Cycling Related

Another comparison occurs. The new president of the EU Commission is chosen by horsetrading behind closed doors, by people who are themselves democratically accountable but in practice with negligible opportunity for the population to have any influence, and the person chosen was not one of the fron...

Screenshot_20190719-175956_Gmail.jpg This comes from this week's Cycling UK weekly email. I find myself prey to two strongly conflicting emotions. One is an intense distaste for people who find fault with other people's grammar or spelling (grammarnazis! elitism and classism!) The other, which is c...

Yeah, thanks, I've done the last minute dash along the platform before (as we all have) and I'm sure it will be OK. But I confess to getting unhealthily stressed by these things so you'll have to bear with my worrying

Does anyone know where the bike carriage is on the Southwestern trains from Waterloo to Exeter via Honiton? It says registrations are compulsory and there are only two spaces, which makes me think it's a designated carriage rather than just the nearest vestibule, and we're joining at an intermediate...

Meanwhile, enjoy the NHS while you still can. If Boris wants an early trade deal with the USA, it will surely involve giving greater access to the NHS to US healthcare firms, or at least an understanding with Trump that this will follow. And that surely spells the end of many of the essential princi...

More obsessing from me. I've just watched the CUK video promoting the Dutch Reach. https://youtu.be/WeM984dk220 It describes the Dutch Reach as a "solution" to car dooring, which is either knowingly dishonest or shows a completely inadequate understanding of the factors involved in road safety. And ...

:o Might it just be because he has to earn a living? Or are blind people only meant to do things that are issue-led, pure, and 'worthwhile'? No, it had nothing to do with his being blind, and everything to do with my visceral loathing of the smug entitled small-horizons materialistic complacency of...

I try to oblige

I was once on a train just across the aisle from Peter White. I was sorely tempted to strike up a conversation in order to ask why, when he had done such worthwhile things on In Touch and Does He Take Sugar, he demeaned himself by lending his talents to the odious You and Yours. But I resisted.

"I want someone else to Google it for me." How about this? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index Small sigh from someone who does actually know how to use Google and who already spends too much of their life on Wikipedia😀. When Joan's valiant efforts to establish this site as a sustainabl...

The EU elects MEPs by proportional representation. But MEPs have deliberately limited power, shared with the Council (degree of democracy dependent on political systems in different member states) and the Commission (ultimately democratically accountable, but only through several removes from actual...

So The Real Ravenshurst hyphenates sous vide, Regulator italicises it, but Iris does neither. What does that reveal about middle classness?

@Regulator I kniw you like a nice church, here is the CofE outpost in Balestrand, it was set up for the British tourists many years ago and has a resident vicar from May to October. 20190704_103734.jpg20190704_102855.jpg20190704_102842.jpg It is one of the many anomalies of churches that if it were...

I see that it was me who started the previous discussion of the "Dutch Reach", so clearly the evidence shows that I am obsessive on the subject. But the latest from CTC/CUK says: Do the Dutch Reach We’re hoping that by campaigning for safer roads for cyclists, we’ll see more and more people give cyc...

I was curious, so I googled this https://gipsyhillbrew.com/beers/envoy/ "12 UK and 12 European breweries brought together to each make a beer celebrating the achievements of the EU." Until November isn't that 12 European and another 12 European breweries? I don't want to celebrate the EU by emphasi...