4°C, light NE, sunny.
Floating back upto the surface for air now. It’s cold but the sun does shine.
Surface.
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Category Archives: Thinking
Happy 2016.
Put on a good face.
2016’s tick-off list:
Hill and Moorland qualification,
6,000 on the bikes,
Kintail munro loop,
Drop a kilo, Christmas food indulgence means a bit of weight gain. I want to get under 13st 12 by the end of January.
‘
Stop all the clocks.
Warm and wet stormy winter continues.
2015 was a noteworthy year:
4,500 miles cycled, 1,000 each on the fixed hear and the cyclocross bikes.
Multi-day hike, (done),
Bivvy (first night),
Bothy night, (done),
Now is time to zero the odometers on all four bikes.
Paddy wagon, Jake clocks,
Arrow and Racelite.
Milage:
Arrow: 2,918.1
Jake: 975
Racelite: 532.1
Paddy: 953.5
Total about =5,378.7
That’s still 450 lower than last year. Repeated illnesses and long hiking trips away from home in the summer are to blame.
Are you cold today?
4°C clear start.
Do you feel the cold more if your family is from Africa, or southern Asia? Many pupils at school think so. They all had anecdotes about their families at home who run the heating at home on high. Some wear warm, woolly clothes right into high summer. They suggest it’s genetic!
I suppose it’s a form of ‘soft racism’ but they would be horrified to consider its association with that word. I offered the idea that we can acclimatise to a country’s climate, but they thought race was the real reason.
There is much distortion in the meaning of the word ‘racist’. I would be surprised to hear that feeling cold has a genetic cause. However, I am prepared to change that belief.
Evidence anyone?
Not the same this year.
15C, sunny, wind has dropped.
Rode: 36 miles today. Things have changed this year. I ride more on work nights, but the usual surge of energy and enthusiasm has not taken over this time. Something has changed and I am feeling for what it may be.
Rosie leaving still seems the most likely reason. Annoyingly, I can’t be sure. The house feels wrong without a dog. There is no curious wet nose pressing at the gap as I open the door to come in. No-one to think of as I potter about the house, no daily visit to the local field. I don’t know how the juvenile oak tree getting on in the spring light.
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Posted from a mobile.
Meal deal.
8C, gales and heavy showers.
The commercial monster loves Valentine’s day. All that kitsch sickly pink plastic packaging has been peddled for weeks now. They have missed a trick though. A fifth of brits live alone, or some figure like that. The gap in the market is here-
The Valentine’s Meal Deal For One. It would look the same as the meal for two. I would include a bottle of wine, but it’s half empty. The chocolate box would be conspicuously missing half of the chocs, the ones you love most are strangely missing.
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Posted from a mobile.
Traffic Police.
9°C, windy.
Desperate for a break, this weekend will have to do.
Motorway cops- a documentary series on BBC television is easy watching. None of the sensational drama that seems to encourage crime as found on other channels. It did leave me with some questions.
One incident closed the motorway because of a multi-car crash. The front car driver said red car braked in front and then 4 more collided in a cascade. It was never established who caused it all, so no charges were filed. Breathalysers were used but no checks were made on mobile phones. Also, none of the following cars were prosecuted for tail-gating.
The most disturbing incident involved the death of a cyclist. The body was found on the busy, fast section of the A10, late at night with fast traffic still passing. Police spent time searching for alter and were interrupted by a phone call. Police went round to a mini driver’s house where a badly damaged car was parked. The wind-screen was broken on the near-side and the driver thought she had hit an animal. When told of the death of a man, she collapsed and threw up.
Back at the accident scene, was the body dressed in dark clothes, a mangled bike with no lights or reflectors. The victim was also very drunk.
I felt rather sorry for the mini driver. She will have to come to terms with killing someone, which was in no way, her fault.
A troubling programme. She was breathalized, a standard procedure. But why are mobile phones not checked as standard procedure? Distraction would explain at least 3 of the unexplained accidents, and phone companies hold those records.
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Posted from a mobile.
Prisoners’ votes.
BBC.– prisoners won’t get the vote after all. The story brought up all sorts of arguments about justice, European interference, sovereignty and stuff. My problem was that I couldn’t easily make the bridges between arguments presented. On one hand, the debate is not really that important- the number of prisoners is relatively small and many of them aren’t going to vote anyway. The other side revolves around arguments of principle.
Today, I have made some headway after reading the above linked feature. There are several strands to balance:
Prisoners with long terms, more than one parliamentary term won’t be free to benefit from their vote. The changes in society voted for, they wouldn’t see.
Prisoners will not have their right to vote taken away by the state, they have made choices that led them to jail.*
Prisoners may be incarcerated for behaviour that was in protest at government policy. They could still retain the vote, in my scheme, so can still affect law-making.
So my current position is- give them the vote unless they are sentenced for a long time, longer than a parliamentary term.
Anyway, shut up, I am tired and want to go.
Posted on my phone.
Horsetail verdentification.
18°C, clear.
A decaying school near home. I dropped in today for a gander. There used to be a lot of work done on their garden, lots of fine plants surrounded by clambering wild plants. One cracked and mossy concrete area has hundreds of horsetail plants thrusting up through unseen gaps.
Lovely, eery place.
Twelve green bottles and a glow in the dark condom
16, sunny.
Today’s rubbish from the binge drinkers. Why did you need a glow-in-the-dark condom on a bright sunny day?
Micycle 