…and are you still thinking it wasn’t too long? :-)

Around Mt Ventoux is fab for both.

The Queen Mother tried to slip her tongue in.

any relation to Ned Flanders’?…

No, but she is related to Michael Flanders…

tangerine, you have got close to some important realisations in what you have said. The first is that you are a logical/rational kind of guy. This means you expect to be able to get logical/rational answers and you expect your mind to provide them but there is a catch here. Depression is a big fat LIAR and the fact is you cannot trust your mind to give you the right answers when you are feeling this way.
Another is that this is an illness, not a personality flaw. If you broke your leg you’d be straight off to A&E without a second thought to get patched up but because it is your mind that’s “broken” you feel embarrassed to tell your doctor how you feel and resistant to taking “happy pills”.
Actually, depression is linked to low serotonin levels in the brain and modern antidepressants help keep the levels up. There are many different ones so if you find one doesn’t suit you (bad side effects or just not working) ask your doctor to try you on something else. Keep trying and keep in touch with your doctor. The first one I was given made me feel ten times worse and I couldn’t move from my bed for 3 days! The doctor tried a different one and I felt much better very quickly.
I was also prescribed a course of CBT which I was able to do at home as an interactive computer programme. This was backed up with weekly counselling sessions on the phone (you can also have face-to-face). For me this was very useful in teaching me why depression happens, why it is hard to shift and – almost the most important thing – how very widespread and common it is. You would be amazed how many of the things you describe are very common symptoms of depression.
CBT is not about probing into your past, or about whether you are a good/bad person. It is about recognising that how you feel is closely related to the kinds of thoughts you have. If these thoughts are exaggerated or faulty, you can nail them down and examine them, then find ways of replacing them with more realistic and positive ones.
I know that when you are depressed it is very hard to imagine feeling happy (or even “normal”) again, but the fact is you can.
Good luck! Keep us updated .

Thanks very much guys!

The universe was very tiny to begin with. I’m quoting here:

Lemonick and Nash in a popular article for Time describe inflation as an “amendment to the original Big Bang” as follows: “when the universe was less than a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a second old, it briefly went through a period of superchanged expansion, ballooning from the size of a proton to the size of a grapegruit (and thus expanding at many, many times the speed of light).”

But—-if it was possible for anyone to be around at the time and measure it, would they have thought the universe was “the size of a grapefruit”? -or would the massive curvature of spacetime have made the ruler, the observer and everything else correspondingly tiny – so to the observer, the universe always appears the same size?

I love the junk mail that comes in an envelope marked “hand-delivered for your personal attention.”
“Hand-delivered”?? Has the Post Office come up with some other way of doing it then? …and my “personal attention”? Well, usually I get my valet to open the post for me but since you insist…

I think either a 37 or 47, because that’s what I used to see the most as a kid.

This.

When I was younger I used to go to a unisex salon where they’d wash your hair first. I wasn’t bothered about that but it was the only way I could get a teenage girl to stick her tits in my face.

A satsuma by the side of the road…about 500km inside the Arctic Circle in Finland, in the middle of a pine and birch forest.

It doesn’t day anything about that on the strava premium benefits list. Seems a bit strange.
It even does it if I move the start/finish points to a section of road. It keeps telling me “your segment looks like an existing one” and shows a completely unrelated road climb about half a mile away.

My ribs hurt now.

Maybe that’s something to do with it – the line I want is down an old unclassified road (actually an overgrown woodsy singletrack)so it’s just moving it to the next bit of road.

cleaning jockey wheels with a screwdriver lightly pressed against them and spinning the cranks.

This too, especially if you can get the grease/grime paste to come off in a single wiggly worm.

Thinking that it was 20 years from the end of WW2 to my birth; but 30 years from the Falklands War to now!

Any good for astigmatism?

Booking the test for after your trip may help stop them having to cut the salaries of the nhs staff down there….

A kind of immortality. That’d be nice, wouldn’t it?

Any old time of day. the doc did say something about maintaining hydration though.
I thought you only had to tell the insurance co. if there was a known problem before they covered you?

This site can be useful – haven’t looked at your area specifically but it had lots of rides where we are going and many had gpx files attached.
http://www.vttour.fr/%5B/url%5D

we had an Olympics on our street a couple of Olympicses ago. Events included longjump in flippers, tug of war, spacehopper race, welly-wanging, and dunching.

I love it when a rider powers off up a mountain, usually the day after blowing out on a big climb, and they say something like “How does he do it?”. Inevitably within 2 days the answer will be, “drugs”.

Sykes did more than share an office with Milligan. He co-wrote many Goon Shows; and when Milligan was too ill to write he would do them himself or with Larry Stephens.
I saw Sykes in a cameo role in Charlie’s Aunt at Newcastle Theatre Royal a couple of years ago. All he had to do was push a tea trolley across the stage. He had the place in tucks.

I think Descend Hamsterley’s website is on the blink. You need to get a license from Craig to ride the downhill trails. What you have there is the best way of linking all the cream of the marked XC routes together; have fun!

You need to fill in this online form http://www.garmin.com/uk/edge200cashback-form/%5B/url%5D, send a scan of your receipt and a photo of any old bike computer, and provide your bank account details.

Excellent tip jam bo, just reserved mine.

Thanks for that, cinnamon girl.

The main benefactors of this thread are going to be trail centres selling axles and QR’s to people who left theirs in their hidey holes.

:oops:

Another vote for the Roland HD1. I bought these at the tender age of 47 and I love them. You can run a CD player or MP3 through them and play along in the headphones. Just brilliant.

http://Www.totally-bikes.com rent Thorn tandems. Perfect bikes for the job..

I feel sick…

DezB +1 for the Spandau lyric. Another in the same vein is:
Gonna write a classic
Gonna write it in an attic
Baby I’m an adict now
An adict for your love
Adrian Gurvitz. Bleh.

Splendid. Here is the late Isaac Guillory.

I’ve loved my Peugeot 306 1.9 turbo diesel estate. Carries huge loads, fun to drive, does 50+ to the gallon, lovely ride and reliable. What a pity they stopped making them and now they’re getting hard to find.

I went to one of the Forestry Panel’s discussion evenings re. the future of the forests. My discussion group was chaired by the (then) Ramblers’ Chief Exec Tom Franklin, one of the panel members. I pointed out to him that there was no panel member who represented the interests of mountain bikers and asked if he would speak up on our behalf. He said, “No, I’ll speak up for ramblers.”
Not impressed.

I once enjoyed a long chat with Leo Baxendale, who created the Bash Street Kids, Minnie the Minx and Little Plum among many others. He was a very nice, modest chap (and still is I hope).

eats meat

Oh – I get it – a euphamism eh?

You can eat all mushrooms – but some of them only once.

That canal needs mowing

Hi SSBonty, sadly not at the mo – I am tied in to publish through Amazon exclusively at the moment, in order to make my book available on their lending library scheme. However, this is not proving very worthwhile so when that expires (in a month or so) I’ll look into getting it onto iBooks too.
Have you spent a summer there yet? A feast of mosquito-related fun!