StreetCowboy

Saturday will see us riding our 20-20-24; 20 on 20” wheels; it’ll be a city ride, so I’m not targeting 20 kph. We’ll ride to Bukit Bintang, I’ll have my phone face up on Strava, and we’ll stop at 20 km and go to the nearest pub. That’s the plan, anyway, but the best-laid plans o’ mice an’ men gang aft agley.

Health and Efficiency

All roads lead to Rome, even if you go by the barbers'. Or maybe look the other way

In the spirit of the thread, I have done a Youtube search for songs about scissors. Have you ever changed the subject? I'd not listened to this before I posted it - "fire" in one syllable - that's like Christmas! It's "FIRE" as in "Fire" not "Fiiyah" as in Martin Offiah. But if even Stuart Adamson can't get it right I am paddling a canoe 400 miles upstream. Miles, not Miyals.

He'd have probably not enumerated three in that case. Not when there were scissors in the house.

My father told me that if there hadn't been three tunnels on the train into Edinburgh he'd have never got married, and I have no reason to believe that is true, and I haven't even checked if there are three tunnels.

You may or may not recall that I enjoyed my first trip to Hua Hin much more than my other, and we stumbled somewhat intoxicated to get the sleeper back to Bangkok Hualamphong... Well, the least said about those escapades the better, but in terms of songs about trains, which do you find the most romantic? Clarksville? London? Central? Or here? Or 400 miles away? In terms of tragic sadness, I think you can't beat "It's a <deleted>e state of affairs, Tommy, and all the fresh air in the world won't make any bloody difference". But that was not specific to the train nor the station.

When it comes to smashing blokes, I think you would need to search hard to match Johnny Wilkinson or Kevin Sinfield

Paris - Roubaix clashed with our regular Sunday ride, so I decided to do it, rather than watch it. I had to substitute gravel for traditional cobbles, but it was a sound planning guideline. The first section of gravel - a pretty pointless detour from our regular route through the village - had been resurfaced, and qualified as Village Tarmac rather than gravel. The old Jalan Damansara has been resurfaced as well, and I can see that after 12 years of construction, that road might be nearing completion. Similarly, they have resurfaced the road that leads up to our office, and when they’ve done the downhill direction I can see that road being less attractively quaint. Especially if they close the concrete batching plant, and the cement trucks stop piddling obstacles all the way up… I had thought long, and hard to find a route that took us through the gravel at the furniture showroom, over the Jerry bridge and up the quiet estate lane to the steep downhill to Damansara Perdana. Long, hard, and unsuccessfully. Instead, we went the opposite direction. And that is a climb! A long, hard climb, and, after a short rest, successful at the second attempt. I didn’t try to find the gravel back road behind the Chinese village and the construction workers’ accommodation - the time we rode that in the other direction it was flooded, and we both ended up with one wet foot… So we carried on to The Leper Colony - I had hoped it would be quiet during Ramadan, but it seemed only the competent drivers were staying home fasting, and we crawled through as usual. Then, we’re into the new highway junction construction zone, and the roads are different every time we ride them, but we could follow the local motorcyclists, and before you can say ”Which… “ ”Last time…” ”But…” ”Motorbike” we were back on tarmac. That took us out to the Pasar Segi (the highlight of our St Rongbow Day melon-scrumping adventure) I had not planned the route on Google Maps - there were too many sections that Google would not allow - so we had a mid-ride route change but we know those roads well enough, and we were soon fanging it in the traffic into Jalan Sungai Buloh. My buddy, for safety reasons, prefers to take the low road, and the traffic lights, at fly-over junctions ”The New Boy would’ve gone over the top” ”He’d have turned back at The Leper Colony” ”No, he’d have stoically soldiered on, and then complained ‘You never told me it was going to get worse!’ “ If I’ve learnt one thing from our ride through the floods in Hulu Langat in Jan. 2021, it would be this: That you should turn back at the first opportunity, because when it gets worse, and you eventually turn back, you have to ride through all this a second time… We didn’t, and I didn’t, so that is a lesson that I still have to learn. I am not looking forward to learning that lesson, but I know it is on the curriculum. The next gravel section was a familiar road - Jalan Montfort - I think used for the laughingly named Skypark Rail Link, which terminates near a car park not far from Subang Airport. The politicians that spent the public money on it clearly didn’t get their envelopes from The Operator… The road was blocked to vehicles, which was new… it seemed slightly overgrown from lack of traffic and then…the riverbank under the road had been washed away, and the road had collapsed right in front of a small Indian temple. A young gentleman observing his observances at the temple said we could go round behind the temple, but please to keep away from the shrines as we were wearing our shoes…It’s handy that you can still get to the temple from either direction. In the view looking down-river you can see the small temple in the distance. Once you get to the end of that road, and through the posh housing estate, past the Japanese School and a golf course, you are not far up the Airport Highway before the turn-off to the shooting range; a courteous driver helped us make the right turn at the roundabout, and we’re off past the University Aviation Department, some aviation industry workshops, an international school, to the shooting range, and the gravel road beyond around a detention pond. It all looked different since I was last there five years ago, but the gravel road round the detention pond still ended in a dead end overlooking Sungai Damansara. I’d wanted to follow a path the other way round the detention pond, in the hope of finding a route out to the airport road, but instead, we found another herd of cows, some folks enjoying a picnic by the pond, and a dead end on the opposite side of Sungai Damansara. If it had started to rain, I’d have learned the lesson mentioned above, but luckily, we got from there back to the pub dry. I don’t know if I enjoy gravel rides more looking forward to them, or looking back on them, but certainly not when I’m riding them.

A few nights back, I had cycled out to buy beer and bread, thinking that while I was about it, I would stop for dinner and a few pints at the pub next door to the mini-market. You can imagine my dismay when I discovered that the supermarket had shut up shop, leaving us nothing but a couple of 7-11s, some local convenience stores, and a few greengrocers that close before 8 pm. And all the pubs and restaurants… So I set off to Centrepoint, and the slightly larger supermarket, but took a sudden unexpected dismount at a pothole that had been lurking under a puddle at the get-away from some traffic lights -seen below photographed in sunnier and drier conditions No harm done, I bought a fancy loaf of bread and two six-packs to lash on the rear rack, and I was back in the pub for sardine masala and three pints of Guinness quicker than you can say “Lucky the lights were red”

As far as I am aware, you can ride a bicycle anywhere that you want to, and it is a matter for the police to prosecute you if that is against the law, not casual passers-by. Sadly, traffic planners may not understand what is safe, or unsafe, for cyclists, and that issue may not be high on their list of priorities in any case. "Regardless of whether our road is the safest for you to ride on, by posting a sign prohibiting it, we can claim absolution from any accident that you suffer on our road" My view is that we all have a duty to drive or cycle, walk, pogo-stick or space-hopper as best we can, and any accident that is down to our negligence cannot be completely absolved by posting a sign saying "you are not welcome here". However, in the absence of fault or carelessness by others, it is hard to claim against them. SC

As a law abiding person, I trust the judges to make sure that conviction is sound more than I trust the police to make sure that they get find the right man

That's a great point, Swissie. Maybe it is time for internet life to cast away from the mundane, the temporal, and focus only on the Virtual, on what goes down in the Virtual World, whether that be this forum, or Youtube, or anything else that does not require a relationship with the temporal world of concrete real life. The Cycling Forum will not be going that way.

Do you have a ranking for that? As a big-spending Big-Nose, I have found Thailand quite welcoming, albeit potentially bureaucratic, and I am not sure how people from neighbouring countries on whom the economy relies for cheap labour find the bureaucracy SC

Don't tell him, Pike. He might suspect we all think that.