Mike's Blog

Category: Uncategorized

  • Still working towards my NPPL(M)

    After a 3 week break from flying thanks to poor weather I finally got back up at the weekend, twice in fact. Saturday the weather was glorious – as the pic above shows. Sunday was murky and cloudy and we were restricted to 500ft max to keep below the cloud base – sometimes just 400ft.…

  • Aviation – weather forecasting..

    While writing my thoughts on Learning to Fly, it did occur to me that this is more of a new world than I’d ever really anticipated, possibly naively. Anyway, that’s not a moan, just an observation – but there are some things that persist in that world despite the world moving on. Take the world…

  • A year, and 17,500 miles

    Have you ever sat back to reflect where you were just a year ago, and how much has changed in that year? When I look ahead I often find that I make a general assumption that most things won’t change – how often have you heard the expression “all things being equal”? The caveat that…

  • A week away with the kids

    Well, only one week off, but feels like a lot more – win! I finished work a bit early on the Friday to go to the dentist to get my temporary filling removed and replaced. That went smoothly, although I did then have to greet my sister in law, Ali, newly arrived from the states,…

  • A frustrating week.

    Now, I absolutely KNOW that there will be tens of thousands of people out there who’ve had a far worse week than me. The family and friends of the soldier murdered in London for a start! However, in my own little world of biking it’s been a pretty bad week… Allow me to indulge! Sunday,…

  • New rear shock for my ZZR

    Well, what a busy couple of days this has been. Some time ago a group of us had a good old bash at adjusting the rear shock absorber on my ZZR1100, but the adjuster rings absolutely refused to budge no matter what we did, so eventually we had to give it up as a bad…

  • Thread Lock

    So, following on from my post about a brake caliper mounting bolt on my motorbike working loose and falling out, Nick (aka Muddydisco) suggested threadlock. Now as it happens I recently got to know a nice chap Tom who is a professional motorbike mechanic, and he’d invited me over to his garage yesterday to see…

  • Should cyclists wear helmets?

    I’m not judging – honestly – I am an ‘All of the gear, all of the time’ person, and so MY opinion is that cyclists SHOULD wear a helmet – I do on my mountain bike, and I won’t let the kids play on their bikes without a helmet – I’d say that if you’re…

  • Just one reason to drive a bike and not a car

    QUEUES!!! Heading east on the M9 this morning I was confronted with a huge long queue of traffic – it turned out it was caused by an accident in lane 2 (the outside lane to this not familiar with the Police lane numbering system) – and the queuing traffic stretched for miles and miles. Filtering…

  • 0 centigrade

    That was the temperature this morning for my ride into work, 0 centigrade. Still, the road outside the house looked dry and clear of frost, and the cars in the street all had clear windscreens, not a frosty window in sight, so I was 99% certain it’d be fine to take the bike. Apart from…