Category: #inktober

A day to relax and take stock – 24 October 2021

Posted on by Zogman

After yesterday’s hustle and bustle we needed a day to relax.

Although there was still some work to do, the dishwasher would manage to do the heavy lifting. All we had to do was empty yesterday’s last load and fill it up with the final bits and pieces from the cooking and the eating. Then the living room had to be returned to normal, but with Scamp’s guidance that didn’t take long. By midday we were beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel. I say ‘we’, but Scamp did most of the work, as usual.

Lunch saw the watershed and we knew it was downhill after that. We sat and watched last night’s qualifying session for the American GP amazed at the drivers’ skill to navigate the zig zag changes of direction while managing to avoid slower cars in front of them. Good to see Mad Max get pole for today, Sunday although, because the race is in Austin, Texas it won’t be available to us poor souls without Sky Sport until the early hours of Monday morning. We can wait. It won’t make much difference to our life to wait until tomorrow.

In the late afternoon I went out for a walk in St Mo’s and got some photos, 49 photos to be more precise. I liked the shot of the larch needles changing colour and almost ready to drop.

Dinner was some soup from yesterday, the remains of the Chicken Cacciatore from yesterday augmented with some chicken thighs from the freezer and a baked potato each. We also finished off the tear & share bread and the wine. It seemed a shame to waste all that good food, and it was also an ecologically sound choice.

Spoke to Jamie later and found out more of the last minute changes that have to be made and the slight alterations to timing that come when house buying. As always, Jamie was very calm about the whole thing, never making a drama out of a crisis. Totally unlike his father.

Prompt for today was ‘Extinct’ and while others were sketching dinosaurs and skeletons and some were even predicting the end of the human race, I chose to draw Sid from ‘Ice Age’. It seemed to fit the prompt and he was fun to draw. Another ink sketch with no watercolour. The ink is still drying as I’m writing this.

Tomorrow Scamp is off to the Doc’s, so Neil, this is her interpretation of ‘Soon’. You were the one who gave her the incentive to do it. Thank you.

Relentless – 23 October 2021

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Today would be no-stop.

Up early today because, before we did anything today, there was a loaf to make, or at least the dough to prepare. John and Marion were coming for dinner tonight and I was in charge of the bread and the soup. The bread just had to be the Tear & Share. The soup was to be tomato and red pepper, but the prep of that could wait until we returned from dance class. Scamp was ahead of the game having made the main course yesterday and was preparing the Lime Cheesecake while I was kneading the bread dough.

Out a bit earlier for our trip to Bridge of Weir for the dance class. Hoping there wouldn’t be too much congestion on the M8 because to f the COP26 stramash happening across the river at the SEC. Actually there was very little traffic.

Dance class was ok to start with. Strange complicated sequence dance called Mambo Magic. Much, much more energetic and frantic than any I’ve encountered so far. Very disjointed too, as if it had been designed by a committee! Lots if disparate routines that didn’t seem to gel. Even teacher Jane agreed with this complaint.
Next was Tango and a fault finding and tuning of the basic tango. This was very useful because it changed a simple dance into a much more sophisticated one.
Final teaching session was for the Quickstep which is my bête noire of the moment. We’d practised this at home, yesterday and I’d managed to get all the bits in the right place, but today all Scamp’s teaching went out the window. By the end of the session and with Scamp and Jane’s help it began to come together again, but this will need some more practise sessions at home before I’m ready to progress.

Drove home through Glasgow and the only time we met any substantial amount of traffic was just before the Kingston Bridge where it’s usually busy anyway. We stopped at Tesco on the way home, but were still parked and in the house much, much earlier than a usual Saturday. I wonder if all the talk of road closures and long delays had made some people stay at home today or at least choose a different route that avoided the motorways. Whatever it was, it was a pleasant surprise.

Dough was rising for the bread and Scamp was hard at work getting the table set while I chopped tomatoes and peppers for the soup. I was trialing a new method for the soup. Just chop all the veg sprinkle with oil and bake in the oven for 60mins at gas 6. After that, add the stock and a tin of tomatoes and cook for 20mins before blitzing. Much less faff which leaves time for other things, like photography!

PoD was a shot of a single rose stem with one bud and one blown flower. Used Potatoshop to put a nice blue sky (from another of my photos) in the background and there you have it!

Visitors arrived on time and we had a great, relaxing evening eating, talking an generally catching up with everything that’s been going on in all of our lives over the past two years. Found out about the May wedding too.

After the visitors left and the dishwasher was chugging away with the first load, we had a chance to sit and relax for a while. I managed to get the sketch finished and posted just before midnight. The prompt was “Leak” and I drew the leaky tap you see here. A bit rushed and no watercolour this time, but finished (just) in time and fulfilling the prompt.

Tomorrow (today, you realise!) we will probably load up the dishwasher again and try to put the house back to its normal relaxed state!

We went for the messages – 22 October 2021

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We drove to The Fort for messages and for lunch, after a technology breakdown.

I wanted to see if my covid vaccination status had been updated, but the app wouldn’t work. It simply refused to accept my password. I finally gave up and uninstalled it, then reinstalled it and started fresh. When it asked me to scan my driver’s license I realised what was going on. People in Scotland had been reported as getting in to a nightclub, then passing their phone back to one of their pals. That allowed them to get in with an other person’s phone. The problem was there was no biometrics check on the app. Now there is. It took me two tries before I could get the thing to work, then it crashed just before the final stage. After the first two failed attempts I had to go right back to the start and go through everything again. On my last try at a restart it just took me through all the screens without having to do anything. No license scan, no facial recognition scan, just a QR code. Of course, Scamp got right through first time! Now we’ll be able to get into a nightclub!

With our new covid passport, Scamp went looking for towels, a house warming present for Shona, in M&S and I went looking for my next book in Waterstones, but found none that interested me. Then I went to Boots to get fine tweezers. Just the thing for picking off nasty little ticks. The first pair I saw were £23. I was thinking more about £2 or 3. I found a pair, thankfully, for £2. Then I saw a sign of the times. The bloke at the set of Pay Here cubicles asked if I wanted to pay cash or card. I had enough ready cash in my pocket to cover the cost of the tweezers, so I said cash. He pointed to one cubicle at the corner and said “Wait until that one is clear.” There was one cubicle for pay cash, the other five or six were card only. I swiftly changed my mind and paid by card. It cost ME the same amount of money, but I’m sure Boots got less from me once the card company’s share of my £2 had been deducted. The shape of things to come.

Met Scamp and we went to Wagamama for lunch. Checked in (will we always have to do that from now on?) Ordered shirodashi ramen (pork belly) for me and shu’s ‘shiok’ chicken (curry) for Scamp with a couple of sides. Ebi katsu (prawns in crispy panko breadcrumbs) and Vegetable Tempura. Scamp’s main was only just warm, but was replaced without question. Mine was very spicy hot, but tolerable. The Ebi katsu was lovely as usual but the tempura was far too oily. Not Wagamama’s best day.

We went to Morrisons for the messages and bought a fair amount of stuff, then drove to to Hobbycraft. Scamp was looking for ring moulds, but they didn’t have any. I was looking for a paintbrush, but they didn’t have the one I wanted. We drove home.

After a while I put on my boots and went for a walk in St Mo’s to see what I could find. PoD went to a golden leaf. Not real gold, just gold leaf ??. Sketch for today was ‘Open’. My thinking was the door to a shop that is open, but the restrictions on entry mean it’s closed. I liked it although the sketching and painting were rubbish.

We’re having John and Marion over for dinner tomorrow, so tonight we started our prep. My soup didn’t quite hit the mark, so I’ll have a rethink for tomorrow, but Scamp’s main is looking good.

Tomorrow will be busy. Work will hopefully start before we go out to Bridge of Weir for dance class.

A lazy start to the day – 21 October 2021

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After a quick lunch we were off and the lazy start was behind us.

We set off thinking that the COP26 extravaganza would cause chaos with the traffic on the M8, but actually the road was just the usual snarl ups and then clear. The problem came in deepest Paisley where roadworks closed part of the road we were intending driving on. That meant a long detour to get to the hall where our tea dance was taking place. After such a good start it was annoying to have to start finding a way through the maze of Paisley’s traffic. Eventually we arrived about fifteen minutes late. That in itself was a success, just fifteen minutes!

The hall was very busy with a new group of tea dancers ready to strut their stuff. We both found the floor very slippery, so slippery that I changed from my old shoes to my new black and white shoes. That made it a bit better, but still not right. When you looked at the parquet flooring with the glancing light from the window, it looked as if the floor had been newly waxed. That might account for the problem. The other problem was that we were making more mistakes than normal. We tried Social Foxtrot, we completed two tracks of Ballroom Foxtrot and we achieved success with waltz with whispered instructions to each other. Tango wasn’t as good as it could have been, but it too is getting there. Lots of sequence dances and for the first time I danced the Sally Anne Cha Cha or to give it another name, FIREBALL! because that’s what you’re supposed to shout at the end of each sequence. I didn’t just in case I got it wrong. Two Scottish country dances and a waltz finished the dancing for today.

I was hoping to grab some of the late afternoon sun when we got home, but the traffic through Paisley and on the eastbound M8 was a crawl. If you can find a space in the fast lane to sneak into, you can get up to 40mph for a while, but it doesn’t last. That said, it was better than the M74 beside us was doing, it was almost at a halt, and this is before COP26 gets into full swing with its road closures all over the city.

An hour and a quarter after we left, we arrived home. The light was all but gone, but I managed a few shots taken along the lane down to the shops. A bit of jiggery pokery in Potatoshop and it became PoD.

Sketch prompt was ‘Fuzzy’, and that’s what my little caterpillar is. It was just a ten minute sketch, but it covered the basics and the prompt.

Tomorrow we may go for the messages at The Fort with the chance of lunch there too.

Out West – 20 October 2021

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Today I was meeting Alex at the Art Galleries in Glasgow’s West End.

Scamp gave me a run up to the station and I trained it in to Glasgow. The light was beautiful when I came out of Queen Street station, so I grabbed a few shots of the buildings and one sneaky wee shot of a bloke leaning in a doorway where they were ripping out the inside of a shop to make it into another shop that would last a year or so before going to the wall and needing another makeover. “It all makes work for the working man to do” as Flanders and Swan sang many years ago. I walked through a lane to Buchanan Street and got the subway from there to Kelvin Hall and walked from there to the Art Galleries, or Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum to give it its proper title. On the way I passed what used to be one of our favourite restaurants, Usha’s. A vegetarian Indian restaurant. Now it’s a German Doner Kebab place. Possibly the exact opposite of an Indian vegetarian restaurant!

I took some photos outside Kelvingrove while I waited for Alex. A bus was parked outside the galleries and a group of drivers were being photographed. I don’t know what it was all about, but presume it was some new service that Glasgow Council have dreamed up. We walked round the museum part of the building and I took a few photos of the main hall with its pipe organ. Sadly no organ recitals today, probably something to do with Covid. Alex took some shots of the stuffed animals with his new acquisition, a Sony A6000 with a Zeiss standard zoom. Very nice! He’d kept quiet about that! After we’d had our fill of the stuffed animals and the beautiful Spitfire that hangs from the roof we went for lunch in the restaurant.

From there we made our way up to Glasgow Uni which was where Alex wanted to go today. Amazingly, I’d never been through it and was surprised that proles like me were actually allowed in. Light was fantastic today. My favourite place was the east quadrangle with a beautiful beech tree place, not in the middle, but towards one corner of the lawn. Alex wanted to visit the chapel and I did like the stained glass windows at each end and the lovely warmth of the wooden pews. I must go back again some day and have a second look at the Uni.

After a bit of shilly shallying I worked out how we should go to the Botanic Gardens, but by the time we got there, the good light had gone, so we headed back down Great Western Road to Kelvinbridge and the subway back to town, but before that there were street art paintings for Alex to photograph while I was amazed to see a bloke in a kayak shooting the rapids of the fast flowing River Kelvin. He seemed to be struggling against a fearsome current, but enjoying every minute of it. One of those shots made PoD.  Today’s prompt was ‘Sprout’ and I made up a bit of a fairytale about a boy who sold a cow for some seeds …  You’ve maybe heard it before.

Subway back to Glasgow and a cup of coffee before we split up to go our separate ways, vowing to do it all again in a couple of weeks. By that time he will have mastered his new camera and amassed a bag of lenses, no doubt. I got the bus home, just managing to get it before it left the stance.

Dinner tonight was beef olives for me and mixed veg and potatoes for Scamp.

Tomorrow we may go dancing in Paisley.

Under the weather – 19 October 2021

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Literally and actually.

Another wet day but I had a job to do today. I had to fix the broken lock on the bathroom window. Found what I needed at the B&Q website, but of course they didn’t have that cheap model in the store, only the dearer ones. I took one anyway after I’d checked that the screw holes in it lined up with the screw holes in the one I’d removed from the window yesterday. Drove back via Tesco for bread and a couple of bunches of carnations to brighten the kitchen and the downstairs toilet. Surprisingly the fitting of the new handle was simplicity itself after I’d confirmed that it could be used on the left side or the right side of the window, some can’t. Job done.

Lunch was a bowl of yesterday’s soup which was fairly tasty and warm. With a couple of slices of bread to dook in it, it was even better, but I wasn’t feeling too great. Aching shoulder from yesterday’s Covid booster jag and also that “coming down with a cold” feeling. Shivery and aching. That too could be from the jags, the flu jag this time. Scamp had a parcel to post to Skye, so that gave me an excuse to go for a walk with her to Condorrat. Came home via St Mo’s and I had a camera with me, so I took some photos although my heart wasn’t in it and it was raining. Best of a bad lot was a nettle that looked like I felt, washed out. That was PoD.

Scamp made dinner tonight which was chicken curry. Chicken Tikka Masala to be more exact. It was good and hot made from a Pataks kit. Another company jumping on the bandwagon that Spice Tailor started. I still think Spice Tailor is the best for range and taste although today’s offering would give them a run for their money. While Scamp was making the dinner, I was trying out my idea for today’s sketch. The prompt was ‘Loop’. Not the most interesting prompt, but it’s what I had to work with. I finally settled on a Mobius strip which is a loop with only one side. Its inside turns out to be its outside too. Just look at the sketch and you’ll get the idea. Follow the little cars and see where they go. It’s a fantasy Formula One race track called the Mobius Loop and yes, the cars do have to travel upside down. That’s what the magnetic tyres and the steel track are for! Following yesterdays lateral thinking again. I won’t say it’s my best sketch, but it’s different and it fulfils the prompt.

Took a couple of paracetamol after dinner and felt better. They’re beginning to wear off now, but I’ll take a couple more before I go to bed. I might even have a wee hot toddy too.

Hopefully meeting Alex tomorrow for a walk around the West End of Glasgow. That should be fun if I’m up to it and I think I will be.

Shopping, Jagging, Boosting – 18 October 2021

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Don’t mistake Jagging for Jogging. Oh no, don’t do that!

We had to be up early today because the lady was coming with the swabs and the iPad that held the questions we have to answer on the Covid survey. She’s been before, in fact I think she was the first Ipsos MORI Market Researcher we met, more than a year ago. We both felt sorry for her having to stand outside in the rain asking all the questions and then trying to security seal the sample bags with sticky tape that wasn’t sticky any more in the rain.

With the survey done for another month, Scamp drove us to Tesco to get the messages. Mostly the usual sensible stuff that we use a lot and we managed to fill the Wee Red Car’s boot with bag after bag of useful sensible stuff. It was raining, of course, and showed no sign of letting up any time soon. When we were driving out of the estate I saw this car sitting under a tree with half the tree’s leaves covering it and decided that if it was still there when we came back I’d go out and photograph it. It was and I did. The photo didn’t need much post processing, it was just one of those ‘found things’ that make you smile. As I was finishing off removing the car’s number plate (on the computer) I noticed it was a Kia and thought wouldn’t it have been nice if it had been a Nissan Leaf!

With the photo done and posted fairly early in the afternoon, I started to make some soup. Today it would be Tomato and Red Pepper soup. I chopped and roasted the tomatoes and peppers then sweated the onion and garlic before adding everything to the pot, pouring in some stock and letting it bubble for half an hour or so. That gave me time to correspond a while with Alex about where and when we’d meet on Wednesday.

It was soon time to blitz the soup and make tonight’s dinner which was Pasta Carbonara and it was fairly good. It didn’t go with the soup, but neither of us paid that any mind.

I’d already agreed with our neighbour, Bobby, that I’d give him a lift to The Link in the town centre for our Covid booster, but when I went for him he said he’d drive because he has his own off-road parking place and parking in our parking area is at a premium after about 5pm. I accepted and then was driven in luxury in his big silver Mercedes. I’d already been warned by my pal, Fred, that there were long queues for the booster jag. He had a 45minute wait in the big converted games hall. He was lucky. We were just over an hour from start to finish, but we both walked away fully boosted and flu jag done at the same time. Ready to face the winter.

The rain was still beating down when we drove home. We rose at about 8am and it was raining. Bobby and I got back just after 8pm and it was still raining. We have had buckets out in the back garden to catch rainwater. They have been filled to the brim for about a week. The birdbath in the garden has been overflowing for weeks. Where is all the rain coming from, and more importantly, where is it all going?Tonight’s sketch is ‘Moon’. I thought about it long and hard and eventually came up with a rehash of last year’s Wolf. Added a crescent moon for the wolf to howl at and that’s what I’m posting here!

We have no plans for tomorrow, because more rain is predicted!

A thousand words for rain – 17 October 2021

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Just as Inuits allegedly have thousands of words for snow. Scots have thousands of words for rain.

We saw a lot of those varieties today. Heavy rain, light rain, drizzle, smirr and everything in between. Just not a lot of dry spells. This left little opportunity for photography. As I said yesterday, there were lots of things to do in the house, just we didn’t want to do them.

Eventually, late in the afternoon I did manage to drag myself off to St Mo’s for a walk with a Sony. It rained all the time I was out. That same mix of heavy rain, light … well, you get the idea. I did get a few photos of the effect the rain had on the plants. Eventually I headed home with the prospect of at least a couple of shots.

Dinner tonight was Cod with Prawns and Fennel, a fairly standard weekend meal. Pudding was the last of Scamp’s lemon drizzle cake, served with custard.

PoD was a little glass-like ball of rainwater hanging from a weed in St Mo’s. Today’s sketch prompt was ‘Collide’. I puzzled about this for a long time, but just before I made the dinner I found I’d picked up a tiny, and I mean tiny tick on my walk round St Mo’s. Once I’d disposed of the tiny beastie, I got an idea for a sketch. It’s a little tick about to collide, or be collided by a cross pein hammer. I felt that was a fitting solution to the puzzle set by ‘Collide’.

Spoke to Jamie tonight and heard some good news on the house front. It looks like things are moving on at last.

Tomorrow looks no better than today as far as the weather is concerned, so maybe it WILL be time to start some of those inside jobs, but not until we have our monthly meeting with the lady who brings the throat and nose swabs and who asks those personal questions!

An afternoon at the seaside – 16 October 2021

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Off to dancing class first.

I was a bit late off the mark this morning. Honest, it wasn’t a Freudian slip, it was just a touch of brain fade, but by cutting a few corners we did get on the road about ten minutes late. Just as we were driving past the Irn Bru factory we chanced to see some head case in a bright yellow car testing his vehicle’s 0-60 capabilities. Usually this is done of a perfectly straight and level piece of track, like a runway or something similar, not on a fairly busy ring road with a bend about 50m from his starting point. Also the greater than normal chance of HGVs crossing the road just past that bend. I pity the folk who will eventually have to scrape him off a lamp post. We drove sedately on.

Arrived with about five minutes to spare. Today we were tackling Tango and I was given a reminder of one of the finer points of the man’s part, the pull back on the leading foot after the first three forward steps < that’s my reminder to me. It doesn’t have to mean anything to you.> With that fixed we got a thumbs up! We must have spent almost an hour on the tango, I didn’t check. Next was a sequence dance that we’ve done many times, but which I still occasionally get wrong, the Mayfair Quickstep. We did the Bellisima Cha-Cha after that. I think we’re both fairly ok with it now. After that we went on to a real Quickstep. We haven’t done the quickstep with Stewart and Jane, but we did eventually get the first set of steps right. It will need some practise at home to hammer it into my head, but we should have it by next week. Another couple of sequence dances later and we were done. My little head was full.

We’d planned on going to Irvine if the weather was fairly decent after the class and although the little patches of sun that had appeared in the morning had disappeared to be replaced with milky white cloud, we did continue down through long convoluted road the sat nav picked for us and ended up at the seafront at Irvine. We parked near a little trailer selling New Mexican food. I had a beef taco and Scamp had a chicken one with a couple of coffees. The food was lovely. We both really did enjoy it. After that, it was coats on and a walk down to the pier. I took some photos of the bridge to nowhere. It’s a steel bridge with hand burned steel panels on the side depicting different inventors who originated from Scotland. It used to lead across the estuary to an island with a kind of Science Centre on it, partly buried in a man made hill. The bridge had a removable middle section to allow yachts to sail through, but now that removal has become permanent and the science centre has closed. Such a pity. Such short sightedness on the part of the councils. We saw a family walking a strange looking dog. I thought it was a Borzoi, but Mr Google says it could have been a Saluki. It was the shape of a greyhound with long hair and had a tail that looked like a fan. Strange looking beast.

I got PoD on the walk to the pier. It was a view of some folk walking out to the end of the pier with that grey sky above. Quite gloomy. We drove home by a different route, one that I knew and not the twisty turny routes the sat nav prefers. I must check the preferences on that device to see if I’ve set a flag for “Choose the most awkward route.”

Today’s sketch prompt was Compass. I drew my old Silva compass which is about fifty years old and although the clear perspex base is broken, the compass works perfectly. It’s little used now that Google Maps and OS maps online make instruments like this almost obsolete. However, it does not need batteries, nor does it lose its signal, so still useful as a backup.

When we were driving home the rain came on, gentle rain, that started off as a drizzle but was getting heavier all the time. Now, at just after 11.30pm it’s raining properly, and has been for a while.

Tomorrow we may go for a walk if it’s dry, and if it’s not, there are lots of things to do at home.

Curry then a walk – 15 October 2021

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We did find that Indian restaurant in Hamilton.

The restaurant was the Bombay Cottage. Convenient parking just outside for the princely sum of £1.60 for three hours. As I’ve said before “Who would want to stay in Hamilton for three hours?” We had no intention of doing that. I had Chicken Rogan Josh which was very mild, too much oil/ghee and lacked salt. Scamp had Cauliflower Shimla Bhaji which was too salty. Two chefs with different tastes? Still the naan made up for the main courses. We left feeling that we’d been well fed.

We were entertained by a wedding group walking past the restaurant with their photographer in tow, heading for the car park of the Townhouse. Then they all trooped back again, walked through the main car park and out through another exit. By the time we were leaving the photographer was taking photos of the happy couple posing in front of a white minibus in the main car park, and everyone else crowded round him taking photos with their phones. I wish I hadn’t left my phone in the boot! What a photo that would have made! We drove slowly past the group with folk crossing in front of us like we weren’t there. Maybe there’s an unwritten law that states if you’re in a wedding group and get knocked down, it won’t hurt you. One woman nearly got the chance to try it out.

We drove in brilliant sunshine to Barons Haugh for a walk through the trees. Lighting was lovely and the path was interesting for a mile or so, then we turned a corner and the path went in to shadow and wasn’t nearly so interesting, so we turned back and although we were walking into the sun, the lighting made it so much more photographic. PoD was a photo of a yellow leaf that had found itself hooked onto the branch of a sapling.

Drove home with the sun still shining. What a difference a day makes. Headlights on when we left the house yesterday morning and brilliant sunshine and blue skies today. Tomorrow the weather begins to revert to Dull October again. However, for today the sun was still with us and I wanted to get more low sun pics in St Mo’s. I think I just missed the best of the light, but I still got a few decent shots.

Sketch for today was “Helmet” and I chose my bike helmet. Really demanding thing to draw with all the curves and cut aways. Also lots of air holes in it. I hadn’t realised just how many there were until I started it. I was beginning to think that a helmet is just an expensive bag of holes held together with some plastic. However it is essential when you’re on a bike.

Tomorrow is back to dance lessons, but with the possibility of a run to the coast if the weather permits.