I’m not a member of any clubs unless you count the Velosolo Club, whose official stance is to neither confirm nor deny membership. The closest I come is The Fridays, to whom I haven’t paid dues for a number of years as I consider myself exempt from such trivialities.* It…

Tech isn’t my strong suit. My wife can analyse a computer system (at least I think that’s what a systems analyst does), and is in charge of resetting the clock on the boiler, while I typically handle the more… physical chores. When our home broadband went out last month…

Jack Fuller was fuming. His latest masterpiece — or folly, as local wags had it — wasn’t going according to plan. As it was to be his home until judgement day, could anybody blame him for being so particular about its construction? If he’d told the builder once, he’d told…

Thanks for my dream bike. The dream lasted about 10 years. You know how it ended: by me hanging up on you mid-sentence. I’ll leave it to whoever else reads this to decide whether or not they’d have done the same thing. It was in 2011 that I fell for…

Cycling Plus, November 2002 Does anybody really know what time it is? Does anybody really care? -Chicago No offence to the very late John Harrison, or the Swiss, or my wife, who has separated our house into minute time zones to aid her morning routine,* but I couldn’t really care…

Cycling Today, October 2000 I don’t CARE. -Tommy Lee Jones When the editor of Cycling Today gave me this column a little over two years ago, he reminded me that it could be used as a force for good or evil, and as it was to appear in a responsible…

not quite as published in The Telegraph, 28 July 2014 Boris Johnson only has jurisdiction over me and my bike when I come down to London. Nevertheless, he has the power to make me miserable while I’m there: by taking away my iPod. Last November, after a series of cyclist…

You cannot put a price on your love for a pet. However, I shall do my best to tot up the expenses incurred in our maintenance of 1 rabbit, over the course of the past 4 years 4 months. We begin with the cost of him himself, which sounds crass…

One day near the end of Reagan’s first electoral reign I left for Europe with barely enough money to sustain my whim. An airplane is the best way out of the metro area because it leaves you feeling like Phoenix, rising from the ashes of urban blight. As…