Ten Memorable Things About the 2011 Tour de France.

1. A picture of Johnny Hoogerland's backside should be on the dressing room wall of every football club for any 'hard man' to contemplate before he goes out to lumber his thuggish, preening way around a pitch clattering other players and complaining about having to play two games in a week. (Photo here: don't feel you have to click on it, it's not pleasant. Really.)

The Dutch rider was knocked off his bike by Juan Antonio Flecha, who was in turn knocked off his bike by that lunging French TV car. It illustrated the horrible vulnerability of cyclists to cars, and with repeated viewing it didn't get any less shocking. Hoogerland was catapulted into a barbed wire fence, and continued the race with thirty-odd stitches holding him together. Not the least thing to his credit was his reaction immediately afterwards; while being visibly upset and very shaken, rather than giving live TV a ten minute swear festival he was full of dignity and forgiveness, putting it in the context of poor Wouter Weylandt's death. 

And then a few days later he was back on the attack in breakaway groups. I like football, but you could make five football 'hard men' out of the bits of Hoogerland left on the barbed wire.

2. My friend Colin predicting a Vinokourov stage win, a full minute before he rode into a tree and broke himself into pieces and retired from cycling. He had a mottled record, Vino, but he was a fierce rider, and fierce riders are good.*

3. Bradley Wiggins getting into an ambulance. What could go wrong? Wiggo, winner of the Dauphine, looking generally in great form, reconciled to and comfortable with his role as team leader on an excellent team, wearing the British National Champion's jersey in the Tour, a podium finish a distinctly achievable aim. We were all rubbing our hands together in anticipation. And then all of a sudden on Stage 7 he was getting into the back of an ambulance and going home and it was all over. Bugger. I hope he had a big bag of chips that night.

4. The indestructable Jens Voigt. He fell off twice on one stage and then was there back at the front yet again, hammering out a horrible pace for mile after mile. He fell off seven times on one stage of a previous Tour and the peloton said that the road was getting Jens rash. He's announced his intention to keep racing next year, which is excellent as he's one of the few remaining professional sportsmen older than me.

5. Cadel Evans during the time trial. Whereas Andy Schleck was willowy on the bike, constantly changing his position, Evans hunched himself into a bullet shape as he came down the ramp and stayed that way until the end. He was a picture of power and determination, and he rode brilliantly in the mountains, too, dragging the field up the Galibier in pursuit of Andy Schleck. I thought it was going to be a matter of seconds in the end, perhaps even closer than Fignon and LeMond, but Evans knocked lumps out of Schleck's time by the finish.

6. Dickheads. It's great being on telly. It's great being drunk and on telly. It's especially great being drunk and wearing nothing but Speedos and espadrilles and bellowing in a cyclist's ear while trying to run flat-footed sideways up an Alp showing your arse before strutting back down the road to do it again.Because this moment is all about me not some bloke on a bike who I admire so much I'll impede him or knock him off his bike or put his eye out with my hilarious steer-horn hat. Contador punched one of them in the gob this year. Good.

7. David Harmon and Sean Kelly's commentary on Eurosport. Once you've had David and Sean you can't go back to Phil and Paul. This was a shocking discovery, because they were The Voices Of The Tour for donkey's years. Then this year I started listening to David and Sean and began getting genuine insights into racing, rather than having a goldmine owner read aloud from The A-Z of Big French Castles before revealing 'Contador will want to go as fast as he can.'

8. Alberto Contador, winner of the Giro d'Italia and strong contender for the 2011 Tour victory, still not having had his drugs hearing yet. World cycling picking up a big gun and pointing it carefully at its own foot. Idiots.

9. The television. No different this year to any other year. From a swarm of brightly coloured microbes sweeping along the floor of an Alpine valley, to giddying, motion-sickness descents, to Maxime Monfort foaming at the mouth in high-definition super-slow-mo, it was a fantastic thing to watch on the television. Hats off to French TV, apart from when they tried to to kill Flecha and Hoogerland.

10. Voeckler. Voeckler generally, but especially Voeckler at the stage finish at the top of the Galibier. Heaving desperately to get the oxygen in, collapsed over the bars of his bike, not yet able even to get off it having ridden himself into another day in yellow, it was like seeing the classic cycling photographs of the greats in agony, live and in colour.

He rode the whole Tour like a terrier with his teeth into the yellow jersey, and every pedal stroke was an act of defiance, a refusal to accept his own limitations as he shouted, grimaced, fought his bike up every stage. 

David Millar on Saturday afternoon reported being in his team car, driving past a 'strangely familiar' figure in Eurosport kit cycling alone along the autoroute after the time trial. The chat in the car died away as they realised it was Voeckler, presumably needing some time out of the way on his own to come to terms with things before the huge Roman circus of the media started to feed on him. Tommy, however rotten you were feeling then, you have no need. You were magnificent.

*Col also selected a fantasy cycling team which ended up garlanded with stage winners and jersey wearers. I did not.

Bicycle Touring in France

It's that time of year again.


The video's a bit ridiculous, like Michael Bay Presents: the Tour de France Route, but even an animated route map is absurdly exciting.


As Brian Blessed once said, "My God - Look at the mountain!"

I like the Tour's grading of summits, in that it is a system deliberately constructed so that it has a category of mountains so immense and difficult they are beyond categorisation. It's as if pedaling up a gigantic alp is not enough but the riders have to contemplate the philosophical conundrum at the same time. How very French.

A Trip Around the Chicken Factory.

Recently I was reading, then skipping through, then looking for the pictures in, then putting away again Graeme Fife's 'Bob Chicken....A Passion For the Bike.'

For one thing, I'm sure - although I can't find it now - author Graeme Fife uses 'methinks' and 'alas' deliberately and without irony. In my jaundiced view that marks you out as an elaborate saloon bar bore and should be punished by being taken into the car park and beaten with morris dancing sticks.

It's a bit unfortunate that early on a journalist complains how boring a trip round a tyre factory is, because that's pretty much what you're on for 75% of the book. Or 75% of the bit of the book that I read. The paragraph devoted to Bob Chicken's decision to import Weinmann brakes was the first sign that the fact he was called Bob Chicken might be the high point of interest. For example;

"Whereas the Maillard 5-speed freewheels arrived in batches of 150 per ropey old wooden case, nailed and strapped, having been freighted across from the works outside Le Treport by tramp steamer and then sent on by road, Weinnmann sent (for example) batches of 54 cards of brakeblocks and shoes, or 50 pairs of brakes or 100 brake shoes, immaculately packaged in separate modular containers - tough cardboard containers - all symmetrical, in a handsome wooden packing case which would then be used for delivering on to wholesalers."

A trip round a tyre factory. And there's a whole series of rotten proof-reading errors where

appear randomly in the middle of proof-reading errors where paragraphs appear randomly in the middle of broken sentences. There's no index either, and a history/biography having no index is like stockings turning out to be painted-on gravy browning. Yes, he uses figures for numbers. And yes, on the spine the title does use a four dot ellipsis. A quick look at the front of the book shows that it was published by 'Robert J Chicken Sr,' which explains a lot.

Mind you, there were compensations in the early section, which I could have read much more of, covering as it did the early days of European road racing and giving a brief account of the life of the remarkable Tullio Campagnolo.

Campagnolo was a rider himself, in the days when to change gear on a bicycle you had to undo the wingnuts, take the whole rear wheel out, turn it around to engage the sprocket on the other side, refix the chain, tighten up the bolts, and remount. Racers who knew the roads well would get off their bikes and pretend to set about changing the gears, wait until their rivals followed suit, leap back on and speed off still on the big gear.

Racing up the Croce D'Aune pass in a bitter, snowy November, wrapped around with tyres and salami sandwiches, his bottles filled one with water and one with coffee, Campagnolo stopped to change his gear. Frozen, gloveless, soaked through with snow and sleet, his bare fingers numb to the bone, Campagnolo was unable to undo the nuts on the rear wheel. In order to keep up with the leaders he had to just keep going, and ascended the mountain pass fighting that big, laborious gear. Legend has it that he uttered the words, "something must be done about that rear wheel," which makes for a more nicely understated legend than "f-----ing b------d gear, b------y b-gg----g snow, c------g b------d bikes."

Anyway, the upshot of it was that he invented a simpler mechanism to allow the rider to change gear while pedalling and remaining in the saddle. It was permitted in the Tour de France in 1937; Bartali won it with Campagnolo gears in 1938. Anyone, apart obviously from willfully contrarian 'fixie' hipsters, who has tried to ride up a hill on a bicycle will be thankful for Campagnolo for helping to make it less horrible. (Fixie riders might like to consider it's also pleasingly 'conditioning' to the feet, not to mention amusingly retro, to go about without shoes. I bet you've got all got iPods, though. Very difficult to get a Victrola onto your pannier rack.)

He didn't stop there, though. The derailleur gear went through a constant series of refinements, and it was indicative of how Campagnolo's mind worked - and it worked constantly. It was impossible to keep rain out of the bottom bracket, the part where the pedal cranks rotate on an axle. In an apparently absent-minded daze, Campagnolo was sitting at his dinner table, gazing at the rumpled tablecloth. He took a pencil and a piece of paper and, inspired by the ruffles and folds in the cloth, there and then sketched out a design for a bottom bracket with grooves to channel away the water. He bought a vineyard and, pondering the difficulties of removing the stopper from the bottle, invented the corkscrew. (Well, a corkscrew anyway; some digging on the interweb reveals that there was an Italian-designed side-lever-arm corkscrew design already in existence, whose patent expired in 1966, perhaps handily. But, you know - legend is legend.) He also invented a nutcracker and a tennis racket with an aluminium handle.

It wasn't tennis that Eddie Merckx was thinking of, though, when he delivered the eulogy at Campagnolo's funeral in 1983; "you were the most loyal of our domestiques. The seven times that I crossed the Milan-San Remo line first, you were with me. You were with me in the snow that day I rode to victory over the Tre Cime de Lavaredo with more assurance than I had ever known. I shared every success with you." Which is a lovely Merckx tribute - 'I was bloody great, wasn't I? And so were you.'

Speaking of bloody greatness, though, that quality attaches itself in huge, opulent, gilded baroque bouquets of Montgolfier balloon proportions to the name of F.J. Davar.

F.J. Davar (I discovered his full name was, splendidly, Framdi Jamshedi Davar) is a man I feel I should have heard of, or at least regularly walked past one of his many statues. He gets one paragraph in the Raleigh cycles chapter, but it's got a whole book's worth of material in it, because by May 1929 he had bicycled across South America to reach Iquitos, having previously travelled - are you ready for this? - forty-seven thousand miles through thirty-six countries. He was the first to cross the Andes on a bicycle. He was the first to cross the Sahara on a bicycle, a comparatively short jaunt of just under three thousand miles. An American newspaper reported that he was heading through Central America and that his "Raleigh was giving him good service and is in quite good order."

If there's a book about this man I want to know, I don't care what the proof reading's like.



(Edit: apparently there is, and he wrote it himself. F. J. Davar's 'Cycling Across the Roof of the World' was presumably written in a long period of having a nice lie down - although, no, apparently not that long, as it was published in 1929. He must have started writing it resting on the handlebars during some of the slower uphill sections of the Andes. It's wrong not to mention that he did not do the epic Andes trip alone but in the company of one Herr G. Sztavjanik. I want to read this book.)

It's Resurgam All Over Again.

Dawes Warwick.

My Dawes Warwick, all nicely tidied up.

George, about ready to step out in the 2011 colours.

I've probably spent entirely too much time and money on this bike, considering its worth, but 'worth' is a relative term. On the one hand I cocked up quite a lot of the detail work on the respray, but on the other it now looks - from a suitably respectful distance - rather splendid. It's even got lug lining. No, you can't see a close up of that. Stay over there.

It's the most comfortable frame I've had, so while it's not a lost classic British lightweight, I picked it up cheap on eBay, it was made at a time when even the medium quality stuff wasn't being mass produced and welded together in Taiwan, and I've had a lot of fun out of restoring it, not to mention some knuckle-bitingly frustrating moments. So now I hope this Spring will see me back out and pootling around the countryside trying to jettison some of the sloth that has settled around my midsection.

Where we live is great cycling country. As a teenager I used to spend hours cycling with two friends, even on gloomy winter days, we'd ride out bundled up and make a cup of tea on a Trangia. We went on cycling holidays to the Lake District and North Yorkshire, which were the occasions respectively for (still) the furthest I've cycled on one day - 111 miles - and one of the worst hangovers I've ever had, which debilitated me in a tent sweat/dry heaves inferno for a whole day. I still remember camping in a wet tent in the pouring rain in a forest outside of Lockerbie, the overheard awestruck campsite comment that "those boys have been on the road for three days", and the feeling of cycling down the road beside Windermere on the first bright, sunny day for a week, whizzing through the shadowy patterns of leaves. (Twenty years ago! Stone the crows.)

Lancaster was a good place to get out on my bike, too, to try and shake off some of the unemployment rage in the Trough of Bowland and up and down the coast. The West Midlands did for me as a cyclist, though, as there wasn't anywhere I really fancied going, and to get there I would have to run the risk of fast, insane traffic and fast, insane drivers. For a long time I didn't even have a bike, and one I did have I gave to my friend Col as a winter trainer.

Anyway; George is about ready, we're just waiting on a gear cable and a 102mm bottom bracket so that my Campagnolo (I said, Campagnolo - I photographed that side so you could get a good look at it) Chorus chainset will mesh smoothly with the Shimano front derailleur, and we'll be off. Oh, and I need to lower the hole to secure the new rear brakes through, as they don't quite reach the wheel rim, despite being re-drilled once already, and being long-reach. So just a bit of fiddling and that'll be it.

I did actually have one bike during my stay in the Midlands, when I splashed a daft amount of money on a Claud Butler RoubaixTriple:


It was a fairly overcooked decision as it was about six times the bike that I needed, but I'd discovered that a young lady I was interested in was going out with someone so I lashed out at my disgruntlement with the sharp edge of a debit card.

As a machine it was rather glorious. It was razor thin and light and greyhound-eager to go but I felt like an imposter upon it. Had I ever gone out in the rain I would no doubt have noticed how appallingly filthy I got in the absence of mudguards, but it never came to that. I couldn't help but notice how meagre the tyres were and how buttock-cleavingly uncomfortable the saddle was; "I were right about that saddle," essentially, which isn't the correct thought for a man lashed to the helm of a carbon fibre and alloy index-geared road monster. And if I wanted to carry home a bag of potatoes or a piano, where would I lash it? Also there was a big danger I could get into conversations with strangers about 'kit.'

In the end, nice as it was to look at in the cubby under the stairs, I sold it. So I don't have the most expensive bike I ever bought, but I am on the other hand getting married to the young lady, so you know - strikes and gutters.



(Sorry about the unusually insistent captioning, but when you do a Google image search for 'Dawes Warwick' it's my bike that comes up first, and I'm keeping it pimped.)

Twenty Lire and a Salami Sandwich.

Fausto Coppi - oil on board, 16" x 22".

So, new territory. A human being.

Hang on, you're saying: Fausto Coppi, two time Tour De France winner, cycling legend and cause celebre? Il Campionissimo himself? How come you move in such elevated circles, Rich - not to mention that he's been dead since 1960: what gives?

Well.

I was doing a lot of reading about the Tour de France and Coppi's story is a very interesting one. He was, above all, a phenomenally good cyclist. One of the giants of the sport, to this day. The interruption of his career by the Second World War (he was a prisoner of war in North Africa*) leaves it open to speculation about how much he might have won, but in the years either side of the war he was the dominant force in cycle racing, his achievements only ever exceeded by Eddie Mercx.

*(British cyclist Len Levesley, stretchered out with polio, awoke to find Fausto Coppi giving him a haircut.)

A certain amount of scandal pursued him - and by 'a certain amount' I mean that when his affair with Giulia Occhini ('the Woman in White') was revealed, Pope Pius XII told him to return to his wife and refused to bless the Giro d'Italia because Coppi was riding in it. Italy in the 1950s was not a place to look tolerantly on adultery, particularly when the Pope doesn't like you, and Coppi was publicly execrated, abused and spat at by spectators. After the scandal broke, his career went into a decline, and in later years he was described as almost literally a shadow of his former self: "a magnificent and grotesque washout of a man, ironical towards himself, nothing but the warmth of simple friendship could penetrate his melancholia."

Another, unignorable, fact about Coppi that would be as familiar today as tabloid headlines of a sportsman caught in adultery was his open admission to using drugs. Famously, when asked if he took "la bomba" (Italian road slang for amphetamines) he replied yes, when it was necessary. And when was it necessary? "Almost all the time."

There don't seem to be any great cyclists about whom you can't have reservations, but despite everything there is the legendary litany of Coppi's victories: five Giro d'Italia, five Tours of Lombardy, two Tours de France (he only ever rode three), Milan - San Remo three times, the horrible Paris-Roubaix, the hour record and the World Championship. He was good.

And he had an interesting face. He had a strange look about him on a bike, almost as if his legs were too long for it, but contemporary accounts all say how fluid, elegant and just damned stylish he was, as well as being tremendously effective, obviously. So, greatness and controversy, with style. That was what I wanted to paint.

The first thing that came to mind, almost before I'd really thought about who it would be, was the posture. I had Titian's Portrait of a Man with a Quilted Sleeve in mind:

because I wanted to allude to that sort of classical Italian greatness. I chose the deep red background for the same reasons, because it was imperial and at the same time suggestive of infamy. Also the sleeve in Titian's portrait says a great deal about the sitter, it sticks his opulence and wealth right there under the viewer's nose - get a load of that. I wanted Coppi's arm, the wiry muscle, the tan and that pallid band of flesh under his sleeve, to be as much of a statement about who and what he was. The goggles too were a symbol of his profession, but mainly I just thought they were pretty cool. I had to look up a lot of photographs to see whether such goggles were an anachronism or not because I was dead keen to put them in. Most of the photographs show Coppi riding in a pair of pretty snazzy sunglasses, but I came across a picture of Jean Robic in the 1947 Tour de France wearing a pair so that was enough for me. (Jean Robic won the 1947 Tour de France, and was five feet one inch tall. But that's another story.)

Rather than just copy (pardon) one photograph, I did some sketches based on a number of photographs, to get familiar with his head as a three-dimensional object of changing expression:

In the absence of a model (Mr Coppi, as mentioned above, being dead for the last fifty years) I wanted some suitably scrawny, pigeon chested individual to step in and pose. Luckily I have one such person close to hand. The final composite image was a horrible mess, badly patched together (with overdubbed arm and goggles) on GIMP, but all roughly in proportion so I could transfer it onto a grid for scaling up:

For the scaling up I used an OHP transparency divided into 5 and 7. I cut the board to the same proportions as a sheet of A4 paper and marked out the grid with thread, also increased by the same proportions. I was able to sketch out the outlines according to what was in each box. It meant I was able to have real colours, shadows, tones and the fall of the fabric to work from.

I won't go through the whole process of painting, but suffice to say I learned a lot. Not least that the tiniest brush strokes can alter entire expressions, and even the degree of resemblance. It's extraordinary. I worked and re-worked the mouth and the end of his splendid nose so many times. I was also haunted by his startling resemblance to Dimitar Berbatov.

I looked up the classic Bianchi shirt (an Italian rider had to be wearing a Bianchi shirt) and if it's not baby blue then I'm sure someone will correct me but frankly it's too bloody late now. Also in real life he's less pink than it looks in the photograph. And yeah, I'm happy with it. There may well be some tinkering yet to do, though...

And if you've read this far I'll reward your perseverance with the Fact that twenty lire and a salami sandwich were a fifteen year old Coppi's prize for winning his first race.

Putting on the Style

I lost a plug from the handlebar end a while ago, and anyway it had 'Bikehut' on it in big, clear letters, which were visible no matter how much black marker I applied.

My friend Colin - cyclist and Nature Reservist (in the event of war he is camouflague) - asked a while ago for some champagne corks for just this task, and they've been lurking in my car for months now so I thought I'd put them to some use. If it's good enough for his Mercian, I reasoned, then it'll do for my eBay Dawes. I spent a very pleasant half hour whittlin' with a Stanley knife and - voila. Bar end plugs with a bit of panache.

Putting the 'bar' into handlebar. Yaboom.

Strangely Like Cattle ... But Cattle on Bikes

The Pave, oil on board, 24" x 18".

This year's Tour de France was fantastic, not least because of the use of the treacherous cobbled roads over which the Paris- Roubaix road race ("The Hell of the North") is ridden.

Dust, colour, spectacle and noise, all at collarbone-threatening speeds, it was magnificent to watch.

Next year, Andy - next year.

Actually, I'll add something. Ambivalent as I may be about the finished product (I'm in post-painting tristesse) that little bleeder in the yellow t-shirt there on the left gave me no end of trouble. That he ended up with a fecking great big hat on is not unconnected with the difficulties I had with his face.

Resurgam

Dawes Warwick, completely cleaned and restored and repainted, minus only the rear carrier, which I'm about to put on. This afternoon I fitted new brake levers, assembled the brakes, attached the computer, and pootled off up to the road end and back, and came back grinning like a goon. It's marvellous!

I Am That Pale Man

Language, as has been noted elsewhere, is often an expression of power. I tend to experience this most often in garages, for example the time when a mechanic showed me my [I forget what] which was rusted into some clump that wasn't recognisably a part of any car. I went 'tch!' nonetheless.

This morning, I was in a bicycle shop and looking for the bit of tube that goes on the back of the bike and through which the cable to the rear derailleur runs. I'd settled on 'cable housing' as I'd read it and it sounded appropriately technical. To raise the ante a little the bloke at the counter before me was a tractor repair man who had previously repaired tractors for the British Antarctic Survey and mine clearing machines in Afghanistan, so they were practically sweeping testosterone-based competence out of the shop with brooms.

So, I told the Man I was looking for rear derailleur cable housing. I even pointed to one. "Just like that," I said.

He said, "index gears?"

Bastard.

I said: " The warriors are cutting timber with brash chainsaws; they are trimming hardwood pit-props and loading them;/Is that an order? they hoot at the peremptory lorry driver, who laughs; he is also a warrior. / They are driving long-nosed tractors, slashing pasture in the dinnertime sun; / they are are fitting tappets and valves, the warriors, or giving finish to a surfboard. / Addressed on the beach by a pale man, they watch waves break and are reserved, refusing pleasantry; / they joke only with fellow warriors, chaffing about try-ons and the police, not slighting women. / Making Timber a word of power, Con-rod a word of power, Sense a word of power, the Regs. a word of power."

He said, "That'll be one fifty."

What's The Score?

It's upwards from here: the taking apart has been completed and the putting back together starts. This is my restored Dawes resplendent in midnight blue - two cans of Rover Midnight Blue and then, when Halfords ran out, two cans of Peugeot Midnight Blue. This morning I took it down from its hanging in the garage roof (managed to chip the paint in carrying it between the garage and the house) and applied some Turtle Wax and brought it up to a wondrous lustre.

It's not flawless, but considering I did it in the garage it's not bad, and the most important bits are glossy and fine - the most important bits being those that I can see when I'm on it.

From now on it's putting on shiny new parts and cleaned and polished old parts. I shan't be riding it, though, the roads here get dusty and then wet and muddy. So I'll be on the lookout for something scruffy to actually use.

The Joy of Shed

A shed, yesterday.

I have a shed.

It's the first shed I've ever had. I installed a workbench (I say workbench, it's two planks of wood at the moment) and cleared out the stuff that had ended up there as the overflow from the house move.

I began to turn my mind to the renovation of my Dawes, now that Judge Dredd is done and dusted, and the prospect of tinkering with it in a bona fide shed is an appealing one. As it happens, we went to Kelso this morning to pick up a mountain bike and a lightweight aluminium frame that we bagged through Freecycle. They were from a man called John (thanks, John), who was being slightly forced to get rid of them by his wife, who seemed to think he had come up to some sort of bicycle plimsoll line. I had the chance to see what she meant, because John showed us his shed. "Do you restore bikes?" he asked, and I said I was working on one - hesitantly, because I could tell from the way he asked this was a man who'd spent the greater part of his life tinkering in sheds, knew vastly more than me and could probably identify fourteen brands of British Lightweight by feel alone. And then he took us to see his "projects" he was working on.

Man, what wasn't he working on. He had a couple of hand built Flying Scots, a 1960s Dawes frame waiting for stripping and powder coating, a couple of Brompton-type things (he said he had a bit of a thing for small-wheeled bicycles), and was on the lookout for a Raleigh Twenty folder, and he'd just completed a fixed-wheel project with a frame he'd got from Vancouver. And there were others, stacked and dangling in said shed; road frames, mountain bikes, BMXs he was doing up for neighbours and so on. He delicately removed a lightweight alloy mountain bike frame from a cardboard box; it was worth about four thousand pounds and, I couldn't help but notice, splendidly finished in Tartan. "If I'd not been here," John said, "my wife would probably have just given you this."

As we were leaving, he was still offering tools, odd bits and pieces, handlebar stems, nuts and so on. And this was all Freecycle, mind, he didn't want anything for it. I take my hat off to you, John; thanks a lot. I've put them in the garage and will be compiling a good bike for Laura out of the one frame and two bikes she's got. Which brings me back to the shed.

I can't wait to start hanging tools from nails and finding an old chest of drawers to put stuff in. I dream of one day having a drawer entirely full of anonymous and inscrutable offcuts of metal such as I found in my dad's workshop this afternoon when I was looking for something else. In the meantime, I'll be happy to aim for a chilly autumn evening, a mug of tea, a small portable radio, the Sports Report theme tune and the voice of James Alexander Gordon. Magic.

My Lovely Dawes

I know, it's supposed to be a blog for artistic musings, and I have got plans for a post discussing heavyweight cartridge paper (yes - I can sense your anticipation, it's almost feral) but I bought this splendid thing yesterday.
It's a Dawes Warwick. Some interweb nerdism reveals very little, but it's from about 1984 and isn't a great lost classic but a decent mid-range pootler, which will do me. I've already stripped it down to the frame; mudguards, lights, all cables, tyres and wheels will be replaced, and I'm de-griming the gears etc. to see what they're like underneath the cack. I've ordered a new set of decals and I'm already thinking about what colour to have it resprayed. Perhaps a heart warmingly lovely Britsh Racing Green. Mmmmmm Racing Green...

Anyway, it's a sign of things to come. We're moving back to a part of the world where I can get out on a bike without feeling like I'm about to be hoovered under the wheels of Norbert Dentressangle or petulently swiped aside by some wide boy in his pimped up Corsa, and I can't wait.

Finally, a word on the collection: I'd like to thank the planners of the Midlands for putting at least three roads with the same name within a couple of miles of each other; I'd like to thank the seller who waited so patiently; I'd like to thank the lady who we interrupted in the course of her evening and asked for a bicycle she did not have but who was helpful anyway; I'd like to thank the gentleman who tried to help us despite the fact I appeared not to know the name or address of who I was looking for; I'd like to thank my partner Laura who lent me her mobile phone; I'd like to thank my mother who logged on to my eBay account to access the message containing the seller's phone number; I'd like to thank myself most of all, for not bringing my own mobile, for not knowing the seller's name, and most of all for getting his house number completely wrong in the first place and making us an hour late. I still say eighteen sounds confusingly like eleven.

That's not our kitchen, by the way, it's the eBay image. In the photo I took our house was such a mess I was too ashamed to post it.