shed mouse has got some nerve. first eating our Brexit spaghetti. and now it’s taken to eating the caps off bike chain lube (that’s two bottles lost to it now) and the straps of every single piece of bike luggage I own. humane or kill trap? both make me feel sick, but then, so does the rage I have for shed mouse, so.
I was pretty dismayed by the comments on Gary Younge’s excellent piece in the FT (paywall, but the key sentence is probably: “The racism we are dealing with isn’t a question of a few bad apples but a contaminated barrel. It’s a systemic problem and will require a systemic solution.”). a lot of ‘all lives matter’, so there’s an example of people who are presumably reasonably well educated having not learned…anything at all, in the past six weeks. good to see how far uphill we have to go! black trans lives matter, btw. I’m doing my best to be braver at work and saying things that maybe previously I would’ve kept to myself. I don’t expect any medals for it; should’ve done it a long time ago.
for some reason, despite never having worked in the cycling industry, my activism lies mostly in cycling infrastructure policy. maybe because it’s, well, intersectional: safer infrastructure for getting around cities on a bike can benefit pretty much everyone. often it’s people on lower incomes who don’t have cars, and the roads are already safe for people in Range Rovers. and it’s not right that the image of cycling in London is a middle-aged man in lycra (known as a MAMIL). from TfL’s 2016 report on cycling potential: “more than half of all trips made by residents using motorised modes could be cycled.” “The most significant barrier to realising this potential is that most cyclable trips are made by people that do not cycle at all.” “According to 2016 figures from TfL, Black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) groups account for 15 per cent of current cycle trips, but 38 per cent of potentially cyclable trips.”
a qualitative insight into Black women cycling in London is Jools’ book ’Back in the Frame’ - Jools gave up cycling as a teenager, and refound it as an adult, and the book is really about that. part of this is being a teenage girl (I stopped cycling between about 11 and 21, too), but heck it’s way harder to go back into doing something when you don’t see others who look like you doing it as well.
not going to go on and on, mostly because it’s bedtime, but access to safe cycling is an intersectional political issue and yes I have been writing to my elected representatives about this.
C got offered a fully funded PhD position by UCL. I’m very proud. our main response was to stick the flat on the market and start looking at larger places near the sea, because 5 days a week in an office (or hospital, in C’s case) ain’t happening for either of us now for the foreseeable and if we’re both going to work from home, we’re going to need a bigger boat I mean place to live. made an offer on somewhere yesterday, so fingers crossed.. owned by (based on the photos up on the walls) a lesbian couple, so maybe there’ll be some pride solidarity in our favour?!
hi, sellers, if you googled me. sorry for creeping on your pictures, we like your house and would like to live there!
cancelled an American Express card that I only got because I wanted some free lounge access. free for year 1, £140 for year 2 and every year after that, and when I got the £140 bill this month I was like “wuuuuut nooooooo”. anyway, the point is: never had a lovely ‘endings’ experience: accrued points transferred to another loyalty account, “obviously the account fee will be waived”, and a little chat about holidays. I guess that’s what the account fee is for. the Amex staff were all working from home, too, so that made me feel better about phoning them up.
Dulwich Park was heaving this weekend but the Dulwich College playing fields were still empty. y'all, what you doing, just cross the street!
someone at work was selling a Surly Cross Check for £350. the part of me that loves a deal and the part of me that loves a Surly suddenly overlapped, so I walked to Streatham to pick it up. thanks Andy for helping do it up nice!
it’s all getting pretty groundhog day isn’t it. finding it hard to think about any kind of planning or whatever for the future. measuring life by our daily morning walks and ice cream sandwiches from Jones of Brockley, where I am surely in the top 5% of customers.
finished Flights by Olga Tokarczuk, which only took me about three months to get through. there were some lovely bits but overall the narrative jumping around was not what I needed. started The Return by Hisham Matar which so far is excellent.
I’m on a day off, thanks to the Queen, so I’m going to go read it in the Alleyns playing field, another of the private school fields opened up. I have come to love that field and hope they never take it back from us.
the week before last, I didn’t want to write a weeknote. last week, I just didn’t make the time for it. sorry to my 25 week streak.
we cleaned out / tided the shed. I’m simultaneously very happy about this and also a bit sad that “sorting out the shed” is no longer a thing to look forward to. questions remain outstanding over what I should do with one working and one broken Shimano 600 STI shifters/brake levers, not to mention the many spare downtube shifters I appear to have acquired in the past decade. I’ve got enough spare parts that I could build a real mongrel of a bike, although it would be a bike without a front wheel, brakes or a seatpost.
yesterday I took an hour for lunch and went out on my bike and down to Fowlds (inspired by Andy). had my first flat white in 7 weeks which was simultaneously lovely and also underwhelming. hope the first pint in the Gowlett is more momentous.
the other success story of the week is that I bought a tiny solar panel and bulb (off Amazon, sorry world). solar panel on roof of shed, bulb off a hook inside. there’s a whole world of solar panel lighting out there when you start looking. surely we can’t be far off my dream of a solar powered freezer (never say I don’t dream big).
we’ve started going for walks first thing, leaving the flat somewhere between 6.30-7am. either up to Dulwich - park or woods - or, this morning, to Brockwell Park. it’s good to get a headstart on the day, and getting back at 7.45 still feels like enough time to have a cup of tea and a sit before starting work. when did I become a willing participant in mornings?
work: continues. there was a point last week that I was like, ah, here I am, at the perfect point which intersects across all of my experience. that quickly folded into “I offer nothing unique on this project”, and now we’re back to an even keel again. what a rollercoaster! I’m getting big meeting fatigue, though, so this week I’m trying to just…get us all writing stuff down more. like the Jeff Bezos 6-page-memo thing. though, lols at having a week to write something at the pace we’re moving. nice idea, Jeff!
the only other thing of note is that I bought a new phone for the first time since February 2015. the iPhone SE is pretty much exactly the same form factor as my previous iPhone 6. I was deeply impressed with Apple’s onboarding / data transfer process - just keep the phones nearby each other, and everything will switch across, just a bit of extra auth required for banking apps - but unlocking a new phone to find it looks visually identical to the old one really exacerbated the feeling of slight underwhelm. no clean slates here! just a metal object, slightly different to your old metal object. I guess that’s the feeling when there’s the flip from smartphones being an object of novelty into being utility items. but at least Strava tracks my runs more accurately now.