Hafford's, one the UK's leading bicycle sellers, is a pile of shit. I bought a bicycle in their Tottenham Hale superstore just under a month ago, and what I got in return for my money was a junk bucket. After bringing it back to get it repaired - the uselesss drones up there couldn't even do it right. My message - don't ever buy anything from Hafford's. Don't even park in their car parks - in fact don't even mention their name. Hafford's - it don't exist.
The development of blogs has of course led to another space where human beings can endeavour to exercise their inalienable right to complain. To whinge is to be human.
In April I was trying to get hold of a flappable affable politician who claims to be a big cyclist. Well he is a big cyclist, proportionally. Anyways after calling his assistant and passing on my questions a few days later I got the customary,”blah, blah, thanks you for thinking of him at this time, but due to blah blah blah he will not be able to blah blah blah.”
Having an exercise bicycle can prove detrimental to your health, well that is something I have long believed. It’s also a maxim that everyone in my family understood too. Exercise is bad for you.
My sister (pictured left) got an exercise bicycle years ago when they were probably more common than their forerunner, the bicycle. This exercise bicycle had a little computer that measured a whole pile of fluctuations and indexes and broke within one week. There was a knob that tightened a band which in turn slowed the back wheel making it seem like you were going up a small hill forever. Within the week it was relegated to the garage, and it stayed there only ever to be moved out when mother Ireland would force us to clean the garage out. We would take the piles of crap out (nineteen pairs of hospital crutches, eight spare doors, a fleet of bicycles, an aborted dark room, enough carpet to outsell the Afghans and a catalogue of sundries longer than an almanac). We would sweep out all the dust and then put what should have been in a skip back in the garage. Since well before the famine Irish people have never discarded anything lightly, why becuase we had nathin', nathin'.
When good men do bad things.
Now it’s not for the first time an Irishman on feeling the weight of melancholy in a big city far from his own shores would want for a reminder of said shores and turn to Limewire. And so it was I downloaded Carrickfergus, which if you haven’t heard it is a haunting air with beautiful lyrics, full of woe, tinted with tragedy. My younger brother sings it very well, so well that it disguises his youth.
The renditions I managed to pull off Limewire were universally awful. Besides the two-bit two-brain cells crass entertainers like Charlotte Church, Brain Kennedy and Phil Coulter who have covered the song and murdered it, what Christy Moore has done has been equally as untactful and distasteful. He’s got an electric keyboard wavering in and out. Van Morrison sounds as constipated as ever egged on by the “ah sure we’ll play for another 300 years” – The Chieftains.
If you never heard the song and just read the lyrics you would immediately understand that such sentimentality would be treated with pithy and reverence not a synthesiser. So sing on Kenneth (mo dhreathair) and shame on the soulless pretenders.
Continue reading "Carrickfergus - completely unrealted to cycling" »
For a day in July the streets of London will be an Elysian network of cycle paths. Some of the world's greatest athletes will speed along the al fresco velodrome unhindered by motorists and cheered on by Londoners as the Tour De France comes to town.
London's burgeoning cycling population can only wish that cycling would be celebrated in the same vein on the ‘mean’ streets of the capital every day. However the humble two wheels are making a serious return - cyclist numbers have in creased almost 50 per cent in the last five years.
In a world where we grow weary and excited at the rate of technological change, a device so simple as the bicycle has never seemed so pleasureful and necessary. Why did it take Londoners so long to appreciate the brilliant simplicity of the bicycle?
Continue reading "London gets to the grip with the bicycle" »
Foreigners to Japan tend to get headrush the moment they step off the plane. Although this isn't my first visit I don't think I will ever get used to: plastic shiny food, pedestrian crossings that play synthesised music, five million people at the train station and all of them queueing, school girls walking round with PlayBoy backpacks, and toilets with heated seats and an arse cleaning function.
Not to stray from bicycles, well it's hard to they are everywhere piled against fences and walls, people of all ages peddaling past on the footpaths. The bicycle is a civic insitution over here. It makes sense to travel by bicycle. Apart from the main roads, most roads are narrow and more suited to cycling than driving. Distances are generally short and as most Japanese live in the lowlying areas they tend to cycle.
The drawbacks are that pedestrians, cyclists and drivers all tend to use the same space and unless you happen to know where you are going you will never find it in Japan, street names died out with the Last Samurai.