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i generally find that if i shout no in as deep and authoritive a tone as possible they freeze.
in their mind they are weighing up if their dash for the other side of the road will be smooth or rough. a booming no! tends to answer the question. one day i might try "freeze!"

+1 to that.

"Waaaake UP!" also works. I think of it as snapping them out of a hypnotic state, which is the only explanation for Cornhill/Poultry/Cheapside peds I can think of.

Heh! I was indeed only visiting (on my way to meet a lovely friend and eat Irish Stew and get drunk at the Kingston) but I'll be in Cambridge a bit longer in the next few weeks. I'll definitely amble down to the Maypole.

Syadmin/IT stuff. Linux/BSD for preference, a little Solaris, Macs and spits Windows under protest.

Roberts do custom 953 for £1100, it sez 'ere: http://www.robertscycles.com/prices.html
Brian Rourke is £1400
Dave Yates Elite 853 is £870 and he will do 953 (was working on one when I did my course)

Not strictly apples-to-apples, but I know where my money would go.

Yours!

actual: Conceivable that might have been me (visiting my mum). Tallish, 'tache, white Campag cap? I had a smile and nod type moment at some chaps on fixed at the top of Kingston Street, but we didn't speak.

Whereas I'm a smidge over 6ft and have essentially zero standover height and a decent fit on a 56. Long torso, shorter legs.

I have this:

16mm thick case-hardened chain and a humungous lock of the sort usually seen on shipping containers full of tellies and the like. I cannot begin to describe how heavy it is though.

Raleigh titanium (which I have never come across before) with horizontal dropouts:
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Raleigh-Titanium-Cycle-Frame_W0QQitemZ190289965303QQcmdZViewItemQQptZUK_sportsleisure_cycling_bikeparts_SR?hash=item190289965303&_trksid=p3286.c0.m14&_trkparms=72%3A1688|66%3A2|65%3A12|39%3A1|240%3A1318

£26 with an hour and a half left (though you'd have to go to Portsmouth to pick it up).

I would guess not many can ride for 4 hours without some sort of discomfort in the seating area

Depends, innit. Three years of Dunwich:

1) Ludicrous folding bike (Dahon Helios SL). Arse in agony, nerves in hands shot such that I can't feel a thing in my little and ring fingers for weeks.
2) Orbit Photon steel audax frame, carbon forks, Koobi Xenon saddle. No actual agony, but definite tenderness. Hands fine (but frozen because it rained all the bloody way).
3) Custom 631, carbon forks and seatpost, Koobi Xenon saddle. Really, genuinely not a twinge. Tired the next day, but blissfully free of pain.

Same (£20 Altura) shorts every year.

That's right, I've fucked another frame! It's nicely snapped right through the chainstay (where it has been rewelded once already. I'm sure somebody told me welds are meant to be stronger than the metal itself?!) So that's another frame down the drain and I have no idea how long I've been riding it like that for!!

The weld itself may be strong, but the heat-affected steel around it probably won't be, especially if it's been re-brazed (thus two heating/cooling cycles). There's some pretty awful-looking corrosion around the break too.

The "correct" way to get it fixed would be to get a proper framebuilder to replace at least the snapped chainstay and probably the seatstay too with new tubes. Dave Yates lists repairs at £70 (single chain stay) to £230 (whole new rear end) - http://www.daveyatescycles.co.uk/repairs.htm . A car place probably won't be used to working with really thin steel - a sill, say, is a much bigger chunk of metal than a stay.

^^^ Learned the hard way. Very neat cut too - a through-in-one rather than a nibble.

YouTube - Abus Steel o flex cable lock getting chopped.

Chap on a fixed that was entirely and rather neatly covered with what looked like yellow electrical tape, heading from Bethnal Green Road to Whitechapel Road this afternoon.

Biggest OH SHIT moment ever was riding home from sixth form fast on my father's early-60s Claud Butler, on a path made of compacted sand and gravel. I watched the front wheel collapse in very, very slow motion, then over the handlebars and head-first into the ground. Came round, noticed that the back wheel was still spinning, which reassured me that I wasn't all that badly concussed, ditched the bike and started home on foot. Made it about 500 yards before a mate from school found me and made me wait for an ambulance.

Final score: broken nose and left cheekbone, flap of forehead open to the skull, missing chunk of chin, rock through my upper lip that shredded it and broke the bone up above my left front upper incisor which needed removing. Got to A&E and the very tired-looking junior doctor on duty visibly winced. One brilliant plastic surgeon (brilliantly named Mr Bangash) and some very good aftercare by a family friend (an oncologist now, but originally trained in dermatology) later, there's nothing much visible, but at the time and for weeks later I thought my face was fucked for life.

The bike is still in Dad's shed, rusty as all hell but possibly rebuildable.

I've added a less shit one (my first ever tag, in fact). Another vote for cycling mums too - mine is 64 and rides daily on whichever of her two Hercules Balmoral ladies' indestructocycles is working better on the day.

I have a spare Koobi Xenon which you're welcome to try if you like. It's an odd-looking thing; rather flat, with little padding and a big barse-split bit. Much the comfiest thing I've ever ridden though. Bought my first one by accident as they were £15 or something silly cheap in Cycle Surgery a few years back - these days you have to order from Koobi directly in the States I believe, even though they're made in Italy.

Stocks made of old bicycle frames, and a large pile of over-ripe fruit and veg?

Shed of Stolen Tools -> Old, rusty steel implements -> Bike-thief death by flaying, pour encourager les autres to do something less fucking maddening.

Haha - I did likewise with a German Shepherd police dog at Palermo airport a year or two back. The (dark shades, rigid jaw, immaculate uniform) policeman was not delighted at the effect on his perceived machismo but the dog was happy as anything :-)

new oxford st, heading east. that stretch is the caves of hell

Made all the more entertaining by the ever-changing cast of overweight Essex nobbers in black cabs who are mysteriously never in the lane they want to be in. Oh New Oxford Street, how I hate thee.

Sorry, that came out rather more earnest than it was really intended - it just irks me a bit when I see dogs being blamed for their owners.

great choice of dog to crash into
could you have chosen a more violent dog !!

There's nothing innately violent about Ridgebacks - they're not a full on fighting breed in any case and even dogs specially bred for fighting can be nice if treated decently. I used to know a lovely Bandog, for example, and that's an American Pit Bull / Neapolitan Mastiff cross much beloved of crack dealers and dog fighters until the Dangerous Dogs act. He was post-DDA, so illegal, but lived an extremely low-stress lifestyle far out in the countryside and was a sweetie.

OTOH, people who keep large, athletic dogs in cities are very often idiots and their dogs' personalities reflect this.

Dave Yates's verdict on them was "nice lugs, variable brazing" IIRC - he's had a few to repair that just didn't have enough brass flowed into the lugs. I'd imagine most of the ones that are going to break probably have done by now, but if I were buying one I'd have a more-than-usually-careful poke at the joints in case anything was starting to come adrift.

mikec: you're quite correct - I live next to the hospital so see a lot of the noisy red bugger :-)

Since I'm not working at the moment, I'm just about to start picking up/dropping off collection boxes for them: volunteerengering if you will.

http://www.londonsairambulance.com and go to "About Us" and then "Mission Data" and you can see what sort of thing they've been up to, albeit it hasn't been updated in a bit.

I'm not about to give the big "smoking" lecture, but those who smoke and cycle, do you have days where you can cycle the fuck out of your lungs, and days where you just can't inflate those bad boys to get the bike moving?

For me, the former was last summer when I was going out into Essex with Cycling Club Hackney every Sunday - even felt OK after the Dynamo. The latter is now, sadly. I suspect things will improve once I get used to carrying twelvety-three tons of Almax chain and lock about with me.