Pretty horrific.

Mind if I use the pictures in a briefing at work?

Yeah go ahead, I’m fine with that.

How did you come into contact with it, out of interest?

Not even sure where it would have been, but it’s pretty endemic in East Kent. I went out on the gravel/cross/singlespeed/whatever you want to call my Surly KM with cross bars and tyres, rode to Dover and back along woodland paths and field edges. If anywhere it was probably at the Dover end – I’ve seen it recently at Kearsney Abbey and this stuff really spreads.

Presumably this was just a glancing strike and you didnt set off rolling through the stuff.

Yeah, but apparently a lot of the sap is in the leaves.
It’s not absolutely 100% certain it was hogweed but there’s basically nothing else it could have been that anyone can think of, and the timings were spot-on between my ride and the blister coming up.

Essentially it was a small third-degree burn, and was treated as such. I wish I’d bought shares in Duoderm back in the summer.

There’s no other candidate. I don’t work with anything dangerous. It flared up a couple of days after a very sunny ride in shorts around overgrown field edge paths, so it’s really very likely to have been hogweed. The hospital had seen a lot of injuries with it this year including one of their own staffers who ended up at East Grinstead burns unit.

Which brings us up to yesterday, day 145: https://photos.app.goo.gl/xXZzafosLH2eqvYU7

And the fun thing? For an indeterminate amount of time, the ****-up DNA in my shin will burn again in the same way if exposed to strong sunlight. This could be months or years and I guess the only way to find out exactly how long would be to find out, which I don’t want to do.

Day 108. Given clearance by the nurse to swim again. https://photos.app.goo.gl/uF5koDe3TvuzMkFh9

Day 85: https://photos.app.goo.gl/Vs2wpxMC7FMhGBit7

Day 71: https://photos.app.goo.gl/sj8ckXqNeuNa1uV66

Day 63: https://photos.app.goo.gl/PbpNnppFaKpVcXft6

Day 55: https://photos.app.goo.gl/TrhKuH1MNnP88obAA

Bit graphic now so I’ll use links instead of direct embeds:

Day 39: https://photos.app.goo.gl/7xN6dnreErT2Uy5C9

Day 24

Day 17, by this stage having trips to the minor-injuries every 2 days.

By day 15:

Later that day:

Complete bollox.

All it will achieve is a corresponding rise in house prices.

Any fool can see that.

Yep, this is spot on. Ironically this will basically be another subsidy to the homeowning generation from which the young people will be trying to buy housing (just like stamp duty relief).

We just need to build a ****-ton more housing, and continue to make it harder for existing owners to easily bid-up the price of housing as they seek buy-to-let investments, and also introduce much fairer long-term rental contracts. Easier said than done, I know, but after generations of policies encouraging nice comforting above-earnings rises in house prices, we’ve basically got a pyramid scheme for a housing market.

Surly?

I basically run my Karate Monkey this way. It’s got CX tyres here but it’d take huge slicks too

I’ve got one of each.

They’re both bikes

I can’t say I tend to think about it much when I’m riding them.

Thanks! Have done.

Yeah, the techie at TF Tuned wasn’t complimentary about those aftermarket ones.

That quote from that video: “Every time you take a map out again, it gets bigger”. Going to teach my kids that.

Looks like he *wasn’t* alright. Collapsed and was lying under a tree for 40 hours. Holy moly.

One thing op didn’t mention was whether he was in a tick area

Yes, Berkshire. We went to a deer park/petting zoo place last week, and fed deer close-up.

The bite on your elbow could just be a mosquito.

Yep, indeed. Not chancing it though – will at least do the antibiotic course

You’re really not helping things with this….

I’m 6’7″ and not even 14 stone. I have size 14 feet. I ride a bright orange 64.5cm road bike and a similarly enormous mountain bike. In these trying circumstances, sartorial elegance is a hopeless ask, so I focus on basic warmth.

That’s what I’ve got

It’s actually an ancient Bench cable knit hoody jumper thing. It’s warm.

I’m being given fashion critique by… mountain bikers?! 🙂

Thanks. Just phoned GP to get call back to discuss getting the test

Any particular reason to get tested now or are the antibiotics enough?

I am glad the idiot who wrote negative stuff in the Guardian (as linked to above) has had a good dressing down, was even mentioned in PMQ’s this week.

It’s very important that dissenting views are crushed. Especially on this subject. No irony there at all

Cycling without one is a darwinium statement

Shit, I just walked down my stairs without a helmet.

You know what, I usually wear one, but cycling without one sometimes is bloody lovely. Darwin schmarwin, I don’t consider a pootle along a towpath to carry sufficient risk to make a helmet a necessity.

That’s not the weather forecast. It’s just weather day on the front of the Express.

Tomorrow Maddy
The next day immigrants
The day after, pensions
Then immigrants again
Then Di
Then immigrants again
Then Maddy again
Then back to weather

It was just political opportunism, was it necessary? I don’t really think so, most of the gay folk I know just roll their eyes, and get on with life.

Was it necessary that black people in the USA were allowed to sit at the front of the bus?

I think I’d want drop bars on a tourer if only for somewhere to get low if I was riding a very long way into a headwind

Shocking. Just up the road from me here, a road I ride almost every time I go out on my bike.

They’re named now in the local paper:
http://www.readingchronicle.co.uk/news/reading/articles/2014/02/14/97737-updated-scenes-of-horror-as-two-cyclists–both-reading-borough-council-workers—die-in-purley-rise-last-night/

29 year old dad of two, 39 year old dad of five. Both “keen cyclists” who worked for the council

But that’s the thing… I don’t accept that they’re of the same mentality. One of the activities is fundamentally higher risk than the other. It is a different decision to take a risk in a car than it is to take a risk on a bike. I think we as a group should point out to people that while a cyclist behaving impolitely is annoying, it’s completely different in terms of external danger to instances where a driver does so. People need to get past the sense of offending politeness, and look at what people are ACTUALLY risking when they behave the way they do

“Inconsiderate people are the same whether they’re taking too many biscuits from the tin, or piloting a JCB through a crowded school playground without paying attention”. See?

Inconsiderate people are the same whether they are in a car, on a bike, or walking down the pavement 4 abreast.

I really really don’t accept that equivocation.

Only one of those groups kills people in large numbers through their inconsideration. It’s DIFFERENT when the inconsideration involves making very heavy lumps of metal move inconsiderately amongst soft fleshy people.

Strangely, desipite all this awful inconsiderate cycling going on, still about 1 in 200 or so of us will die in a motor vehicle accident. In the USA it’s more like 1 in 100. In Thailand it’s 1 in 40

Meanwhile, 83% of drivers admit to speeding regularly.
http://www.ctc.org.uk/blog/roger-geffen/rac-says-%E2%80%9Cdrivers-need-help%E2%80%9D-%E2%80%93-and-they%E2%80%99re-right

I reckon that proportionally there are as many ‘bad’ cyclists as there are motorised road-users. You’re seeing more I think because there are more cyclists venturing out than before.

Who’s doing the killing? That’s where the problem is. Let’s not get all Stockholm Syndrome here and pretend that mildly antisocial cycling is in any way a serious problem.