Author Archives: essiep

Hour and a half mudding.

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7°C, sunny with light wind

Coming to the end of the wettest autumn I can remember. Black gritty mud coats most roads and puddles hide portholes. When I get time, I’ll put CX tyres on the commuter.

What about this little painting? It’s acrylic onto A5, painted while the others were watching Strictly. That makes it about 1 ½ hours or so. It needs a little work around the left eye and hand; about another half hour.
I found this quite tough in comparison to oil paint.

  • Sometimes you go back to a colour on the palette and it has dried up,
  • blending is rough when applying new colour to dry paint,
  • the colour changes as it dries,
  • the surface is chalky,

Most of these problems could be solved by using a slowing agent, the problem they introduce is that they look milky. All of those problems could be solved by using oil paint.

Ninety minutes at night

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6°C, cold and dry.

A 1½ hours after work. This is a return ride after over a week of feeling poorly. I’ve really felt the cold but, unsurprisingly, it’s not noticeable after the ride.

As you can see, the speeds are quite low, partly because of restrictive warm clothing. Ironic that I overheated slightly. A week of no exercise does make the cold air more biting.

Two hours.

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I used to keep a measure of my accumulated bike rides by adding up the weekly then annual milage. In a good year, I could total 6,000 miles. As the years go by, this figure has steadily declined to around 5,000. However, I recall doing a survey about a decade ago and worked out that I did about 10 hours a week exercise. Over his last year, it’s somewhere around 9 hours per week. In other words, it has not really gone down much, I’m just slower now.

As for today, what a cold biting wind there is. It’s cold for it’s direction – south East. Two hours was enough and even my legs felt stiff despite me urging them on.

That’s why I bought the Jake.

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7°C, quiet and cool.

Autumn rust.

A fine November day, surface water everywhere after recent downpours. I felt the magic on this ride – so that’s why I bought this bike. The poor machine got caked in mud especially after plunging into a deep rut. It then looked like gravy.

What a satisfying day, the distance is not great but it took 3 ½ hours.

Many miles, but. little.. strength…

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11°C, some sunny bits, but you know – it’s November.

A much used route.

Nothing seriously wrong but I didn’t have a lot of energy on tap. The ride was nearly 50 miles but I avoided the bigger hills because of that empty legs thing.

This old Arrow bike is running nicely with its new brakes, chainset and BB. The next bit to fail will be the Sora shifters, they are quite loose now after 20 years use. This used to be my main commuter and winter bike so it has some huge miles in its history.

2x bannister hill

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11°C, bright and dry.

Tried to make a photo on the garage more classy.

Well, that worked out well. Rode twice up my favourite hill climb – Bannister Lane. I went steady and long today, 85km in all. The best bit is that I set a comfortable right to the end. I got in thinking another 20 miles would have been comfortable, (though without hills). Right up to the end, I could hold the pace on the level.