Richard's books

I don't know about you, but I can't resist seeing what books someone has on their bookshelves. So here, gentle reader, is your chance to see what Richard's study has got in it. (He was quite keen that the new cricket bat should be in the picture, by the way. You know how it is. It was freshly-oiled, too)

bikes and beards

We used to have a bit of an infestation of bikers, in the basement of the big house in Portsmouth I used to live in. Nice chaps, though their taste in music was a bit narrow, and they weren't all the shiniest apples in the bowl; I remember one watched an ad on TV for Shredded Wheat, which claimed that 'no-one can eat three' .

"I could," he said, and suited the action to the words.

And then there were the lads from West London whom I sailed with in the North Sea back in the 80s. They were mostly into Laverda Jotas and Kawasaki Z1000s. Nice chaps all of them, and most of them still alive too. There were always great plans being made for getting bigger, better, faster bikes (I peaked with a dinky little Laverda Alpino, personally). And bike magazines lying around everywhere.

One of the magazines had small ads in the back, which were reputed to be a sort of gay dating site. So, for a joke... some of the lads put in an ad on behalf of young K. And, lo and behold, he got a letter in reply, complete with a photograph of a middle-aged bald chap in one-piece leathers unzipped far enough to show off the winky that was protruding....

Time passes.

I met up with the chaps at a reunion last year. It was a happy occasion, and entirely free of discomfort about my transitioning. That was simply not an issue. Because we're grown-ups. You know.

Someone pointed this out to me yesterday. It's on the website for SuperBike, one of those magazines that we used to have lying around on the ship.

Finally we have good news from Yamaha in WSB. We reckon if you have the attributes (i.e. you are not a bloke/transsexual/transgender type) you're in with a shout! ...Great news if you are one of James Toseland's many stalkers or have a hankering to get up close and intimately personal with Cal Crutchlow! A press release from Yamaha confirms that – assuming your not a bloke who dresses as a lady – you could be in with a chance of wearing skimpy kit and holding a brolly. Now read on...

Well, quite. And of course all motorcyclists are heterosexual men without gender issues, too. And bikes are never used as beards. Never, you hear?

Do you get the feeling that those very manly journalists at SuperBike may be just a teensy bit insecure?

swimming in the Thames

With the gearbox newly installed in the car, it seemed only proper to give it a good run.

So I took it down to London, and managed to pick up Richard somewhere along the way. We headed out to Oxfordshire, and took a walk along the Thames. It was extremely hot, and swimming in the river seemed a sensible thing to do.
"There's a place just here," said Richard as we descended to the river bank from the bridge "-or there's a nice place a bit further down."



"How much further down?"
"About forty minutes"

"Forty minutes there and back, or forty minutes there?"
"Forty minutes there"
"OK, I can handle that. It's a nice day for a walk."

We passed some places that would have been likely contenders for swimming if they hadn't already been baggsied by herds of cattle, which stood up to their bellies in the water, occasionally sticking their noses in and snorting. The calves formed their own little coterie of disaffected teenaged calfness, under a hawthorn tree on the river bank. We steered well clear of them- Richard is not really a cow person.

Time passed.

"I wonder if I got the distance right?" said Richard presently. "When I'm running, it takes about half an hour, and I reckon I run about 1.3 times faster than I walk. Or maybe 1.5 times. What do you reckon?"

"I'd say more like 1.2," I said, being a sedate sort of runner myself.

"We'll time it, " he said, taking off his watch. Richard's watch has, of course, got a stopwatch on it. Goes with the territory.

"I'll run to that tree there, and when I get there I'll raise my arm. You stop the clock, then start it again when you start walking, and we'll be able to compare."

So that's what we did. It was a very fiddly watch, but I got there in the end.

"Fourteen seconds, and thirty seconds", I pronounced, when I'd caught up with him.

"Hmm, about twice as fast then. So it's further than I thought."



Red kites called out and circled above the meadow. A girl galloped by on her pony. She put me in mind of a gaucho, riding across the pampas. If gauchos were young girls and the Argentine pampas had Didcot power station slap bang in the middle, you simply would not have been able to tell the difference, on this breezy hot Saturday morning.


We finally found a place where you could slip into the water. There were a few narrowboats and cabin cruisers not too far away, but not too close either. and their crews were obviously having a bit of a lie in.




Richard slid down into the water and edged out. The bottom was a little muddy but firm beneath that, then shelved deeply and suddenly. He launched out. I followed. We swam to the other side, and under a great hanging willow where a swan was busily nibbling the leaves. If you were careful, you could scramble out, using the roots in the bank as steps. The river bed underfoot felt quite horrid; crunchy but fragile stuff that felt as though you were treading on small creatures; and great bubblings of marsh gas whenever it was disturbed.

It was cool and peaceful under the tree. Someone had had a bonfire there. It would have been a good place for a late night party, we agreed.

changing the gearbox

So what do you do when your gearbox starts making horrible noises in third gear? -well, after seeking advice over on the Morris Minor forum, and draining the gearbox oil and finding a tooth in the mix, I kept on running the car carefully, avoiding third gear. Which can be a bit of a bore on long uphills.

I also started looking around for a replacement gearbox, as overhauling the gearbox myself would have been quite time consuming and fiddly. It proved a bit difficult to find one, as the usual suppliers didn't have anything available- there seems to have been a bit of a run on Moggie gearboxes lately. I finally found one on Hayling Island, where John E Evans specialises in rebuilding gearboxes and happened to have a reconditioned one available.

I also needed help with the changeover, as I don't have the lifting gear available, and it is a bit of a daunting job anyway when you're busy with other stuff too. So, after reading some recommendations on the MM forum, I got in touch with Russell, who trades as RTG Services. And he came and did the job on the road outside. I helped a bit (most of the dirt under the fingernails has finally gone now....). We started on Monday, and finished on Tuesday morning- Russell had to combine his mechanicking with childcare on Monday. A good combination, in my unbiased opinion.

It was good weather for working outside. The neighbours stopped and chatted as they passed. Several of the more elderly ones got a bit nostalgic for their own long-departed Morris Minors. Russell described how some of the locals where he lives are a bit less friendly- "A young lad pulled a knife on me outside the house. So I took it off him. I said "Look, if you're going to pull a knife you've got to know how to use it, don't just wave it around"." Russell is quite big and strong, you know.



And now the car is up and running again. I took it down to London and back, just to make sure.

Thank you, John and Russell. They were both really helpful, and cheerful and friendly too.

The Seven Wonders of South Wales

Someone mentioned the Seven Wonders of Wales this morning, and I'd not heard of them, so I looked them up.

Pistyll Rhaeadr and Wrexham steeple,
Snowdon's mountain without its people,
Overton yew trees, St Winefride wells,
Llangollen bridge and Gresford bells.

I felt a bit underwhelmed, I must say. Not least because they are all in North Wales. So, in an attempt to redress the balance, I spent three minutes listing these, the Seven Wonders of South Wales. (contents subject to change depending on how the mood takes me, suggestions (polite suggestions) gratefully received).

Crawshay's great gravestone at Vaynor, near Merthyr
Port Talbot's blast furnaces, flickering at night.
The slagheap at Bargoed, now gone but still worth a
High place on the list; Tiger Bay, shiny bright
(I preferred it before). Down at Newport, now- tsk!
The Transporter Bridge gondola
Traverses no longer the mud of the Usk
-in fact, most of these wonders are broken or, duller,
Demolished, or seized up and covered in rust...

...The Market at Cardiff for faggots and rissoles.
The M4 which carries me safe home to Bristol.

peregrines

I went across the Downs yesterday morning, on my way to do something, so I stopped off and tiptoed to the place where the peregrines like to sit on a rock, basking in the sun and thinking falcony thoughts. And there indeed was a peregrine, though it launched itself off and away across the gorge when I tried to get a better picture.

Later, I stopped off again on my way home, and this peregrine was swooping around the place and riding the updrafts...


..and then it was joined by another and then another, until there were five of them. There was some passing of a dead creature between them, and a lot of play. And several swoops from a great height into the gorge, followed by zooms up to an almost equally great height. It was like watching Spitfires showing off, but without the sound of the Merlins, as it were.

unloved

This is a garage in Weymouth, that I sketched in 1997, but never got round to colouring in properly. So I've just finished the job with the wonder that is Paintshop. And speaking of wonders, I wonder, too, if the garage is still there. It did look a bit unloved. I've had a quick virtual wander around Weymouth on Google Maps' Street View, but couldn't see it. So maybe it's been demolished.

Which reminds me of a pub just around the way from here, the Cock of the North, made famous (well, relatively famous) in The Young Ones, in which it appeared as the Kebab and Calculator.


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...it used to be a really (well, fairly) nice pub. An unashamedly 1960s job. Circular, with the bar in the middle. Light and airy, with the big windows. And then it got made over as a sort of bogus Edwardian thing, and it's all gloomy and (last time I was in there) pongy with the ghosts of a million cigarettes and pub lunches. I suppose that the pub's problem, along with the garage's , was that it fell outside the parameters of Buildings That People Want To Preserve Because They Are Very Much Of Their Time.