See this bike?
It wasn’t always like that. The picture was taken after the love-injection exercise.
When my friend GA43i found it in a garbage bin in Brixton, its handlebars were dropped. So the gear changers were not there; they were on either side of the bar between the pedals and the handle bar.
Continue readingTo give praise where it is due, I should report that I have used the lifts at Greenwich tunnel a few times in the past few weeks and they were both working as they should all those times.
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Last Thursday I crossed the Greenwich foot tunnel, part of ‘Cycle National Route no. 1’, with a fairly loaded bike.
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Five years ago, a group of London activists cycled to a “Smash Edo” demonstration against the arms trade in Brighton. With them was Marie Vesco, who was part of the Food not Bombs group which regularly handed out food in Brixton.
14 miles north of Brighton, she was killed on the A23 by two careless drivers who were never prosecuted.
As I was preparing the announcement for the ride, I googled for web pages about Marie and what happened to her and I found a report from the Inquest.
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Quite an uneventful critical mass, last Friday 27th of March 2013, from where I was riding – apart from a fire emergency situation that gave police a justified reason to divert the ride.
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Things I have learned as a possible witness in the last Critical Mass trial; in no particular order: Continue reading
I have never gone to a cycling lesson but I have friends who teach about the safety of it. And I keep reading some golden rules at conversations especially during critical mass London.
You come out of the night club. You feel the cold of the night, but you know your body will get warm again after a few minutes of pedalling. You get on your bike and it takes you away from clubland, away from the cars vomiting their music and into the stillness of suburbia.
The road feels peaceful because it is night time, it is silent all around there is no traffic and no one has thrown an empty bottle of Vodka at you in the past three or four months. Biking feels safe, fast, quiet. Silence between the only two beings that matter right now: you and your bike.
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The next three days were similar in structure to one another, although the mood in ourselves, and around us, changed gradually until it was completely different on the Sunday than it had been the first day.
The day routine started with breakfast and a neighbourhood meeting almost at the same time. Then the camp would re-organise itself in working teams until lunch, and then whatever had been left unfinished in the morning, would continue to be done in the afternoon.
Food for some thousand people had to arrive on foot from the nearest roundabout, about half a mile away, because vehicles were no longer allowed down the local road that led to the camp.