simple tools
My £50 bike is doing pretty good for, well, a £50 bike. Today I gave it the royal treatment of basking it in WD40. I also removed all the mud that didn’t fall off from riding really fast… in puddles… in the rain. I’ve been out on numerous bike trips with my friend Sabine in the Cambridge area since I got here. Being winter, most trips involved muddy bridleways or fields that made our bikes all clogged; and yes, the wheels stop turning. Basically, mud starts collecting on the wheel like a snowball and then gets collected between it and the mudguard (yes, I’m aware of the irony here.) By design, in these muddy areas there are no slender, rigid objects available to clear these clogs… amazing, but true. One time I had to carry the bike on my back (irony strikes again) up a hill because hunters were behind us and the foreman told us they are about to start shooting so we better get the hell out of there. They were serious, a bunch of birds were hanging and dripping in the back of their truck. The downhill that followed was great for a rain of mud that accelerated from my wheels and a good way to not getting killed.
But the point of this story is this: When biking on this island, carry a stick.