Walter and pug

walter and pug are my two bikes. i am by no means a serious cyclist however i really do enjoy pottering around on them and ride to work most days. when i have had bikes stolen in the past (too many times) i have felt utterly lost. i'm a nervous soul and often find walking alone intimidating, but on my bike i feel great.

stolen bikes are:

vix: my purple raleigh vixen which i had for years, bought for my 20th birthday by my family and my only mode of transport for nearly four years, before my sister got a car and the one we had shared came with me to cardiff. stolen on the same night i had to be rescued from the side of the M50 when the wheel fell off my car and i missed adam green at barfly. i learned to ride no-handed on vix.

fruity bike: my sister's old bike, actually a kid's bike which my dad restored for me when vix was stolen. my old bike, a shocking orange raleigh racer was deemed too knackered. i could JUST get away with it as a stop-gap because i am 5'1". fruity bike is named after the game i invented with her help.

giant:

a lovely blue giant mountain bike, 24th birthday pressie from my parents and grandad. survived two theft attempts before finally being nicked from outside buffalo on a night i was already pretty miserable. police found footage of the theft but couldn't identify anyone from it. giant was lovely, even if she did make my little fingers numb.

(unnamed):

i didn't have my next bike long enough to give it a proper name, other than pinkbike. it was an apollo zodiac, loud late 90's design at its best. shocking pink, purchased from ebay for the princely sum of £30 to replace giant. the loudest bike in cardiff- visually and literally; the brakes did not stop the bike but emitted a good warning squeal when applied, i purchased bright orange floral pannier bags. if you're going to be seen, you may as well do it properly. it had two working gears, 20 and 21, and once, forgetting that it did not have suspension, i fell off it in humiliating fashion (ie people could see) when trying to hop up onto a kerb. nicked from outside the romilly pub when i was doing a quiz there.

intermission:  the poshbike. i acquired a dutch style town bike, free of charge, from my friend. it was too big for me really, and taught me that even though i think dutch bikes look cool, they do not suit my riding style (fast, erratic, standy-uppy). scrapped after the pedal fell off and i couldn't be arsed to fix it.

so, then i got walter (raleigh) for my 29th birthday. walter is ok, but a bit heavy and cumbersome. great for my short ride to work over the potholes etc but a bit frustrating on long rides. and so with this in mind, and also that it is likely to get stolen at some point, i decided to buy a spare. so i got pug from ebay. pug is  a 1993 peugeot racer, fulfilling my needs for a spare bike and a faster one. i have  a peugeot car from 1993 with nearly 200k on the clock and going strong, so i reasoned this to be a good  sign. pug need new tyres but after i have sorted that i am massively looking forward to being able to choose a bike every morning based on weather and where i have to go.

here are pug and walter getting a good scrub:

and just pug:
(i like her black and whiteness)

so getting pug is either the beginning of a collection of bikes, or of 1993 peugeots. i genuinely don't know which.

Old timey me and chickens in a hole

so i've been a right old lady recently and have been doing all sorts of pottering around the house and garden, stuff that i never thought i would have enjoyed in my youth but really have. oh well, people change. anyway, what i did always know was that miserable settings make me miserable. and returning to my house and having to look at the front garden would often make me so as it was a drab, grey, broken, dirty hinterland of nothingness and frogs (so many frogs. evil splatty things. wallworms too- those ones that emerge from walls in straight lines when it rains). it was mainly occupied by a triffid, frogs, crisp packets (not mine) 2 wheelie bins and loads of recycling bags. i'm ashamed at the quantity of recycling produced by this household.

after slaying the triffid (and hurting my arm in the process), it looked like this:

yuk yuk yuk.

so i spent way too long researching pebbles on the internet (went for a mix of plum & green slate in the end, if anyone's wondering) and way too much money in a well known home and garden store, and me and my housemate then made it look like this:

it has a hidey place for the recycling and pretty pots and plants! i did unearth one frog during the works. noticing that i had jumped onto the garden wall and had started barking "frog frog frog frog frog frog frog frog frog!!", housemate valiantly picked the little blighter up and deposited him at the foot of a tree down the road.

these three plants are cuttings from my grandad's garden. my lovely grandad died in january and his house has been sold, so last time i went home i got these. they are forget-me-nots (my favourites), and purple and white heathers. wish them luck!

in other news, i want these things:

a duckling. well, several.

a water pump. there was one of these at my great aunt's house in kent. she died when i was very little and we only visited a couple of times a year, but i do have a memory of grandad showing me how to use the water pump in the garden- it was a huge novelty as the house and garden seemed to be from another time. it was a lovely place.

the chickens have kept themselves busy lately by digging an enormous hole in their run, and in turn i have been busy trying to capture a photo of one of them in it.  so here it is- and a treat too i hope you agree!

 tata!

Boom (and kahn)

Ha! it's been a while hasn't it? I am rubbish at this. but a big long academic holiday looms, so i'll probably get my rant on soon.

Anyway, it's time i told you about Boom. or Boomhauer the chicken (no other names, although they give her my surname at the vet), named after the blond indecipherable ladies' man in king of the hill, to which i was a bit addicted at the time of her purchase.

here she is:

she is an old cotswold legbar. (old cotswold legbars) she was purchased, along with her original sidekick kahn (also from king of the hill) in summer 2008 after the passing of Elvis (just because) & CJ (reginald perrin) in worryingly quick succession. so worrying that CJ, another black rock bought to keep reg company who died very young, was post-mortemmed. poor thing had blood cancer. very sad, but luckily, nothing environmental, which had been the fear.

they were the most expensive chickens we bought- about £15 each if memory serves, and were chosen because they lay those beautiful blue and green eggs which cost a fortune from the supermarket but are really rather nice. they are spectacular looking things too, with huge, floppy red combs, a fluffy crest (hairdo) and prettily patterened feathers. they are not known for being friendly. quite the opposite- they are reputed to be skittish, loud and a bit of a bully and quite a fan of escaping.

here she is as a whippersnapper:

that's before her comb developed and when she still had pink & purple feathers. the run is a temporary one-
so they could get used to the surroundings & the sight of the 2 old chickens (reg & arn, at the time) gradually. kahn is in the backround. she had the best hairdo of all.

boom's first act upon arrival was to try to escape. she did this by scaling the 6ft fence. one prompt catch-and-wing-clip later (wing clipping sounds horrible but it's actually just the feathers that get clipped) and she made it quite abundantly clear that she didn't like people and was going to hide in the coal shed until it was dark, at which point she could be caught & put in her run. kahn was only slightly more brave, occasionally poking her head out of the coal shed but swiftly thinking better of it.

boom got brave with the other chickens quite quickly. she was still skittish around people for a long time, long after she was all moved in and grown up and laying. in the meantime, kahn had become quite attached to me, however had stopped growing and was still petrified of the other chickens. it was very sweet having a tiny pigeon sized chicken that was really soppy, but we suspected that it wasn't right, so called the breeder, who asked us to return her and exchange her for another. (they were under guarantee, bizarrely, and she was not fulfiling her terms) so, kahn got exchanged for bobby, more on her another time.

over time boom got braver and friendlier, and moved up the pecking order. she is now quite firmly at the top. and she does things like this:

(excuse dire pyjama face picture)

in both pictures she is pursuing food. she is a legend. she tries to get into the house via a closed window a little too often. she has also made her way onto a dinner plate, and oven and a barbecue.
she no longer tries to escape, but is very feisty. when reg recently moulted, she picked on her quite mercilessly until all of her feathers had grown back. but she does lovely things too. being boss, she always puts herself between the other two & any predators- usually cats which have no intention of doing anything, but more recently a ferret, which burrowed into their run at 5 in the morning and attacked them. i was woken up by boom's loud squawking and all i could see when i looked out of my window was her flapping about the run in a very panicked fashion. it was horrible. she actually managed to break out, so by the time we'd legged it downstairs to find out what was going on, all of the chickens had scattered, boom being last. (bob made it into the house somehow, reg was nowhere to be seen for about 10 minutes, horrible hecause i thought she might have been eaten or killed or stolen) the ferret was still after boom when i caught her & put her on top of the guinea hutch. she kind of collapsed then- so i was worried she'd been hurt, but luckily i think she was just stunned and exhausted. reg had been hiding behind the bin, we discovered when the ferret found her. ferrets are horrible creatures. really vicious. or at least they are when they've broken into a chicken run at first light.

anyway, i've realised i can gibber waaay too long about a chicken that not many people care about. so, one last picture or two, & i'll be off.

Boom!!