the Avid pads on the newer bike were far better than the others. Eventually, after cleaning and roughening discs, adjustments and degreasing, I gave up, and ordered some original Avid sintered metal pads. Performance restored.
The moral of all this is that your brakes are your life. Don’t waste time with cheap shit. 

April 7th – Since the day was grey and overcast, I went with the flow. The weather gradually cleared, and I explored the completed dam works at Chasewater. One of the greater sadnesses of the place is the tumbledown cottage at the north end of the dam. Slowly falling into itself, I have no idea who owns it, or how it came to be in this condition. It’s neighbour – a near identical home – is in beautiful condition and very much still inhabited and looked after. I know the cottages to have been built to serve the mine, but other than that, I’m aware of little of their history.

6th April – New camera day. I’ve been using Panasonic cameras for a while now – built like brick shithouses, they offer a good feature set, remarkable zoom range and good picture quality, all in a package small enough to pop into a pocket and always carry with you. I’d been eyeing up the TZ30 for a while – I’d had a TZ20, and liked it, but there were a few extra features in the new model – 20x optical zoom, sweep panorama, better low-light performance and so on – that I quite fancied. Able to hand down the old one, I found a camera store in Birmingham had stock and a decent offer, so I cycled into town and picked one up.

I always love a ride round Brum, and took advantage of the opportunity. Near Edgbaston Street, I realised how far Birmingham had come as a cycling city: the bike racks were full. This is in spite of, rather than because of anything the council have done. Birmingham City Council’s support for cyclists is legendarily awful, yet Brum is developing an engaging, active cycling community.

April 4th – Today was not a photogenic day. My journey to the station at Telford – about three miles – was against the wind and in a steady rain, felt much how I imagine being shotblasted to feel. It was the kind of rain that made your forehead hurt.

At the other end of my commute, I chose my return station with care. I could have come from Walsall or Shenstone, but the latter offered the choice with the favourable wind. Positively blown home, there was nothing that inspired me to get the camera out until I tackled Shire Oak Hill at Sandhills. The weather had been dire, yet I was coasting up a really quite nasty hill without thinking. I reflected on the nature of this hill over history – this small group of old houses would have been the Sandhills of old, one being the Leopard pub – closed at the turn of the 1900’s, but with a two-century history. What would it have been like to climb this hill in say, 1850? 1800? 1750? 

An old route through an old hamlet. Never really noticed  before.

April 2nd – Working in Telford today meant returning late from Walsall with the wind behind me, a few weeks since I’d undertaken this commute. The wind eased me home, as did the impending drizzle, and my legs found quite a bit of energy from somewhere. Cresting the Black Cock Bridge, I noted how grey it all looked, and how depressing it seemed. Yet it was 6:45pm and still light. That’s a good thing, I guess. I put the camera away, and sped downhill to Brownhills with a less heavy heart.

April 1st – The smallholding near the canal at Newtown, in Brownhills, seems to be thriving. The pigs look happy and in good condition, and seem to be increasing in number. As I passed, this cheeky fellow was proving the old adage that the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. He’s obviously deft at this, and I collected the wool he’d snagged on the barbed wire to hang up for nesting birds at home.

March 30th – As I came back up over Aldershawe that afternoon I was exhausted. The week had been emotionally, physically and mentally enervating, and I felt flat, tired and weak. There had been a chord-change in the weather, too; it was chillier, a little overcast and there was a real bastard of a headwind. It probably wasn’t that fierce, but on top of everything, it just felt like another battle I didn’t need. At Cranebrook Lane, not far from Muckley Corner, I stopped for a snack and a drink, and remembered this sad little stub of a road. Before the great folly of the M6 toll, this used to be Bullmoor Lane; to save building another bridge, the road engineers instead diverted the sleepy back lane southwest, to meet Cranebrook Lane on the south side of it’s own flyover. I loved the bit of Bullmoor lane that was lost; it was a little hilly, had a good view to Shenstone, and I spent hours exploring here as a lad. When they cut it off, a piece of me, just a tiny bit, died. The lost lane is now just a gated farm track. 35 years ago, you may well have found an exhausted lad here. He’d dig for sweets or an apple in his saddlebag on his well-loved Peugeot bike, before heading off into the wind like I was about to. It seems as distant now as my first day at school. The watering eye must have been the wind.

March 29th – It was another gorgeous morning, but the mist pictures were getting a but trite. I didn’t get the camera out much at all today, sometimes you just don’t. Coming home from Lichfield Trent Valley that evening, something about Greenhill in the city caught my eye. Maybe it was the low sun, the same lazy, yellow sunlight I’d noticed in the morning. But this part ofLichfield – as old as any, really, and once site of the east gate – was painted magical for a short while. It captivated me.

March 27th – I’ve seen this curious ladies bike around Lichfield before. Today it was locked up at 5:45pm outside Wilkinson in the city. I think I’ve featured it when I caught it locked up outside Waitrose. I’m trying to decide if this is a modern copy of an old design, or just a well preserved old bike. Rod brakes, original looking Sturmey Archer 3 speed hub, authentic rust in places. it’s a very individual bike, and I’d hate to ride it. I bet those brakes are evil at the best of times, mores in the wet. It fascinates me that the owner locks it – no chance of a fast getaway on that. A real oddity.