I’ve been off work ill for the start of the week - but during that time, I got a phone call I had been eagerly awaiting. Evans rang me up on Tuesday lunchtime to tell me that my Brompton had arrived into store and that I could go and pick it up. Unfortunately, I had to wait until Thursday to go and collect it because I was still ill and didn’t want to sit in the office spreading it around.

Went on my first ride with the London Brompton Club, though my Brompton hasn’t yet arrived. Got the day going after a quick trip to the Kings Cross shops… nothing better to get the day started than a bacon bap with brown sauce! (Though probably not the best of foods to go cyclign with but it tastes good!) I’d left my bike at the office over the weekend and so picked it up and changed before heading down to Embankment to meet the rest of the riders.

So I’ve had the new bike for a while now and I’ve made a few changes to it since then. It’s actually now beginning to look like a touring bike! A few things I already had lying around and I’ve added these to the bike, others have required a purchase. The changes I’ve made so far are:- Saddle The saddle was the first change - in fairness, I changed this the day after I got the bike as my Charge Spoon is the comfiest saddle I’ve used.

As a geek, Git is a fantastic program. Almost everything I write is in plain text, outside of the office (where I’m forced to use Microsoft Word). I wrote my doctoral thesis within LaTeX and Git allowed me to keep a fantastic record of the changes to my thesis as I went through my work, as well as providing a backup. Outside of work, I write occasionally for Micro Mart and of course I write these blog posts and others.

Today was deceptively a nice day to go for a ride. The sun was out but there was still a biting wind out. However, I wanted to get out and about and the weather seemed to be decent enough so wrapping up warm, I headed out. I fancied trying to cycle the Cole Green Way today but I thought with the rain we’ve had recently, this was probably not the wisest idea, as I know the other path nearby, the St Albans Way, has a section that floods in the rain.

Not quite the inaugural ride I had planned for the end of January but hey, things don’t often go to plan. I’ve been informed that my new bike (as you might have guessed from the links on the blog, is a Brompton) will take a bit longer to manufacture (as it’s a custom build), so that will have to wait until next month. I spent some time umm’ing and ahh’ing about getting rid of my road bike as whilst it’s been a good bike over the past year and a bit and we’ve cycled about 2,800Km together, I’m not sure I’m to keen on it anymore.

Today’s ride was another slow ride around the local area, to warm the legs up before trying to get back on the road bike. Was a fantastic day in terms of weather after the storms of last week and the week before that - that was seen in the number of people out on bikes. Went past quite a few club rides out on the roads. Route consisted of some busy A roads around Cockfosters (which I’m not keen on and I think I’ll perhaps be avoiding in the future if I can), some quieter roads around Barnet and then a stretch along the NCN Route 12.

So a fairly boring blog post perhaps on gloves. It’s very rare that you’ll catch me out on a bike without wearing gloves. Not 100% why but I also think it’s better to wear gloves as if I come off the bike, the first part of my body that I’ll move to try and stop myself probably is my hands. And considering I use them everyday, I kind of want them to not be to damaged.

So it was my first ride of 2014 today. I’d been dying to get out on the bike, partly because of my new Garmin Edge 800 but also because I’d been planning a few rides and just hadn’t been able to shake off the flu I came down with on New Years Eve! Anyhow, I managed to get out today. The idea was to get out and just go for a ride.

So it’s a new year and I’ve decided that I’ll get back into blogging - it’s been a while since I’ve gotten anything down so I thought I’d give it a go - New Year, New Start and all that. Anyhow, so as this year I’m looking to do some serious cycling, what better option to write on then? So this is the start of a new blog that will be focussing on my riding for the year.