This summer, when it was really hot, I bought a hat for Brian Eno. He was about to go on stage at Greenbelt Festival to talk to my friend Martin Wroe, when Martin sagely observed that it was indeed really hot, and that Mr Eno might like a hat. So, since I was in the …
I do not possess a torque-wrench. I have never possessed a torque-wrench. It is one of the many ways in which I have failed to express that particular masculine ideal which involves a tool for every job and an intimate knowledge of how it should be deployed. Now, clearly, being conversant with tools is but …
On Tuesday this week, I rode my bike the five miles from home to the bus without stopping, never once taking my feet off the pedals to touch the ground. This is a thing. My route takes me through 27 sets of traffic lights at junctions and six more sets at pedestrian crossings. There are …
A few weeks ago, on a perfect autumn day, I took the train to Cambridge and cycled a rambling, rolling 84 miles home to London. I know what you’re thinking. Well, it represented some solid exercise and I had coffee with my friend Robert, whom I seldom see. And, as is ever the way, it …
In the first week of June, I broke three needles in the sewing machine that Miriam, Esther and Silas gave me for Christmas, and I stripped and rebuilt my bike. So I ordered more needles from the venerable haberdasher's William Gee of Dalston, got on my clean bike and went to get them. I tweeted …
I didn't do too well in the first lockdown this year and I spent too much time feeling purposeless and worried, not really about getting ill but about losing my job. One day in May I decided to go for a ride on my bike to see if it would help. I tweeted as I …
On Monday, I rebuilt my bike. It’s a twice-yearly ritual and one of my most satisfying. Stripping it down to the bare frame, every part laid out on the kitchen table from the bottom bracket to the brake blocks, everything examined and inspected, cleaned and polished, is a ruminative, meditative exercise. It’s the moment when …
My bike is important to me, despite the fact that I occasionally hobble in here in various states of dishevelment after falling off it. It’s never been to Selsey Bill but I have been up to Muswell Hill. For more than a decade, the best bit of my bike has been my saddle. My parents …
I spent Wednesday this week with some of my oldest friends, Nick and Kate, and Kim. These are friends I grew up with, went to school with, friends I still love forty-odd years later. I don’t see them as often as I’d like but sometimes we still need each other. And you all, you lovely …
Since I came off the bike last week, I’ve been very sore. Shaken and stirred. The timing has been bad. The Easter break is hardly finished, and let’s face it, getting injured or sick after the holidays is such a cliché; it’s like saying ‘the cheque’s in the post’. Yeah, right. And because it’s a …