Improved my long term dodgy back, neck and shoulder no end

Aren’t all the Whyte X29 alloy frames the same? If so, maybe get a second hand 529 and strip it?

I have an 18 month old 529 which I am about to completely rebuild to a higher spec for use as an all weather bike.

Different things work for different people. I have colleagues at work for whom medication was the right thing, and others for whom talking therapies worked. Mrs dpfr had a wobble and refused to take medication. The net result was several years of being stuck and miserable, followed by a series of psychotic episodes about two years ago and almost admission to hospital. She’s now on medication and things are slowly improving. Don’t rule anything out at this point, and be prepared for things not to work, or to work slowly. It’s not an exact science but there are certainly things that can be done to make things better. Good luck!

A bit more modern- Jarhead

Obscure one- The Odd Angry Shot

23 miles and 2000 feet of climb in 40 minutes. Sure thing Froomie! :wink:

Wet, wet, wet round the Goyt. Hard to tell if I was in or just by the reservoirs. Now I’m back, it’s brightened up.

Grounded tomorrow

Goyt Valley from home this afternoon

Indeed. I’m just returning a rather expensive stem in which one of the threads is knackered and the bolts all have blobs of threadlock on. I’m no Sherlock Holmes but I doubt I am the first person to ‘own’ it.

You surely mean “Uninsured wife swallows a hand grenade in my newly re-decorated kitchen”?

Bloody Hell!

Monaco is Hellish expensive. Menton is a good shout, and just a short train hop to Monaco itself

The route you’ve put up isn’t particularly easy. It’s got about 700 m climbing in it and some short, quite rough bits, both up and down.

Can I suggest you do a variation on it? Leave Buxton and ride up to the top of Long Hill (A5004) then go left down into the Goyt Valley. You then have a choice

For a shorter route, cross the Errwood dam and turn left up the Goyt Valley, returning to Buxton along the route you found.

For a longer route, turn right shortly before you reach Errwood dam, down a small tarmac track with a vehicle barrier and go down to Fernilee reservoir, then follow the track (flat, old railway line) north to the northern dam and cross there. Follow the tarmac left and climb a tarmac road that goes to the right (don’t take the first path into the wood; it doesn’t go all the way through). At the top of the tarmac road, go left and follow the forest road south. When you pick up the forest road, you are back on the route you have found and can follow it back up the Goyt valley to Buxton.

Either route is easy to pick up on the OS map

@hammy- thanks. Sadly there is this pain in the arse thing I do called work which looks like it’ll get in the way. Enjoy yourself anyway

The steep road climb up from Errwood Reservoir going west is sometimes called ‘The Street’

When are you around? I might see you out and about?

Beehive at Combs for food as well. Drum and Monkey in Whaley for interesting beers.

If you want a bit of up-and-down- to Whaley Bridge (10 mins by bike from Chapel), then left up Long Hill, right at the top of Long Hill and down to Errwood Reservoir, cross the dam, left up the Goyt Valley, left at the Cat & Fiddle and down into Buxton, left up Carlisle Road, left up to the top of Long Hill again, left down to Errwood Reservoir again, across the dam again, right this time up the Street, right at the top and down to Kettleshulme (at the junction on the minor road, take the left one). Right in Kettleshulme and back to Whaley Bridge. It’s basically a Figure 8, 35 km and 940 m climbing from Whaley. It’s a pretty regular spin out for me.

Oh, and Chapel-Rushup Edge- Mam Nick-Edale-Hope-Castleton-Winnats-Sparrowpit (use the Blackbrook road not the A6)-Chapel (34 km, 800 m climb) is a good one too. It works well in either direction.

Race Face Ambush- comfortable and tough as old boots

The Adidas Supernova jerseys seem sensibly cut. I take one size smaller in those than in Italian stick person sizing, and they are still a little less tight.

Bower House is nice. Have you tried the Westcliff Hotel in Seascale? I have stayed there and it’s perfectly decent.

Very happy with mine- details on the other thread. There was a wait of a few weeks’ when I ordered mine last autumn so maybe bear that in mind. I also got them to build it for me, which took their lads about half an hour.

I have the Asgard ‘one bike’ box, which houses two pretty large bikes quite happily. It is solid and doesn’t seem to have to many places where it can be attacked (hinges and door frame are protected), and the whole thing is bolted to a concrete base. My only negative is that the door has a 12 mm padlock hasp which is just too small to take a SoldSecure Gold lock, which mostly seem to be 14 mm hasps or bigger, and some insurers would insist on this class of lock. Bigger Asgard bike boxes have a lock in the door, rather than relying on a padlock, I think.

Stuck on a delayed Pendolino, crawling north from London……

I had this with a Lifeline one which I have now replaced with a much more expensive Park Tools one, which works fine. Couldn’t be bothered to sedn the Lifeline one back because it had lots of useful little bits with it.

17.5 miles each way but it’s straight down a major road into Manchester and can be pretty horrible so I only do it if the weather’s good and I can go outside the really busy times. It’s quicker door to door than the train but I probably only do it once a week on average.

Mine are sufficiently good to scare me. Can lock up with one finger braking from the hoods.

I have recently paid £ 3 k to an IFA for broadly similar advice BUT the transfers were done to move out of some underperforming investments, to move to a lower % charging arrangement and to get a better balance of risk.

I’ll recover the £ 3 k over the next two years from the move to lower % charges.

We have used this IFA for a long time and we trust him because his advice has generally been very sound but, if you don’t have a history with your guy, and you don’t really understand what you’re being asked to pay for, or he hasn’t explained it, I can see why you’d want a second opinion.

So I think what I’m saying is that a good IFA is well worth the money, but you need to be sure you have a good one.

Buxton to top of Long Hill, left down to Errwood Reservoir, right up to the top of the ridge, right into Kettleshulme (take the left fork on the small road), right into Whaley Bridge, through Whaley to Chapel-en-le-Frith, Hayfield, New Mills, back to Whaley Bridge, up Long Hill, down to Errwood Reservoir again, left up to Derbyshire Bridge and Cat and Fiddle, left and down into Buxton.

About 35 miles, 3300 feet climbing. One of my regular spins out.

PS No snow left now. There were a couple of inches of slushy stuff on the very highest bits on Thursday morning last week but it went quickly (not quickly enough for me to avoid wiping out in it though)

I have just temporarily picked up responsibility for a bunch of labs which my predecessor had turned into a ‘work-free safety zone’. At the request of the users, we completely revised the procedures, giving them a lot more responsibility and freedom. It took about three months to sort it all out and at the end they all said ‘Yes, yes we understand. We all think this is a good way to go’.

Tomorrow I am bollocking two of them for a cretinous piece of utter stupidity, less than three weeks after the new procedures came in. I intend to make a terrible example.

I got the Lifeline one but didn’t get on at all well with it (I am damned if I can tell when it’s reached the right torque), so replaced it with a Park Tools one which was more than twice the price, but doesn’t rip the heads off bolts. I’ve kept the Lifeline one because it has a neat set of different heads but that was an expensive way to get hold of those. Or maybe I am just a gibbon?

Asgard for me. It’s the biz. I have the one bike version which holds a large 29er and a road bike comfortably, and the nice men who supply it will, if paid, also put it together for you in about half an hour.

Lots of opportunity if you do a pretty quantitative course. Maybe fewer options if you do something more qualitative. Environmental law has opportunities but is a long slog.

Diet Coke and Mentos (but outside)

I pass that one – it is an arresting sight. Another one installed just outside my work last week – a guy was killed on Upper Brook St.

Yes, I rode into work for the first time in ages today and passed the one on Upper Brook Street

Just be careful. I have just bought my first road bike in a very long time and it’s astonishingly quick. In two rides, I have come off once on ice, fortunately on to a soft verge, and almost outbraked myself on a damp and mucky but very busy road. So far my main conclusion is that I have a good deal to (re)learn.

10000 counts per second is a very small amount, compared with what Litvinenko drank, which would have been a couple of hundred million counts per second. I wouldn’t be happy at drinking from that pot, but I wouldn’t be concerned by doing so.

There was a lot of health screening in the aftermath. The authorities used NHS Direct as the first line, and it took 3837 calls, based on which 1844 people were sent questionnaires and 753 of those asked to provide 24 hour urine samples for polonium analysis. About 50 showed contamination at levels corresponding to the sort of risk associated with a medical X-ray. None showed anything close to the levels needed to see acute effects like Litvinenko suffered.

This was actually a rather well managed incident. Lots of stuff has been in the public domain from the time, for example this and this.

Oh and Yasser Arafat- that’s nonsense.

I have a 2014 529, bought after a very long time away from cycling as a ‘re-entry level’ bike and, indeed, a first ever mountain bike. I bought it just under a year ago and it is used exclusively for chewing through the miles. It is tough as old boots and tolerant of the relative lack of maintenance I give it. It does feel a bit heavy and sluggish compared with the carbon 29-er hardtail I treated myself to at the end of last summer, but that was more than 3 x the price. However, the 529 was sufficiently good fun that it convinced me that I wanted to splash the cash on the carbon bike.

Since the weather turned properly wintry I have mainly used the 529 because my normal riding has deteriorated into a mush of grit, water, snow and ice, which does seem pretty hard on the bike. I did use it a lot over the Spring and Summer last year and it needed little looking after in the nicer weather.

I can see the 529 being a ‘bad conditions’ bike and the carbon one a ‘less bad conditions’ bike (we live in what my brother-in-law calls the Bleak Peak so crap weather is possible all year round) so I expect both will see significant use. I can’t really comment on its ability to handle fiddly going.

Hope this helps

Thanks very much. I understand it a bit better now and think it probably is working but will fiddle around some more before attacking some expensive new carbon with it

Very! I am ‘working at home’ today but managed a two hour commute from the garage to the house, taking in two reservoirs, three decent climbs, and miles of tracks dusted with snow, all in brilliant sunshine. Productivity is rubbish now, though.

Great afternoon out at the AJB- superb performance!!!