Been Taking the High Road

Well, I spen two consecutive weekends in Scotland, one cycling, one diving. Both were fantastic and will be posted about in detail later.

For now, I will merely add that it's taken a week to recover and get everything cleaned, washed, repaired and put away. And I am now off to bed!

I'm Back!

Back from cycling in Scotland, back from the Glastonbury Festival, and generally back in the swing of things.

I'll soon be blogging on my experiences of cycling and drinking in Scotland, serving beer at Glastonbury and eyeballs in trees. For now, here's a nice picture to look at:

Enjoy!

I'm Back...

...and indeed I have been for a while. Two weeks.

The States were great. Wedding was lovely, Buckeyes won their football game, my family are fine. And I love New York. I love it because you can walk around it, I love it because of its history, I love it because they take pizza and cheesecake with the seriousness that both require.

Mostly I love it because - well, I love America, and Americans, though I was not fond of their last administration. But sometimes the sheer cheeriness and earnestness gets a little overwhelming when you come from a culture where shop assistants ignore you unless you ask for help, and taking things seriously is a rarity in social discourse. New Yorkers are funny, talk fast, and say stuff they don't mean. The guy behind the counter at the World Trade Center memorial sold me a keyring and looked me in the eye maybe once, because he was busy kidding his friend that he was a psycho about to go on a rampage.

I could have hugged both of them.

Back from a cycling holiday

Got back from my latest escapade on the bike last Sunday, it's taken until now for me to recover enough to post about it! Down from Edinburgh to Almouth over Friday to Sunday last week. 150 miles in three days, including one day (Saturday) with a 60-mile trip.

It was a mighty amount of fun, despite a grand total of seven punctures, and much beer was drunk.

More details as and when. In other news, I finally got round to putting reflective strips on my cycling gloves. There's a reason for this: I wear black gloves, and at night it's difficult for drivers to see my hand signals before I turn. Hopefully the reflective strips will solve this problem. For anyone wanting to do this themselves, it's surprisingly easy. Go to your local haberdashery shop (I used Fenwick's in Newcastle) and buy a strip of reflective / fluorescent ribbon and some double-sided iron-on backing, such as Bondaweb. All you need to do is cut strips of ribbon and Bondaweb, put them across the palm and back of the gloves, and iron them on with a medium-heat iron. Dead simple!