i want to ride my bicycle............

i bought myself a mountain bike this weekend - as the clocks have finally gone forward & it's gonna be light until 8pm at least from now onwards it'll be great for evenings

the ride back from the bike shop to our house is literally up a mountain, i was knackered by the time i huffed & puffed up the drive, it's amazing though what you get to see - i stopped & watched a herd of giant elks grzing on the other side of the river as i cycled along the path, they didn't seem to know i was there

as i said beofre we had the Olympian home coming on Friday, it wasn't much of a spectacle, we were at the back of the crowd & all we could see was a mass of heads & a very grainy video screen - similarly the speeches were carried away in the breeze - still it's not every day you get to stand less than 100foot away from a gold medallist

here's a couple of songs about doomed Mariners - Pentangle's "Lord Franklin"from their 1970 album Cruel Sister is the sad tale of Lord Franklin's 1845 expedition to seek a passage to the Pacific through the frozen seas of the Canadian north. The story of Franklin is one of the greatest adventures ever told, he set sail from England with a crew of 129 men & the latest in the technology of the day - including a huge stock of canned food. Unfortunately the cans were poorly constructed & contained a lot of lead, this lead slowly poisoned the crew - their ship finally became entombed in the ice & after surviving in the harshest conditions imaginable, with food running out some of the crew turned to cannibalism - basically every calamity that could possibly befall the expidition occurred & the crew & ships vanished into the frozen wastes.

a similarly downbeat number from Fairport Convention & one of my very favourite tracks by the band, Sir Patrick Spens is the tale of a reluctant seafarer, commanded by the King to captain a boat in the dead of winter, Sir Patrick foretells his own demise which comes about whilst shipping Scottish nobility across the North Sea.