muffin the mule

preparations continue for the ride. today me and helie made some muffins, i’m going to take them as energy food. they are very healthy and contain the following super foods: nuts, bananas, dates, oats. i would consider sugar a super food too as it is generally super at making things tasty.

i read something the other day about how overuse of the internet is literally re-wiring people’s brains so that they are unable to read long complex sentences and paragraphs. even people with phds and big brains were experiencing this problem - we tend to skim read a lot nowadays, instead of read with any depth of concentration. and information is delivered with such speed and all flashy that our brains are unable to deal with old fashioned style information - ie proper sentences and complex ideas. i ought to write my blog in a bullet-pointed list with punchy bits of information that change colour and link to other small little words that light up and do dances. i’m not technological enough to do that, and i quite like old-fashioned sentences, but i will try to not be too long-winded in general in honour of this new phenomenon. apologies if you have given up already i completely understand.

the tour of britain bike ride is in taunton on friday - how coincidental is that. must be fate as that is where i will be. sorry that was 2 sentences when i could have just used 1. i’m not very good at this. that’s 5 now including this one. is anyone still reading i doubt it?

in our continuing cash in the attic quest (we don’t actually have an attic, just a roof space with birds’ nests, fallen roof slates and a few ghosts in it), we took a few small golden looking items to the antique place en route to hebden bridge yesterday. i say golden looking items as i don’t know what they are made of - gold? brass? gold-plated silver? foolsgold? pinchbeck? (don’t ask me what that is, mum said it is some kind of golden looking material). the antiques man looked them over and ummed and ahed. then he asked mum what kind of price she was looking for for them. she said she’d prefer him to say what he’d offer. he said he’d prefer her to say what she was looking for. they said that to each other for a while in a polite english way. i shouted out 'two hundred pounds please'. he laughed politely and ridiculously. he had in mind more like fifty. well why didn’t he just say that? mum got all hard-nosed and bargainy, and said she’d take the fifty only if he’d throw in the small penguin/weasel that i’d been eyeing up on the counter. done. and here he is, isn’t he amazingly cute and like a penguin made from a description of someone in the 1700’s who had glimpsed one a hundred miles away and reported back later what it looked like and they had drawn it in the fading light of an old oil lamp, on a ship that was wobbling around in the high seas somewhere after drinking some captain’s rum. ie not quite right and slightly strange. i’m going to call him wilfred in honour of an old pickles relative who was famous in the olden days. 

 

i realise this has nothing to do with my cycling trip. here is something that is (very slightly) more relevant - a picture of a cycling avocado. on the summer school i taught at this summer we each had a poster of us with a little snippet of info, and 3 things we liked (so the students could feel like we were real people and not weirdo teachers). my 3 things i liked were cycling, avocados, and grammar (i was under pressure and don't have a ready made list of likes/dislikes). anyway they missed out the comma between cycling and avocados, which resulted in much laughter and this:

 

given i'm not very talented at drawing, i was pretty impressed with my rendition of the cycling avocado, i hope you are too.