What a ride home tonight! Dreadful dreadful rain, soaked through, but my bike's performance! I just can't believe it. Riding up Peckham Rye in the heavy rain I actually overtook a fit young guy on his Ridgeback. I mean, I was tailgateing him up the hill and I thought, hmm, how much can I push this, so I upped my pedaling and tried to overtake, and just about made it. I thought, I'd best keep pedaling and I did...ALL THE WAY UP THE HILL!

Clearly my new handle bar stem has made quite a difference to my riding. And it feels better for my back too. Anyway I got home and saw a little package waiting for me. New for 2006 - Cateye Strada. It's like a iPod Nano-esque cycle computer. A fair few more functions than my Sigma 500 (which was broken) and no buttons (just like a Mighty Mouse!), you just rock it to change mode (just like a Mighty Mouse!). Perfect cycle computer for a Mac user, clearly.

Oh and did I say how thin it is? It's THIN!

Thin is so...2006. Really.

Tags: Cateye, Thin

Before:

After (clearance mostly done)

The pond has been broken and skipped. Pond? You can't see a pond? Exactly, that's why it had to go. Not for long though! The frogs (now counting between 12 and 14 (and mostly adolecents I think) have been re-located to a trug. Most seemed to ignore it and just hopped off, but I could see a few under the water-lilly.

Tags: House

Cripes, have been clearing the garden for 3 days and it looks like its been bombed. Amazing, I can walk the FULL LENGHT of the garden. All the fish are dead though. But I have 8-9 Frogs and a Toad. And 100 million spiders (urgh!) and dozens of....Crickets! Because I don't have an alley, I had to drag the plants through the house so I have spiders and Crickets inside now :-/ The Dyson is on standby.

Oh and I got the bike back - FINALLY. But the cost was astronomical - £214!

Tags: House

So, I went to Bristol, and since them, I've been to Nottingham, Manchester and Coventry.

Let's start with King's Cross again. I thought there was something familiar last time, about the new entrance hall to the tube. And lo, yes, it reminds me, slightly of Gare Du Nord, and what's this?

It's a Relay, a magazine and tabac shop, dropped in, as if straight from Paris. Anyway, took the train up to Nottingham for a meeting and on arrival at St. Pancras, I saw that Midland Mainline have been moved to their new platforms, ready for Eurostar in 2007.

Turning around I saw that the renovation of the original train shed roof of the station was complete. To explain, the Eurostar trains are so long, that they had to build a roof extension, so the curved roof (with light blue girders - hope that's not the final colour) is the original and the flat slatted roof is the new bit. You can get a better idea with this model and a shot through the new roof, to see the original one:

Here's my pic from the train window:

Ah, rolling fields; and here is downtown Nottingham:

Nottingham is actually very modern and re-developed, lots of outdoor bars, mutiplex cinemas, but still lots of independent shops, and a tram, which I rode on:

And zut! Up to Manchester a few days later. Ah... the English countryside:

Its not easy you know to take these pics when traveling over 100 mph and often at tilt! If you've not been to Manchester for a few years, when you visit you might be in for a shock. The centre is totally rebuilt and the shopping district looks like this:

On the way back I noticed the train had a promo vinyl on it. The film was fantastic (saw it last Thursday). Is it a bird, is it a plane, no, it's a 125 mph, tilting train! .

I finish this round-up with the widest behind I have ever seen (proportionately). I am sure she makes some man, somewhere, very happy.

Tags: St. Pancras