I was up and out on the road early this morning, cycling in the English countryside in the cool damp grey that is passing for summer this year. Went thirty miles.  I needed to, if not for the mind-cleansing freedom of such a ride then to expend the calories in my Father’s Day present which had been given to me a few hours early, on Saturday night – two kilograms of M&Ms! I’ve always had a soft spot for M&Ms, the plain ones, of course. They were, and are, my old favourite indulgence of choice and the foundation of many a glorious cycling expedition back in the days when I was a ropey armed teenager roaming the back roads of Carroll County New Hampshire on an old Schwinn Varsity. We called them ‘supplies’ back then, in the manner of proper explorers, and no expedition worthy of the name could...
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With the Tour de France coming up soon and racing aficionados talking up the prospects of their favourites, here’s an interesting revelation, fresh from this week’s issue of Nature magazine, on wattage and athleticism, one that puts the energy output of the likes of Mark Cavendish and his fellow burn-up-the-road sprinters into startling perspective. The article in Nature was about cheetahs – a favourite subject of mine having spent a lot of time bouncing the back blocks of the Masai Mara and the Serengeti doing a feature on them for National Geographic (November 2012) A team led by a Dr Alan Wilson, who is a professor of Locomotor Biometrics at the Royal Veterinary College in London, affixed some highly sophisticated collars to five cheetahs in Botwswana’s Okavango Delta. These collars, more than 10 years in development, were equipped with GPS units, accelerometers and gyroscopes which could provide all sorts...
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Completely off-subject other than as a word-play vaguely suggestive of cycling is the curious copper coin my twelve year-old daughter Lucy received in change the other day when she bought some sort of knick-knack in town while on an outing with her friends. Her purchase came to 99p and handing over a pound coin, she was given what she thought was a penny coin in change. Upon closer examination the coin turned out to be a very old Victorian farthing, dated 1860, with the bust of a youngish Queen Victoria on the obverse and a sceptred Britannia on the reverse. Now I can remember, as an eager young coin-collecting child back in America nearly fifty years ago, being delighted when going through my father’s pocket change and finding a couple of turn-of-the-century Indian pennies. In those days you could also find the odd Mercury dime or Buffalo nickel too...
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Thanks to our damp and chilly spring – the coldest in Britain in over fifty years, apparently – the wildflowers all got a late start this year and now, with the weather finally warming up, they are all getting ready to bloom in unison with boffins from the Met Office suggesting this year spring-early summer could see a massive amount of pollen in the air. Such a bumper crop of late-blooming wildflowers might not be good news to anybody who suffers from hay fever, especially not coming at the same time the grass pollens start to drift in the air, but for those of us touring cyclists who like to see a rush of colour along the roadside this promises to be a real treat. I love these speckles of yellows and blues and scarlet reds amongst the grasses and wish I knew more about them. It is the...
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