I Want To Ride My Bicycle

I bought a bicycle this past weekend. It's actually been on my mind for some time, so I took it as a sign that I needed a bike when Westminster Council kindly installed a bike rack on the street outside my flat. Their decision almost justifies my £30/month share of the council tax.

The cycle is a Carrera make, a hybrid type, in a matte-black finish. Only one of these attributes was relevant to my purchase, and it would be churlish to suggest otherwise. After all, there are few more important things than the bike looking cool, if it is to ridden and enjoyed.

On Sunday, when it was thirty degrees and sunny, I rode the bike from Bayswater to London Fields to meet some friends at the pool there. This is a distance of about 13 or 14 kilometres, which I'm very proud of. It's worth mentioning that London is pancake-flat, which is immensely helpful for cyclists.

Yet even cooler than zipping around London in the fresh air is how I can automatically record my movement with Nokia Sports Tracker. This is a neat application that came pre-installed with my recently-acquired N82. The application uses the phone's internal GPS receives to record my travel and infer other information like average speed etc. It can even automatically upload the data to the web to share. Check out my journey from London Fields to Shoreditch to see what I mean.

A Very London Day

I'm back in London after a few weekends away: first Madrid, then Brisbane. I wanted to really appreciate being back home with "a very London day"... that is, a day doing things that made the most of living in one of the world's most exciting cities, and to remind me why I live in one of the world's most over-populated, stressful, and under-resourced cities.

That was the plan at least, and part of that plan was walking over to Portobello Road for a paella from the market, a quick wander through the stalls, an afternoon sunbathe in Kensington Gardens, a quick trip to the gym, and an afternoon in Soho. However, before I knew it on this Saturday, three weeks of laundry soon laid waste to my plans.

I didn't venture out of the house until 3pm, to go to gym. I arrived half an hour later to discover that I left my shorts at home. Very annoying! And not the first time I've forgotten something for gym, which makes it doubly annoying. I decided to try my trick of buying a cheap pair of shorts, say £5-£10 (thank God for sweatshops during a personal crisis like this) from H&M... but couldn't find anything suitable, or pretty, and it was about 40 degrees in that bloody airless Covent Garden basement and I was hungry and about to faint, and now also soaked in sweat, so I decided to leave. I was now an additional 45 minutes behind schedule, and still shortless.

Swallowing my pride, I trundled home on the tube. I picked up a coffee from Starbucks at Queensway, got the shorts, got back down to street level, realised I left the coffee in my flat, went back for it, walked to the tube, down stairs, onto train, exhausted. When the train stopped at Marble Arch with the inevitable announcement that we would be held at that station for "at least ten minutes" I almost burst into tears. So I got off and walked to street level, and jumped on a bus on Oxford Street - World's. Busiest. High. Street. - jam packed with Saturday traffic and shoppers. As soon as the bus doors slammed shut I thought better of my decision. The bus travelled two feet and then jerked to an abrupt halt. Ten seconds later, another two feet, another abrupt stop. And kept doing this. Over and over and over and bloody well over. I was now irritable, hot, sweaty, nauseous, still about to faint, and very very late. At least ten minutes later (yes, I KNOW, I should have stayed on the tube), I got off at the very next stop after where I got on - yes, it took that long to travel 100 metres - and walked to Bond Street station, and got back on the tube, which was start/stop for the remaining three stops to Holborn.

I got to gym and started my program at 6, around 3 hours after I first left home. I was expectedly furious that my day was ruined. RUINED! But eventually I thought otherwise. I burst out laughing when I realised that what I wanted this Saturday was a very London day... and that's precisely what I got... I'd just forgotten how this stuff happens all the bloody time in London!!