Are you trying to say, Count Zero, that you drive along towards a pedestrian crossing and get surprised when a pedestrian pops out wanting to cross?

Why not just keep a look out and expect people to want to cross? Going down a line of parked cars – there’s potential for kids, cats, dozy folk to emerge – you’re awareness of them is as diminished as their’s of you, because of the parked cars. Drive further out – you should be a door opening away anyway, so if anyone emerges there’s going to be a little room anyway. Same for cycling – never cycle withing a car door opening space of parked cars.

As for your how often question – never. If I see someone not looking I’m covering my brakes, moving further out and then alerting them if I need to. Just ploughing on straight without either slowing or moving out is just daft, whether you ring your bell or not.

Sounds to me like you ride in the gutter of the road, in which case you’re just asking for trouble.

Good point, but I’d counter that you’ll also miss seeing pedestrians that certainly do warrant attention. Especially since spring is on the way.

Objective!? Just a load of crap – the concentration needed to go 20 is so high that you can’t watch the road properly! Absolute rubbish. Just put the car in 3rd and leave the pedals alone. Maximise the gap to the car ahead (three seconds is nice) and relax.

Perhaps our pedestrians drivers are just more stupider selfish than those elsewhere?

It’s an urban area – people mill about and sometimes get on the road – like the Highway Code says, we should be looking out for them and expecting it, not just blaming them.

And +1 – it is how we are taught that is wrong.

We should start out by thinking of the roads as a massive cooperative system, with the ideal outcome being mutually beneficial flow.

Edit: that includes people being able to cross the road, cycles making safe progress etc etc. For example, scanning the pavement looking for people that want to cross – when you slow down you have ample time for stuff like that.

I started driving through my local town (Dorking) at 20 about three years ago. It is massively better all round – instead of accelerating to the next lights you can easily just roll along and anticipate the flow – people can filter in and out, pedestrians can cross the road and so-on.

It only feels slow because you haven’t tried it properly. Do it for a year and then comment.

I think it is perfectly sensible and practical – not all 30 limits down to 20, but High Streets and residential two lanes.

Merckx for sure. Not only did he win all three jerseys in the TdF, it was his first TdF.

And, if there had been a white jersey for best young rider, he’d have won that as well.

He won by nearly 18 minutes.

That on it’s own is almost enough.

Among many other feats his hour record remains, effectively, unbroken – it has been surpassed, but indoors and with meticulous preparation and understanding of aerodynamics (talking about standard bike record).

You can take that to extremes though and it would still make as much sense. For example you could say that any rider riding for performance and falling off from time to time is being irresponsible.

that the sport has now succumbed to a lot of macho bullshit one upmanship.

can we go back to being nice to each other and riding our bikes?Oh God, yes please! All this sniping at novices is just ridiculous – apparently some people were just born riding Gods and were never beginners themselves.

I’m not desperately unhappy just using my 36″ bowsaw. But it does take a lot of time. My dad shames me – still finding and cutting up all his firewood by hand aged 81 (they only have log burner for heating, plus coal in the Rayburn).

dig:ride ratio of 40:60.

What a crock – think how many trails there’d be if everyone did that!

Claiming some sort of ownership over “your” trail? It is much better to ride a trail that already exists than make another one for fear of upsetting the digger!

As far as I can see you built a trail, and people have ridden it, and now it’s looking a bit sorry. And?

Fabulous woodsman – thanks for the advice.

Don’t worry, I am actually quite safety conscious in my old age.

So if I’ve narrowed it down to a brand (say Husky for example) do I just then get what I can afford (lower end)? Will I end up wishing I stepped up to the next most expensive? Are there big durability differences?

Also – can anyone recommend a supplier? Don’t mind if it is online – looking for discount!

I’m all for patching it there and then – only takes a couple of minutes longer, most of that waiting for the solution to go off & you can be repacking your bag/looking at the view/having a wee. So really, doesn’t take any longer at all – plus it’s cheaper by far and “proper”.

Who, by the way, are these a-holes that chuck their tubes into a tree?

Just put a patch on it, ffs. Or at the very least take it with you!

Only way Williams pace could be not for real is if they wasted very restricted and valuable testing time running under weight – the quick laps were followed by eight or so further laps, so they weren’t running on single lap of fuel etc. I think I’m also right in saying that they have yet to use KERS also.

Red Bull are reputed to be way faster than the rest, and Renault are supposed to be very good too. Ferrari are not far behind. McLaren are unknown – they are definitely a little short of running already – be much more reassured when they can do a race simulation, which they are very far from doing at the moment.

Thanks chaps.

I did join briskoda, and found an answer straight away – broken rod, cheaply available on ebay, common problem. Also found a very good pictorial guide to removing door trim.

Thanks again.

Like a lot of people I think I’ll be on the zig-zag at Box Hill. They’ll still flash past n a few seconds, but at least we’ll be able to see them coming.

The HRT worries me. Are they even real photos? Look like CGis to me. No sponsors at all. I would guess that car is not really built yet.

I think McLaren may be distracting themselves with this “U” shaped sidepod thing. Full judgement reserved until we see the other features come on to the car. We’ll see. Looks like another tank to me.

Red Bull is still the benchmark I reckon. I can already see the other drivers shaking their heads at the Barcelona test as Vettel and Webber drive round on rails.

Massive shame about Kubica – especially as the car looks genuinely interesting. I think the other teams will be covering the front facing exhausts bet by trying it themselves. Red Bull already have a layout with much longer exhausts, so they are well placed from an engine tuning point of view.

There are many many examples, BB. Try looking into it yourself. Basically, anywhere that gets a government that nationalises major assets and takes away profitability from, for example, major oil companies typically gets some level of destabilising treatment from the US, and from us. Like Iran. Like Venezuela. Like lots of others.

Before hair-splitting commences, obviously no political situation is 100% black and white. But the fact remains that there are dozens and dozens of examples of double standards and illegal interference.

Here’s a nice page to get you started, Berm Bandit Wikipedia page

Iran was a functioning democracy before we put the Shah in.

You know precious little about Central America! Try reading up on Nicaragua for a start.

So which democratically elected governments have we been engineering the overthrow of then?

If we means US and us,

Quite a few in Central and South America. Most of them in Central America.

Iran is another one.

Red Bull predictably svelte. Sure there are plenty of clever features on all these cars that will come to light. Renault are def winning the intrigue game so far tho.

Wouldn’t normally expect it to break the chain – chains break sometimes, you’re probably reading too much into it.

You miss the whole point – banks know that they can take huge risks and the rest of us will bail them out when it all goes boobs-up. It isn’t the amount of money, it’s the fact that we ordinary folk have to bail them out, and at the same time the arrogant (insert favourite word) simultaneously think they’re better than us.

Footballers’ wages is just a fact of capitalist life. Same as pop stars or actors.

Don’t clean the rust off – it’s probably holding them together.

Lotus (as in the green ones) have done well, at first glance. Much more tightly packaged and swoopy than their first effort.

I think the retro JPS black and gold of the Renault is just daft, personally.

Sauber – hmm. Can’t see much to get excited about there.

Really, we’re all just waiting for the Red Bull tomorrow, and for all the other teams to go “doh!”.

The way you pedal is not usually questioned – because we can all ride a bike in that most basic way. But consider that youn learn to pedal at aged four or so, at an age when the only thing to reference it to is walking and running. So for ever more, unless given deliberate attention, we pedal like we walk – plod, plod, plod. The frequency is a bit slower than ideal, and the action can be up and down, rather than round and round.

I tried with Abinger Common to get Natural England to come and inspect the work – they won’t. So, although the rules for working in a SSSI are very strict, the mechanism for checking is very weak – possibly additionally so, given the status of the landowner.

BKB is not on a SSSI, so the prospet of any kind of official action with regard to damage caused by forestry work is slim to nil. Besides, some conservation, such as thinning, appears messy but is actually necessary in the long-game.

Don’t know if this sounds familiar, but for me (and I think a lot of people) there is a sensation of bouncing on the saddle as you spin faster – the solution is to imagine sitting into the saddle harder, so that you are more anchored to the bike.

Also, try visualising the pedal stroke coming from the hip and don’t think about your feet.

Finally, practice on very smooth terrain, tarmac being ideal.

No big deal really, despite my strongly worded posting! You and they got a surprise, and a reminder. We move on. Something very similar happened to me a few years back, and I had to take myself to one side for a talking to about not going faster than I can see!

Rahter a classic one is that there are lots of blackberries on the top part of Yogurt Pots – so guess what… people like to pick blackberries. Ditto mushrooms, as jools mentioned.

Don’t think these ones were “bad”.

Telegraph isn’t a footpath. The footpath runs parallel, under the trees.

Even if it were a bridleway (which I don’t think it is either) you would still have to travel at a speed that you can control, and stop when needed, and give way to people on foot. Same even if it is dedicated cycle track.

Here’s a radical idea. Why not just stop and let them get out of harm’s way?

So they made a mistake. Big deal. There are no signs, so it’s bound to happen every now and then.

Why worry about being in the way? People can just wait a minute. It’s not a race track.

Way too much. There is no point is dazzling other road users. You’re much better off taking a better, constructive, position in the road than being a dazzling hazzard. The road is a cooperative system, not war.

More than one light – good idea. Flashing, esp a distinctive pattern – also good. Reflective bits – yep. Deliberately causing discomfort and confusion – stoopid.

Quite why this doesn’t centre around which pub to finish at I don’t know!

There’s really only one pub in Surrey Hills at the moment – Kings Head, Holmbury.

Hadn’t got round to looking at scarbs this morning. Car launch season – even less work gets done!

Not sure where the evolution statement comes from. They’ve got a completely new rear suspension for a start. Plus have promised loads of stuff on the car by the time Bahrain comes round.