101 Uses for a Brompton: Discovering that Some Things Haven’t Changed

In this strangest of years, it’s good to know that some things haven’t changed. It’s an iron law of life around here that almost any interaction where favours are being exchanged must involve some form of baked goods (in summer, garden produce may be substituted).

Exhibit A: today’s journey to drop off our second string ice cream maker. We bought this at the local charity-shop-which-does electrical-items (not to be confused with the charity-shop-with-a-good-selection-of-knitting-needles, the charity-shop-that-always-has-decent-books or the charity-shop-where-someone-knits-little-cosies-for-its-mugs – I’m sure the charities involved all support good and noble causes but it’s their stocking policies which tend to count most when I’m actually buying something) a couple of years ago and have since upgraded to a bigger and better one.

I was going to take it back to the charity shop (by which I mean putting it in the special place of things awaiting the trip to the charity shop, where it would probably still be when the earth finally fell into the sun, along with the curtains that were in the spare bedroom when we moved in and our Antarctic expedition padded jackets which may well get resurrected as going-out-for-lunch jackets the way things are going). But a fellow cyclist expressed an interest in having it at our last group ride and today there was a sufficient window in the weather to load up the Brompton basket with the help of a couple of cunningly deployed bungees and set off into Bigtown.

I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised to then be presented with some home-made biscuits in return, which was very nice, albeit unnecessary (especially as we have a new shiny ice-cream maker which the other half is busy testing out). I then headed to some other friends who are moving house, to have a rummage through their surplus books (outside of course) and parlayed a couple of the biscuits into further baked goods, in the form of flapjacks and brownies, before pedalling my well-gotten gains home.

I’m often asked by baffled locals why I ride a bike when a car would be quicker, safer, and on most days and most journeys drier. There are many reasons which I’ve covered here before, but the one that makes most sense to those I’m talking to is that it allows me to maintain my cake-based lifestyle. Or these days, my cake- biscuit- and ice-cream-based lifestyle…

101 Uses for a Brompton: Media Stardom

Top tip for cycle campaigners – don’t send out a news release that will unexpectedly capture the attention of the local media on the morning the carpet fitter is due to arrive and spend all morning making banging noises upstairs just as you’re supposed to be recording a vaguely coherent WhatsApp voice message to the local radio station (my new least favourite way of interacting with the local media, worse even than posing for a sadface in the local paper, arms crossed in true Angry People in Local Papers style).

It turns out that spending a couple of hours counting bikes on Bigtown High Street and then pointing out that there might be more people shopping by bike (and fewer illegally abandoning their cars in the pedestrianised town centre) if it wasn’t actually impossible to cycle from the main cycle path to the High Street due to the one-way system has media legs on a quiet news day (frustratingly Bigtownshire Council actually decided to exempt bikes from the restrictions about two years ago and got as far as doing the traffic order, when someone raised the issue of street clutter (because giant 4x4s littering your pedestrianised street aren’t street clutter but a small blue sign with a bike on it is) and the whole thing got put on hold until after the outcome of the last High Street rejuvenation project but one, and then apparently filed under ‘too difficult’).

Also apparently not ‘clutter’

Anyway, the upshot was that the local TV news decided they wanted to do a piece about it. Unfortunately this meant Friday’s plan to ride down to some local friends for a leisurely lunch and inspection of their village’s new allotment project turned into a bit of a logistical headache that ended with the Brompton in the boot of the car so that we could fit it all in and I would still be able to show up for the interview on a bike (I did cycle it home, so it wasn’t entirely cheating). Cue an hour spent not just being interviewed but the Brompton and I and a fellow campaigner being filmed riding up (but not down, that being illegal) the High Street and, most importantly, observing social distancing (‘we have to include at least one shot that shows how far away I stood from you during the interview, otherwise we get emails’ the reporter explained – I told him it didn’t matter because their inbox would be so full of people complaining that neither of us was wearing a helmet). They even got in the shot of the bike wheel spinning and coming to a stop, without which no local TV segment on cycling is complete.

Whether any of this will make it onto the actual tellybox depends on there being anything more interesting happening over the weekend (national paint-drying championships, anyone?) but at least the Brompton got its moment in the spotlight, something it has missed with POP being cancelled this year.

I can remember when all this was fields …

There was no time to take any photos of the TV shenanigans, so have some of the new allotments instead. Not bad for something that was a ploughed field this spring. Perfectly timed for lockdown …

101 Uses for a Brompton: Blueberry Matchmaking

I’m not exactly an avid shopper at the best of times so I wasn’t expecting to be one of those racing down to the nearest garden centre as they reopened in Scotland this weekend. But it turns out that we had an urgent plant need, as I can explain. Well over a year ago we bought a blueberry bush on something of a whim during Potato Day (I know, it’s not a potato, but all sorts of garden related paraphernalia can be picked up if you can get past the fleece-clad hordes). Ultimately, we will be building a fruit cage, in the fullness of time, but for now the blueberry bush has been planted outside the greenhouse alongside a couple of gooseberry bushes that sort of fell into our trolley when we were going round a garden centre.

Last year the blueberry bush didn’t produce any fruit but that was because a hare had thoughtfully and methodically removed each of the flowering branches while we sat and watched it do it; hares eat what they like in our garden as regular blog readers will be aware. This year the hares have left the bush alone – they’re surprisingly fickle about their preferences – but although it has been flowering, it has not set any fruit and I recently read that blueberries either need or prefer some cross pollination from another bush.

So, with garden centres opening – and our blueberry window of opportunity closing it was time to saddle up the Brompton (mainly because of its capacious front basket) and head off to find a partner for our lonely blueberry bush.

It helped that it was a lovely day.

Naturally, I took the scenic route.

Once at the garden centre, having negotiated the new rules (every customer was issued with a basket as well as any trolley ‘because we’ve got 70 baskets and that’s how many people are allowed inside’) I headed (almost) straight for the fruit bush section (a bottle of citrus feed may just have fallen into my basket as even Bob Flowerdew on Gardener’s Question Time said it was worth buying and he’s someone even less likely than me to spend actual money on something that could possibly be brewed from old nettles and repurposed car tyres). Unlike Potato Day, no sharp elbows were required – everyone was on their absolute best behaviour, like children who are being taken on a long-awaited treat but only if they are very very good – indeed, there was so much ‘after youing’ things almost came to a halt in places. A flowering blueberry bush was swiftly located and loaded into the Brompton and I was able to pedal back at moderate speed* to unite the new lovers at last. I can only hope their union proves a fruitful one.

* I can only apologise to the young lad walking his mountain bike up our road, on the way home. Being outclimbed by a middle aged woman must have been bad, being outclimbed by one on a Brompton with half a shrubbery in her front basket can only have burned. I hope he would be comforted to know that I was a woman on a mercy mission. And he’s now prepared for a lifetime cycling in the Bigtownshire area where being out-cycled by people twice your age only stops when you yourself are old enough to be the one doing the outriding. Even the wiry old boys had to start somewhere…

101 Uses for a Brompton: Transmuting Spiderplants

I’ve had a bit of a work crunch on these last 10 days or so, with a tight work deadline combined with events in Edinburgh and Glasgow and a big consultation exercise on the Scottish National Transport Strategy to respond to (because we know how to party in the Town Mouse household). So obviously, one of my number one priorities was to spend time photographing just some of our growing army of spider plants and posting them on Bigtown’s newly created bartering group online.

I joke, but it was becoming a matter of growing urgency as we were in danger of becoming overwhelmed by them. We bought one spider plant about three years ago, after we decided that our new-to-us bathroom storage unit looked wrong without a plant sitting on it. Pretty soon the spider plant started doing what spider plants do, which is the same thing rabbits do, but without the need for another spider plant to get the process going.* I’m a sucker for planting up the babies because they look a bit desperate just hanging there, but I always forget that the first thing the babies do once they’re settled in is start creating babies of their own, so we’re on about our third generation now.

Anyway, amazingly – because you’d think the world would have enough spider plants for everyone to have at least one by now – there were takers, and after a trip down to Bigtown in the Brompton (plant transporter of choice), two of the spider babies have been transmogrified into a nice sanseveria, with further offers of a peace lily and a couple of aloe veras still in the bartering pipeline.

In fact the whole bartering group has proved to be something of a delight: a simple idea that appears to have taken off among the good people of Bigtown in an unexpected way. Quite a few people are using it just to get rid of stuff without wanting anything in return (‘space in my house’) but it’s been fun to watch some of the more creative swaps actually take shape – as well as the emergence of packs of coffee and chocolate bars as an ersatz currency.

The only slight downside is I’m now feeling a little bereft, as gaps appear on the windowsill where the spiderlings once sat and others are earmarked for swaps. Still, as long as I don’t get rid of the motherplant, that’s a problem that will quickly solve itself.

What would you barter?

* I used to volunteer for a charity which used to help old people who’d lost control of their gardens, back when we lived in London. One old couple had made the mistake of planting out a spider plant to see what happened. There was basically nothing else growing in their garden, and every nook and cranny was filled with spider plants. You’d think I’d have taken this as a Dreadful Warning but apparently not.

101 Uses for a Brompton: Cattle Rustling

Of all the things gardeners don’t want to hear, ‘there’s a cow in the garden’ comes pretty close to the top of the list – perhaps second only to ‘there are cows in the garden’. Today’s visitor was just a lone beast, and fortunately, once it had been ushered away from the veg patch, quite happy to browse on the long grass near the compost tumbler, while Moo-I-5 stared at it over the fence, making helpful suggestions.

The question was where it had come from – unlike our usual coo neighbours it clearly wasn’t a dairy cow, being a rather fetching shade of dark brown (I would post pictures but these things inevitably happen when your camera is out of battery …). The likeliest source was the farm down the road, but we didn’t have their phone number so I hopped on the Brompton to rouse our neighbour to see if she was missing any cows, because obviously the person you need in a misplaced coo crisis is an octogenarian who stands about 4 foot 10 in her sparkly wellies.

She didn’t think she was one of theirs but came up the road to inspect our new resident anyway, and agreed that the best place for it was their field rather than the suspiciously lush grass around our septic tank. It took a bit of ushering from the three of us but the cow finally, reluctantly, relinquished the prime grazing of our lawn for the rather less luxuriant grass next door and we got the gate secured.

‘Do you get to keep it if nobody claims it in a couple of weeks?’ I asked.

‘It’s the owner to blame if it gets out,’ she pointed out with a twinkle in her eye. ‘Might fetch a nice price at the market …’

And then she headed back to the house to, I’m sure, make strenuous attempts to find out where it had come from and return it safely home.

101 Uses for a Brompton: Wool Transport

When my cousin announced that he’d found me some potential yarn bombing supplies I thought I’d save him a trip to the post office and pick them up when I was in Edinburgh on my travels this weekend. Wool, after all, is fairly light and squashable so I was sure I could squeeze it into my bag and transport it with me as I ran one workshop and then travelled to Dundee for a little light troublemaking and a conference.

What he hadn’t quite conveyed to me was the scale of his find…

Not quite three bags’ full …

Bromptons don’t really have a huge carrying capacity, at least compared to the big bike, so it took some ingenuity (and a willingness to look a bit like a bag lady, albeit one with impeccable taste in bikes) to work out how to attach the bag of wool to the back of my backpack and cycle along with it hanging behind me. This was made extra exciting by a massive tailwind down Princes Street (it’s always … interesting … when you apply the brakes and put your feet down, only for the bike to continue moving forward of its own volition). It also added a certain something to the ride over the Tay Bridge and definitely something to the climb up to the Tay Bridge, the lift being out for repair.

And this is not the Rijksmuseum cycle path but it's pretty handy all the same pic.twitter.com/vweqKIJw9k

— Sally Hinchcliffe (@sallyhinch) November 5, 2018

Dundee has come on a bit since my last visit and now has a shiny new museum you can cycle under, Rijksmuseum-style, meaning the connection between the station and the waterfront is much improved albeit still involving crossing five lanes of traffic. It’s still got a long way to go before it can truly be said to be the livable city its powers-that-be seem to want it to be, but as I found out yesterday evening, it also has a group of campaigners who seem determined to help push those powers-that-be into fulfilling its promise (I also learned last night that Dundee has a great fondness for penguins, something of which I fully approve). Watch, as they say, this space …

Anyway, wool, Brompton and I are now all safely home again along with a bonus potplant from my uncle, because when you’re already transporting large quantities of wool on a small bike, a miniature potplant is neither here nor there. All I have to do now is find some sort of suitable yarnbombing project to make use of my newly acquired loot. Perhaps even penguin-related …

101 Uses for a Brompton: A little light mischief

I think I mentioned I had a small intervention planned – and last night saw me heading out on the Brompton with a fellow conspirator, a stencil and two cans of entirely temporary and not at all vandalistic chalk sprays to do my first ever (and I suspect last) spot of tagging.

It was all for a good cause – lovebombing the cycle paths of Bigtown for We Walk, We Cycle, We Vote, in an idea that made absolutely perfect sense to me when it popped into my brain in September. As the date got nearer and the thought of heading out to do something that would look from the outside very much like graffiti-ing things, I have to admit I got rather cold feet on the idea, but others seemed to think it was a good idea and I had a partner in not-actually-crime who was keen and so off we went into a freezing cold night to share the cycling infrastructure love.

Graffiti on the cycle paths officer? What makes you think I had anything to do with it?

Anyway, it turns out that if you’re standing on a bridge in some parts of Bigtown late at night, apparently blatantly spray painting it, then passers by take it in their stride, with nothing more than a faintly amused note to their ‘allright?’ as they pass on by (it was the other half, blamelessly sitting in the car doing the Sudoku as he waited for me to finish, who attracted the curiosity of the police).

I’d post some daylight pictures of the resulting work, but the weather today looked like this pretty much the whole day, so you’ll have to wait.

This is what happens when you look out of the window and say ‘it’s snowing a bit but it’s not really trying that hard’

And now I’m very much relieved the whole thing is over. Just in time to head down to London for another #5goMad adventure. Watch this space.

101 Uses for a Brompton: Going Singing

As I mentioned, I’ve been trying out a new choir (if it was the sort of choir where it was the other way round, I’d probably not have got very far, but they claim to be able to work with ‘the voice you have’ …). The main reason for choosing this choir, which is in Notso Bigtown (there are others which are nearer) is because a pal and ex choir member from Old Nearest Village found out about it and offered to give me a lift there and back. But this means her first driving five miles in the wrong direction to our house and then turning around to go back past her house on our way out. Clearly this is just dispiriting, even in a car, so after trying a few cunning alternative routes which turned out to be slower, I decided the easiest thing would be to ride the Brompton down to hers, at least on evenings when it isn’t snowing, pissing down or hailing frogs, all of which seem equally likely given the weather we’ve had recently (snowing again today, thank you, although none of it seems to have stuck around). It cuts out at least one of the unnecessary journeys, and crucially it’s almost all downhill, so it doesn’t feel like anything but a pleasure on my part.

So last night, I zoomed happily down the hill, blessing my new C&B Seen lights (which I should probably review one of these days), and arriving feeling refreshed and ready to head off for a happy evening of singing, and learning, and generally not looking at a screen, which is all good.

Even better is the fact that we pass through the village on the Big A Road that has recently had two Stoplights of Shame installed. These are amazing. If you’re detected doing more than 30 as you get into the village outskirts, they turn red on you and you have to sit there for all to see, having saved precisely no time. Instant karma. There was of course an almighty fuss when they were first installed and they were taken down to be tweaked after people complained they were stopping people who weren’t speeding, but they’re now back up again and working a treat. I have to admit I love the wonderfully sedate pace everyone now adopts through the village (there might even have been some unholy cackling), at least until the last SoS is negotiated. Why we don’t have these installed everywhere I have no idea. They’re bloody brilliant.

And the choir? Well they seem to be coping with the voice I have, which is only really an alto in the sense that I can’t hit any of the higher notes, rather than being particularly comfortable in the lower ranges. We’re learning some quite challenging-to-me stuff, but so far we have always managed to pass through the ‘God we’ll never get this’ stage, to the ‘hang on, that sort of makes sense’ stage to the ‘oh wow actually that managed to sound quite good’ part, at least for a line or two. And no being singled out or shamed, at least unless my pal puts her foot down on our way home.

101 Uses for a Brompton: Coffee-Cup Holder

Me and the Brompton off on our first trip of the year – 24 hrs in Inverness to talk @POPScotland @walkcyclevote and @WCFScot. That @backonmybike never lets me rest … pic.twitter.com/cGESg3FZpL

— Sally Hinchcliffe (@sallyhinch) January 10, 2018

For a long time I have regretted that trips with my Brompton by train – requiring as they do two hands to lug both Brompton and Brompton basket up and down stairs – have precluded being able to drink coffee on the train, because obviously I can’t drink train coffee, and neither can I buy a cup of coffee at the station to take with me on the train.

But now – thanks partly to Blue Planet and the current tide of anti-plastic feeling – things have got better. Not (yet) for the poor baby albatrosses, but at least for me because I got a giveaway keep cup at the end of last year, and also you can now ask for your coffee in it without the embarassment of being That Person.

So behold, a Brompton with on-board coffee.

So excited was I by this new development that I totally forgot to pick up any sugar so my enjoyment of the coffee wasn’t exactly unalloyed. Still, the technology worked and a world of productive train journeys has opened up ahead of me

Office with a dramatic view … very distracting pic.twitter.com/FLZGKGhSFU

— Sally Hinchcliffe (@sallyhinch) January 10, 2018

Anyway, here I am in Inverness allegedly for cycle campaigning reasons but possibly also because I wanted to visit Leakey’s Bookshop (and test my new coffee carrying technology, obviously). Unfortunately, for reasons which really are too humiliating* to go into, I shall be visiting with almost no cash and no means to get hold of it until I get home.

This might actually be for the best.

* Put it this way – don’t attempt to efficiently sign your new debit card and cut up and get rid of your old one while you’re very jetlagged after 24 hours of travelling when the new debit card looks very like the old debit card. Just saying.

101 Uses for a Brompton: Flirting with Temptation

Attentive readers of this blog may have gleaned the information, if they read carefully between the lines, that our house is on top of a bloody big hill. I would be lying if I said that this doesn’t occasionally weigh on my mind when I’m planning my day’s activities, even if it does loom rather larger in my head than it actually ends up being on the road. I’ve tried various tactics over the last year to make getting up the hill easier – from attempting to distract myself from what I’m doing in the hope that I will look up and suddenly discover I’m almost home, to, recently, just going for it and attacking the climb to try and get it over with. These have had mixed success, and at the end of the day (and it usually is at the end of the day) the hill is still there and it’s still a bugger to get up, and I’m still in a muck sweat by the time I arrive home and collapse over my handlebars gasping for oxygen, with a little cloud of flies circling my head because that’s how slowly I ride.

So I am officially e-bike curious and when a friend from Old Nearest Village posted this on her Facebook timeline, I knew I was going to have to have a go.

As it happened, I had a meeting out west this morning and I was getting a lift from another friend who wanted to go into Bigtown shopping on the way back, so I took the Brompton, and was dropped off at the road end. That meant, by happy coincidence, I’d be riding right past her door so I arranged for a little test jaunt…

There are dozens of reviews of e-bikes out there, much more comprehensive than I can report on after a quick go up and down the nearest hill, but for what it’s worth, I can confirm that they’re a lot of fun, and that it genuinely is like having a permanent tail wind. I actually found myself out of breath as I tackled the hill, which surprised me, but then I looked down and realised I was going at over 14mph. My friend is finding that for her it smoothes out the hills and makes them all but disappear, but my instinct had been to accelerate when I felt the motor kicking in and just power up it. It was only when I eased off a bit that I felt that wonderful sensation of the bike pushing willingly on, like a horse that knows its stable is just around the corner. I can see how welcome that would be on a long and grinding hill. Well that, and blowing the cars off at the lights in turbo assist mode, of course.

The bike has many other nice features, from a wheel lock to ‘walk assist’ which is useful for pushing it up hills and ramps. I’m hoping to get another go, this time on our actual hill, just to see what it would be like, and to see whether it’s possible to take it steadily enough that I’m not a sweaty mess at the top. I think that I’m not quite ready for an e-bike yet, if only because I know that once I’ve got one, I’d never ride any of my other bikes again, and I love them too much to do that quite yet. But it’s good to know that the option is there, and that it’s opening up cycling to people who otherwise couldn’t ride a bike, because one day that person will be me.