Cycling tip du jour: using your bike as a washing line

In this kind of weather, you can get soaked pretty quickly. So what should do with wet clothes?

Easy. Hang them up all over your bike. You'd be amazed by how many hooks there are on your bike - handle bars, back rack, main frame, even pedals. By the end of the day, assuming your bike is actually in doors somewhere (e.g. at work) you should have much drier clothes.

Tip - make sure you have other clothes to change into. I'm not recommending running around naked at work. Though I must confess I haven't tried it ...

Cyclescheme and a new bike?

I feel a certain amount of disloyalty saying this, but I'm thinking of buying a new bike. The problem is that my current one needs:
- new wheels & tyres
- a new chain and set
- a new seat
- possibly new brakes and gears

The time comes when you think - well, that will probably cost about the same as a new bike. But inevitably I'm looking at spending a bit more than just the cost of repairing my current one.

My requirements are:
- needs to be tough as some weeks I do 100 miles over London's pot-holes and along the fairly rough canals
- needs to be light and fast
- needs to be strong as I'll be carrying a child on the back sometimes and normally I have paniers
- I don't want to do too much maintenance as I'm a lazy fool
- I think I may be prepared to spend about £600 - with the Cyclescheme through work you can get the bike for about half that price

Doing a bit of research and consulting my ever-obliging and highly knowledgeable bro-in-law, I was thinking of a Chris Boardman hybrid. I got quite excited. But imagine my horror when I discovered that the sole supplier of Chris Boardman bikes seems to be Halfords. And wait for it - the Cyclescheme does not have Halford's as one of the preferred partners.

So I'm back to square one and the deadline is in about 5 days. Any ideas?

The Cycle of Karma

When you're cycling around 100 miles a week through London, you develop some strange notions. The one I can't get out of my head is that you build up karma - good and bad - depending on how you cycle. So - if you stop at red lights, wait politely for pedestrians, smile at cars, you get rewarded - the next light turns green for you straight away, someone smiles back at you - you get the picture. Of course this doesn't always work, but it works often enough for me to try to cycle by those rules. Most of the time.