waiting for the white horses

Midsummer in the Vale of Pewsey. With Avebury just over the hill, and Salisbury Plain and Stonehenge just to the south, there's lots of folk in the neighbourhood to do observance to the season, be it hanging out in the stones at sunrise, partying all night to excessively loud rave music while coked up to the eyeballs (fortunately, nowhere near me), or just enjoying being in whatever moment happens to present itself.

Here's a horse that's been providing the locomotive power to a traveller, who'd stopped off overnight.

And midsummer's dawn with a cup of tea, outside my boat.

 

I've been waiting for a new print run of tea towels. Last Friday I had an email to tell me that they were on their way to Devizes Books, and just after nine o'clock on Monday the tracking updated to 'out for delivery', with the delivery slot being 11-12. The mapping thing showed the van resolutely still in Basingtoke, though; I guess the tracker wasn't switched on, which was a bore, because it's fun watching the progress of a delivery van across country and timing my arrival at the drop-off point to meet it.

As it happened, we'd just been into the Post Office to send off orders and pick up a parcel, and came out from Sainsbury's to see Jo at the bookshop opposite, waving and pointing to her phone. The tea towels had just arrived.

 

So that was a big relief.

safely up the gangplank

Straightening a bike's forks

Here's the Elswick Hopper I got last week. Lovely bike, but the front forks had been pushed back by a collision at some point, so, though it's rideable, it bothered me, and I wanted that extra stability you get when there's lots of rake on the front forks; an old Omafiets I once had would ride perfectly happily no-hands..

 

I had to remove the front wheel and mudguard, and chainguard, and the rear brake rod assembly. 

Then I cut a 38mm hole in a lump of wood, this size approximating to the 1½" tubing of the bottom bracket.

 

....and then I cut the piece of wood in half, so I had two semicircular openings

 

....and cleaned them up with a half-round rasp, so that they fitted snugly on the bottom bracket. I held them loosely in place with some bungee, then secured a piece of timber to the front forks with a couple of screws, like this

...and used a car scissor jack to push the forks forward, taking them a little way past the point where they aligned with the headset, because they sprang back a little when the jack was released.

And there they are, nicely aligned! I had to tighten up the headset bearings a bit, because they'd slackened a little as the bearing cups came back into alignment. 

A summer morning in All Cannings

June in the Vale of Pewsey. Here's the sun rising over the Alton Barnes white horse.We're moored near All Cannings, and it's one of those rare places where you can hear the dawn chorus uninterrupted by traffic noise.

In this clip you can hear  the blackbird and wren, and a few other birds too... 

The whitethroats are calling all along the canal...

...as are the reed warblers, and, increasingly, the sedge warblers. Similar sort of calls, but the reed warbler sounds more like a clockwork tank rolling along, while the sedge warbler is more like a steam-powered fax machine that's just about to blow up

they can be tricky to tell apart, but I know this one's a reed warbler

if it quacks like a duck...

the hemlock water dropwort is everywhere, too. I had to chop a path through it to get ashore. And then wash my hands....

An A400 Atlas flying past. Salisbury Plain's on fire again; artillery practice on parched ground, happens regularly

oxeye daisies and the Alton Barnes white horse