Looking at the recent economic data from UK and USA showing people are still skint and likely to remain so for some time yet, expect more shenanigans from the bike industry to try and maintain pre-crash growth in a mature, discretionary spend market at a time when consumers are cutting back even on food…

Personally it’s put me right off buying a new bike…

The newly 20mph limit (used to be 30) in my part of SE London is an interesting place to observe… most, I think will drive around 30, some stick to 20, some are doing 40+.

I suspect to a small minority of stupid/psychotic people, speed limits are seen as some kind of challenge to their freedom and when they see a 20 or 30 limit their response is to drive faster as some kind of protest/stick it to the man effort. Maybe we can include an immaturity test in the driving test?

Given the efforts so far of our political class to solve dangerous driving, self-driving cars seem like a more likely solution to this problem than hiking up the standards of the driving test or more police… bring them on. Tests are already underway in the UK…

I usually ride to work or get the train. On Tuesday I took my car to the garage for it’s MOT so I had to drive in the morning rush hour – bloody pandemonium – people driving with so much emotion and no sense! – I’m so glad I hardly drive these days

They probably drive and never cycle, hence they don’t understand the perspective of cyclists and the additional danger they’ve just designed in. Much the same as most cycle infrastructure

It’s actually just an advert for the social media company. In no way whatsoever is it scientific enough to prove anything about anybody…!

value to prospectors will far outweigh anything we could hope to cobble together.

We should get collecting then and outbid them. STW could be the new Saudi Arabia 🙂

We found a woman pretty much parked in the hedge on our club run on Sunday – someone had just overtaken us on a blind bend and she’d had to take avoiding action.
She was looking rather shocked.

3 pages on car washing?

I’ve not had a post go to the hundred for a while. Not sure if it’s good or bad that this one has 😀

As you were…

I have custard creams today. The Brompton of the biscuit world.

The most appropriate attire when sitting on one is a suit?

All we can do is guess his preferences/reasons.
Why not ask him yourself when you next see him – not confrontational, just flag him down and explain what you’re thinking and you don’t understand his actions.

Unless he’s a total git, he’ll probably explain and you’ll both go away much happier 🙂

For me half the benefit of cycling as a form of transport is you can actually communicate with people face to face as human beings and sort things out rather than gesticulating unintelligibly and staying angry like we do in cars.

Please mods, leave it as it is 😀

What a hero – achieved so much and got so little ego. Wiggo for PM 🙂
Interesting comment he made about his Dad’s doping customers…

Take it out of political control… it’s just a football atm.

Forgetting ideology and political prejudice, just how do you provide a health service for a population who:
a) are getting old and living longer
b) refuse to look after their own health en masse (60+% overweight or obese)
c) are too skint to be able to afford tax increases…

We definitely need reform, don’t we? Someone has to bite the bullet and find a cheaper way to do it, somehow?

Amusingly enough she might find out in the next few weeks how it feels to be properly broke…

It’s a lot wetter and colder than Sussex…
I’ve been in London for 15 years and often think about moving up to the Lakes but salaries are a lot lot lower generally and the weather’s a lot less sunny…

But the riding is far far better 🙂

Boris must be rather unhappy at the result. A poor Tory performance would’ve had them looking for a new leader… but now Cameron looks like somekind of miracle worker saviour (although it’s probably got more to do with Gideon’s machinations stoking house prices tbh)

all the scrotes are spending their days on social media 😀

You cant blame the public when they are being lied to endlessly.

I kind of agree with you – it can be VERY hard to get a true view on many of the things we’re told… but you can blame the public for swallowing it now that we have the internet and social media – it’s much much easier to get alternative views now -you just have to put the effort in.
e.g. if you want the left wing view, go onto Guardian website, or for the opposite perspective, go to The Telegraph – costs nothing but an extra minute of your time. Compared to 20 years ago when buying both papers cost extra…

I suspect, however, in a world which is changing VERY fast in many many ways, and with too much information being available, many people are just clutching at the simplest explanation that matches their existing views and prejudices – a bit like a toddler hugging a teddy when they’re scared. Hence the rise in appeal of UKIP and SNP – 2 parties trying to hide away from globalisation rather than embrace it…peddling a simplistic narrative rather than sell people the benefits of change

If the headlines tomorrow don’t read BALLS SACKED I’ll be very disappointed.

City AM have been running this headline since this morning 🙂

well you’d assume the shop will be asking RM for a refund…

Someone on Radio 4 was making an interesting point that Labour need a new stance not just a new leader.
They need to be more than a party of re-distribution of wealth from the rich to the masses – they need to be a party that supports creation of wealth and then its fair re-distribution…

I think that’s sensible and more in touch with the times tbh…

Hi Rich, stick it up on the forum or my email is in my profile…

tell the shop what happened – they chose RM and they committed to deliver you the goods
If I were a small business and my supplier (RM) did that I’d put a rocket up the rear of their MD for utter incompetence and make loud noises about breach of contract and finding someone else…

Looks like I’ll have to find another £100k on top of already-silly prices before I can buy a small flat in SE London with barely any space to store my bikes 🙁

I suspect the driver here hasn’t been ‘for’ the Tories but actually ‘I daren’t risk any change – I can’t afford it’

The ‘recovery’ has been so non-existent for most people day-to-day, that they simply didn’t feel they could risk a government who may do less well than the Tories have and see either their incomes drop or their debt increase – and Labour don’t have a very good track record on the economy

Also waves at Twiglet Monster – yes I do remember that ride – proper old skool XC fun 🙂

Thanks for all the local knowledge. Luckily I have the chance to rent for a while to try it out for myself – my landlord is trying to sell my cold and dark basement flat in SE London for £700k and having declined to make him an offer on the basis I’m not a millionaire I’m going to rent elsewhere for a little while to see what happens with London prices after the election and then take the plunge… I can get a modern 2-bed flat in Redhill for £250k or so vs £350k+ for a small old place in SE London, so it’s looking very attractive…

how is buying a bike on 0% finance over 12 months financially idiotic?

surely it is more idiotic to buy a 10k car, and have it sat outside your home/work doing nothing for 23 hours per day.

Totally agree with you on the car scenario – if more people thought about that, they’d stop buying cars on credit overnight!

Any kind of credit even at 0% means we’re consuming things before we’ve paid for them. You might have noticed that getting ourselves into that habit has caused a few problems recently…

I had similar issues and threw them away and bought a bike with proper mounts for full guards… expensive but effective solution!

We’re not going to get out of a consumption-led debt crisis with more consumption-led spending on credit…

Sooner or later this is all going to catch up with us. It has already really, but it’s being disguised till the day after tomorrow when the new government is in…

Buying a depreciating asset on credit is financially idiotic. I did it with my first car and lost £’000s and learnt my lesson…

And don’t get me started on people who take the Rapha coin, lead their so-called club rides

A couple of my clubmates work at Rapha and lead their rides. Bloody strong riders, both of them. Nice people too…

Mind you, I participated in a Rapha ride once. The ability to ride in a group was near to non-existent, ability to accept instructions from the ride leader also non-existent and the moaning that the Rapha coffee van wasn’t at the mid-ride stop was, I assumed, a joke. Until my mate who leads the rides said it almost certainly was serious. But that’s idiots being idiots rather than anything you can blame Rapha for…

Rapha don’t price on a cost-plus basis. They price on a ‘it’s way more expensive than anything else basis’ – that’s the entire point of their pricing strategy.

Premium pricing works very well in certain categories of goods – see Veblen goods

Rapha, to their credit understand the nature of Veblen goods very well and have built a very successful business on the back of it.

Personally I don’t buy their stuff because I’d rather spend my biking cash on the bike rather than the clothes, and you can get great kit which will last you 10+ years for half the price… but if you want top quality kit and you have the cash, go ahead… just remember Rapha are one step ahead of you 🙂

You get ‘overpaid’ compared to a perm job for a reason – no job security. Just save, save, save and save some more so you have money to tide you over during any lean times. Personally I’m keeping 12 months-worth to one side. Possibly excessive but it means a lot less worry.
And as mentioned above – don’t forget to keep an amount aside to pay your VAT and corporation tax (if you’re a Ltd) and set up a personal pension.
Personally because I’m very disciplined with my money I’m more financially secure as a contractor than I was as a perm.
Not being sure how long the money will be coming in for also means you spank a whole lot less on unnecessary shiny stuff, which is quite a release

Email Cotic?

Irrespective of income I would not date anyone who expected me to pay for everything. Its not 1953 anymore and we are equals.

True that – times have moved on… seems to me this lady wants to have her cake and eat it… she has the cash, why’s she keeping it to herself?

There isn’t a war, that’s utter clickbait tosh. I ride c100m a week so I’m on the road a lot and I’m not dead. If things were at ‘war’ status I’d be long gone.
Personally I think treatment of cyclists is getting better in the UK. Sure there’s regular and unnecessary abuse and some shockingly bad driving, but the numbers of drivers who wait or hold back or pass wide are increasing too…

There’s a lot of people with their knickers in a twist about cyclists but there’s no way we’d be seeing such an increase in numbers if there was some kind of war… or things were as bad as all that.

Personally I’d steer clear of someone who was that materialistic…
+ if she’s loaded and you’re not, what does it say about her that she expects you to pay for everything?
Personally I don’t think it’s healthy for there to be a significant difference in wealth in a relationship, in can potentially lead to the lower-earning partner becoming dependent on the one with the money, which doesn’t bode well for a healthy relationship, it’s well open to abuse, let alone getting used to a life you won’t be able to afford if you split

You may want to remind her that feminism was, in part, about emancipating women from financial dependency on men and she how she responds. If she doesn’t take it well, you may have your answer 🙂

Wow.
In skilled hands, those things can be amazing.
In the hands of the masses – carnage 😯
Once the regulatory barriers to those things come down, there’s a fair few jobs going to be lost to them no doubt

You need a whole new bike, once the chain’s gone, that’s it.
Or at least that’s what your other half needs to believe 🙂

I believe rider #2 gets 10% benefit and rider #3 gets 30% benefit.
Whatever it is scientifically it makes a hell of a difference when you have a skilled group riding together. Just make sure the lead rider knows his signals and remembers there’s a group behind when he dodges round potholes…

Did you write that yourself Brooess?

Show me someone other than an estate agent/BLT landlord or other vested interest/or individual who takes their opinion from their favoured newspaper, who believes house prices will go up for ever and ever and ever…

Spain, Ireland, Northern Ireland, US, Japan, Portugal all had housing busts, China’s is beginning. What are the chances of UK defying all historical and global precedents?… houses are a manipulated market and demand is not price inelastic

Cars rot peoples’ minds it appears. Pity him rather than get annoyed by him 🙂