Barry Covington Memorial Rides, Sunday 4th October 2020
The first year we ran the ‘Barry’, I remember a glorious sunrise lighting up the Crystal Palace transmitter, like a radiant Eiffel Tower, on my ride to Penge. We we treated to an almost indecently warm and sunny day to enjoy the lanes before gathering for a feast back at the Velodrome to remember our lost pal. A feast
Lockdown Week 27, 25th September 2020
[Editor’s note: This week marks 6 whole months since the UK entered lockdown.] In the week we’re preparing for our Barry Covington memorial rides, I’m not sure we needed reminding that we sometimes take our lives in our hands when we go out on our bikes, mixing it with impatient drivers and imperfect roads. We certainly
Easing of Lockdown Week 26, 18th September 2020
I’ll get to this Sunday in a minute. First, I want to talk about Sunday 4th October 2020. Part of what makes a club, or any insititution is its history. Out of its history, its traditions. Barry Covington Memorial Event 3 years ago, we created a new tradition to honour the memory of one of
Easing of Lockdown Week 25, 11th September 2020
I’ve rather got out of the habit of using this Friday email to give free reign to my self-indulgent ramblings with the vaguest possible connection to cycling. If you’ve missed these, then get a cup of tea and join me for ten minutes. If your heart just sank, feel free to cut to the chase
Easing of Lockdown Week 23, 28th August 2020
I think we are all a little frustrated by the continuing restrictions on group riding. I tried to find out if it’s actually illegal for us to ride in groups of more than 6 people, but all I can find are fairly ambiguous statements about ‘guidelines’. Illegal or not, it doesn’t seem to be the
Easing of Lockdown Week 19, 31st July 2020
We’re often accused of being the snowflake generation. Well, maybe not my generation, more the millennials who are my children’s cohort. We’ve not really seen war and pestilence in our lifetimes, and you might have expected such a so-called soft generation to have been somewhat broadsided by this wretched Covid thing. I actually think we’re
Easing of Lockdown Week 15, 5th July 2020
Seemed to go alright didn’t it? Fancy giving it another go? We’ll run the same routine of staggered start times and different locations, still with a limit of 6 riders per group. I have repeated Niki’s beautifully conceived guidelines from last week at the bottom of this email; please do your utmost to stick to them and
Easing of Lockdown Week 14, 26th June 2020
If you want signs that the lockdown is done, check out the pictures from Bournemouth or Anfield. Let’s hope that this last few months of isolation have not been for nothing. In the mix of human tragedy and economic catastrophe, the distruption to the first half of our cycling year has been a relatively small inconvenience,
Lockdown Week 12, 12th June 2020
Doesn’t seem to be getting any easier does it. I’ve tried to keep tabs on what we are and aren’t supposed to do in terms of meeting up with other people, but that does mean watching the news and I’m afraid I can only cope with so much. It feels to me as if we’re
Lockdown Week 6, 1st May 2020
A friend of mine used to be in the SAS. I’ve always been fascinated by stories of survival against impossible odds and John must have got fed up with my persistent thirst for tales of heroism. For someone like me whose only experience of danger is overcooking it coming down Titsey, his life seemed infinitely