Office Bike

Finally I got to ride my new steed today(it has yet to be named). Having clocked up 1650 plus miles in Vic last month I was even more determined to save the planet by resorting to pedal power whenever possible. After a meeting in sunny south Wales was cancelled for the afternoon meaning all my work today was local to the Red Kite office I mounted up and headed out. This meant quite a few people got treated to the extraordinary sight of a sweaty fat bloke peddling furiously and making very little progress along a road as flat as a mill pond.

Progress was impeded by the refusal of the front disc brake to allow the front wheel to rotate freely and as yours truly is to disc brake maintenance as a gerbil is to DNA sequencing I decided to try and free front wheel by forcing it to turn several thousand times over the five or so miles to my first call. On arrival those nice people who were expecting me were unsure whether they should offer a cup of tea or an ambulance but after I recovered the ability to communicate I was able to explain why it had been such hard work getting anywhere fast.

Everyone in turn lifted the front of the bike and purposefully tried to spin the front wheel before declaring that "It shouldnt be like that" and "Send it back its warped" before a more useful member of the group produced an allen key and adjusted the caliper. This was exactly what I had planned would happen however the result was not exactly as I forsaw, the wheel did now rotate two or three times before stubbornly refusing to continue, so progress of sorts, but not enough to make life as easy as it should be. So with a cheery goodbye I set off onto the next port of call.

Even though it was still insanely difficult to move with any sort of rapidity, we were hardly man and machine in perfect harmony, the sun was shining, the lovely sound a bike makes as it ticks along was music to the ears and I was happy to be back in the saddle out on the road for the first time since 2007. There were a couple of practical problems, like what do I wear (Lycra?), how do I carry my stuff (taxi?), how do I get uphill and how do I stop and dismount without looking like I was falling off, all these will be overcome over the next few weeks. The problem of where do I park it was soon solved.

Out of sight, out of mind

Eventually the out of sight out of mind principle fails completely. In the four and half years we have been here, or thereabout, we have accrued a fair amount of tat and broken items, the majority of which have been put places where they are no trouble. Some in fact have been moved several times to new no trouble places, like my priceless collection of not really broken bikes, all of which with only a few days effort and several hundred pounds would be as good as new. These have been moved from almost barn to the workshop, to the shed that then was demolished and became the Berner Annexe so they then went to to tack room before ending up in the almost barn again where for a few months they have been the favoured playthings of the pigs. The pigs showed very little aptitude for bike mechanics, instead they just copied me and moved them around their domain in a seemingly aimless fashion.
So, having decided that the towering piles of really useful stuff at the back of the stable/house/garden/greenhouses/workshop were now so high that they posed risk to life and limb I conceded that a skip would be a useful item because we might just have enough to fill a small one. Tracey my beautiful and oh so patient wife ordered the largest small one they hire out and ignored my comments of "its a barn, we'll never fill it" (sic Blues Brothers, still the best film ever made) And so the attempt to fill it with my precious things began yesterday (when not chasing cows) and several discoveries were made. Frogs had made a passable home in the box that the trout had arrived in last year and was put for safe keeping behind the stable on the premise that one day I might need a cardboard box that I could carry fish in. No such occasion has arisen and so it is now in the skip. The frogs leapt for freedom once they saw the eviction notice was final.

This amazing radio which is over 15 years old and has been on several expeditions with me, lived in the same places as the bikes except that it was in the eaves of the pig sty. Tracey had put it in the skip, I seized the opportunity to turn it on to prove it was not rubbish bit a precious thing, it remained stubbornly silent. An aha look swept across my beautiful and oh so patient wife's face but she watched ever so patiently as in desperation I rummaged aound and found an almost fitting electric cable. Plugged in and switched on with a stick, just in case, however the only shock was that Radio 2 blared across the yard. Reprieve granted it was allowed back in the tack room. One small victory to hoarders!

By yesterday evening the skip looked like this, full of good stuff from the garden, almost barn, back of stable and tack room and contained compulsory skip items like a broken ironing board. Today the main thrust of attack was the workshop. I was too embarrassed to publish a before the great clear out picture but this is it by nightfall and the skip is, ahem, slightly fuller. This picture shows the location of my "little accident" where I fell from the gallery (no stairs or safety rail at the time, and funnily enough as it happens, no ladder, just gravity, a lot of pain and near asphyxiation caused by a helpful Bernese called Rocky who tried to keep me warm while waiting for the ambulance ) had I fell this morning I would have missed the concrete floor and fallen about two feet onto stuff. I am trying not to think about the 400 or so cd's that were deemed surplus to requirements, and the countless numbers of model soldiers (or little men as my better half calls them) cast aside and now reside skipside. What I am concentrating on is the huge workspace now created, the large number of tools "found" and best of all finding all the photographs had been spared the attentions of mice, unlike a lot of my books and comics which seem to have made excellent nests.
Tomorrow we are launching an attack on the upstairs gallery, rumour has it there are boxes that have lain undisturbed since we first got here. Bound to be full of stuff I really need!