Month: January 2016

I bought Ol’ Paint in 2009. She’s a steel-framed Marin, and she’d been sitting in the shop’s inventory for more than a year when I walked up and offered cash.

Ol’ Paint is designed for city riding, and I bought her with the idea that 90% of my riding would be daily commuting. (I’d have bought something with drop bars otherwise.) That hasn’t proved true. But she’s a very nimble bike, and I like that. Her main shortcoming for Tokyo riding is the width of the handlebars. There are just too many situations where she’s a bull in a china shop, and I’ve only made it worse by adding special grips.

My other big addition has been the clipless pedals, which came a couple of years ago. I’ve already grown completely used to them and feel uncomfortable when I ride without my cleats.

She’s had a new set of tyres over the years, a couple of inner tube changes, some general cable adjustment and cleaning, and a bottom bracket replacement. Right, and one broken spoke.

There have been a few parking lot bumps ‘n’ bangs and a couple of head-over-heels accidents as well.

I may yet spring for a new paint job …

This is an embellishment of a joke my mother told me ages ago. You have been warned.

So there’s a fellow, call him Nigel. He’s a middle-aged bloke, kind of quiet. Actually, he’s a bit of a swot and not very popular with the ladies. Or with anyone, for that matter. Just an inoffensive guy with glasses and a shiny pate surrounded by a fringe of ginger hair, the sort who sits quietly in the corner of the HR office and gets his work done quietly and efficiently, if not brilliantly.

Now Nigel’s hobby, his one spark of life, his raison d’être, is his car. It’s not much of a car, an old Triumph with just a bit of rust — Nigel didn’t go to public school and land a peach job in Pater’s ministry — but he’s inordinately proud of it and he lavishes all the care on it that his lordship might on a prize racehorse. In short, it’s the thing that gets Nigel out of his mother’s duplex in Slough on the weekends. Continue reading What gear are you in?