National Route 75: Maryhill to the Falkirk Wheel

Green and pleasant land behind Possil

After 2 months of rain we get an outbreak of sun and so decide to ride to the Falkirk Wheel, a route along the Forth and Clyde Canal to it's meeting point with the Union Canal.

We start at Maryhill (with a few of the usual confusions over direction) and are soon upon the first attractions of the route. The back-ends of Possil and Milton amaze us with their country-like greenery. For those who don't know Glasgow: these places have never had anything good said about them; they are synonymous with gangs, crime, drugs and deprivation. The canal-side is busy with groups of men, all 'taps aff', some fishing, some exercising the family staffie, some peeing in the bushes. It's your typical Glasgow summer scene, but weirdly lacking in threatening behaviour or violence. Maybe it's too early in the day, or maybe it's the shock of the sun, but everyone is cheery and pleasant.

We continue along, enjoying the flatness of the towpath. In the long straights we try out our top speeds. I am sure the un-named bike is faster than Thor, but he gets away from me every time. We stop for lunch on a pleasant bend and enjoy our repast (big thanks to Big Jamie at Cafezique).

Lunch: Thor, the canal, the never-absent-from-a-Scottish-lunch tablet, me enjoying a sandwich

After lunch we come across some fine planting. Gardens have stretched up beyond their bounds and have given the towpath a bit of their exuberance. Thank you gardeners of the canal-side for this surprise.

Finally, some hours after setting off, we reach our destination, the Falkrik Wheel. It's an amazing piece of modern engineering joining the Forth and Clyde Canal to the Union Canal. There are some small versions of proposed larger kelpies here looking majestic. The Wheel itself has leapt directly from a Picasso sketchbook.

The view from above the Wheel, where the Union Canal reaches an end in mid-air, is spectacular. On this day you could see all the way to the Cobbler. Amazing. And to top off the amazingingness of the amazing day, we caught the train home and all the staff of ScotRail that we encountered were friendly and helpful. Maybe they were from Possil.

Hero crashes of his pedestal

This morning I woke up to the sound of my hero Bradley Wiggins falling off his pedestal. I have spent all July watching the Tour and trying to grow side-burns. I spent all yesterday afternoon shouting WIGGO and lobbying the Queen to get him knighted. Then this morning I hear this:

"Olympic gold medallist Bradley Wiggins has called for cycling helmets to be made compulsory after a man was knocked down and killed by an official London 2012 bus ... the driver was arrested on suspicion of causing death by dangerous driving." The Independent

Promoting helmet laws after a cyclist is killed by a bus is rather like banning short skirts after a woman is raped: blames the victim and entirely misses the point.

I ride my bike every day to work and back. I wear a helmet. I don't jump lights. I (hardly ever) never ride on the pavement. Yet all of this sensible and law-abiding behaviour appears to have no impact on the behaviour of my fellow road users. Almost daily someone in a car/bus/truck runs me into the gutter, or cuts me off by turning left in front of me, or drives past me at a speed that knocks the breath out of me. Will forcing the few people who don't wear helmets to do so make any difference to these idiot-drivers? I don't think so.

Really Bradley, you should stick to what you know: being amazing at racing on a bike. Leave the comments on road safety to those who are using their bikes for commuting and transportation. You sports guys accept that there is some level of risk in what you do, cycling can be a dangerous sport. But I am not participating in a sport, I am just trying to get to work and home again. My behaviour is not the problem here, the problem is lack of dedicated bike lanes, lack of understanding from car/bus/truck drivers and lack of fellow cyclists.

Blythswood Square blues: fine weather continues

In celebration of the recent fine weather, and indeed in celebration of other long standing fine things, we ride over to the Blythswood Square Hotel for a meal. The blue sky holds clouds that fail to produce anything more than three drops. Blythswood Square is a Georgian Square made up of four identical classical terraces, it was completed in 1823. One of these is now the Hotel, and our destination, but was previously the headquarters of the Royal Scottish Automobile Association.

Glasgow sky: saltire blue over the Blythswood Square Hotel

We find the free parking opposite the Hotel empty. Car parking charges in this area are pretty steep, but it doesn't seem to have caused many to use their bikes instead. Perhaps people drive in honour of the the history of the Hotel, as high temple to the car it was also the start of the Monte Carlo Rally in 1955.

Looking at a Glasgow sky: clouds nae bother

The restaurant is not busy so we get a window table which gives us a clear view of our bikes, as well as the garden in the centre of the square. We start with champagne and then select from the fixed price 'market menu'. Except I go off-piste for the dessert selection and try a wasabi panna cotta with warm chocolate sauce and lemon doughnuts. I love all of these elements in themselves but am still undecided about having them together. It's not that I didn't like it, more that my brain didn't want to consume all flavours as one and kept separating them out which makes for a kind of disjointed flavour.

The market menu is good value at £20 for three courses and we both enjoyed our choices. The menu is short, only three options in each course, so it needs to change frequently if it they are to get me as a regular repeat visitor. There are more options if you go à la carte, and this is where I found my desert. But here there are too many choices here for me. À la carte has three categories: classic, contemporary and grill. It's all a bit confusing, or lacking in cohesion. Actually not unlike my dessert and not unlike the room itself; a classic ballroom with grand proportions filled with tweed covered furniture but divided by a contemporary mirror-tiled square arch. On the plus side, the tweed is beautiful and the service is friendly.

Menu choices at the Blythswood Square Hotel

After lunch we take a close up view of the garden in the middle of the square and find it typical of a private garden: surrounded by high fences and locked gates. A sign attached to the fence explains that recently the garden was open to everyone but because of the 'selfish few', who used the garden as a protest site, it is now locked. I think this may be a convenient excuse for the owners. The high railings and secure gates around the garden went up last summer, long before the protesters turned up. It seems kind of contradictory to be building high fences at the same time as professing to be opening the garden up  (you can see the old gates on the street view on Google maps). With or without the protesters it does look as if the owners were looking to exert tighter control over access to the gardens. I'd like to know how many days this year the gardens open, they could have opened all this last week except for the fact that it wasn't summer.

Difficult to meet: conditions under which the gardens will be open  

Breaking news: blogging prevents rain

The ridiculously fine weather in Glasgow over the last 5 days proves that weather can be controlled by blogging: start a blog about rain and the rain is guaranteed to stop. The length of the effect is still to be determined.

Glasgow sky: ridiculously blue

Since starting her blog '366 Words for Rain' upSlope Aunty reports that rain in Glasgow has dried up and that the last 5 days have been entirely rainless. 

upSlopeAunty explains that this is part of the 'watched pot' effect, ie that it is possible delay a kettle reaching boiling point simply by watching it. upSlopeAunty contends that if enough people were to blog about Glasgow rain the prevailing weather patterns in the town may shift to a less blogged location. Livingston seems a likely place.

National route 7 through a thin veil of misty hazey haar type stuff

We had planned a ride along the Glasgow Harbour to Bowling section of  National Route 7. We expected fabulous weather. We should have known better: we wake to find that the glorious sunshine in Glasgow has been obscured by a mist. Or was it merely a haze? If we were over in Edinburgh we would probably apply the lovely term 'haar' to the phenomenon. What ever we call it, it persists all day.

Glasgow sky: indistinguishable from river

We followed the plan anyway. All along the route it seems that people are behaving as if it was the promised glorious day. Lots of people about. Smiles everywhere, polite sharing of paths, dogs and children kept under control. This in stark contrast to parts of the route which are thick with broken glass. I wonder  where the angry anti-social lot that created these hazards have got to. No sign of them today in this would-be-sunny-if-it-wasn't-so-misty fineness.

There were many fellow cyclists about. Nearly all breeds spotted. But sadly not anyone from the frog family. Help! My Chain Came Off gives a great demonstration of this cycling family style. Where were those frogs today? Maybe off somewhere with the bottle smashers.

Largely dry rain

That totipotent rain from last week became largely not rain. It did for a while transform itself into smir, but mostly it was distinguished by its absence.

This morning I awoke to hear the Radio4 weather report announce that there was very little rain about. I rarely rely on these without some head out the window verification action. Radio4 headline weather is always about the South-East of Britain. Very often this is the opposite to the West of Scotland. But today even the 'North of England, Northern Ireland and South West of Scotland' section warns that we will be 'largely dry'.

Largely. How large is that dryness I wonder. Head out the back window I see only bright blue. Head out the front shows black. So probably we will be largely dry if that big section of black moves somewhere else. And so it did. We had a glorious day.

Glasgow sky: the border between largely dry and largely wet

Local bike shops: are they all bodgers?

I have limited experience of cycling and very little experience of bike shops. But once again I take a bike for repair and get a bodge job done. Does this word exist in Scotland or England? Where I come from it means a botched or kind of slaphazard job. 

The other half's newly acquired Union is taken to a new local bike shop because a pedal keeps falling off, the thread on the crank seems stripped. The bike shop guy replaces the crank. But after this, the crank and pedal on the other side can no longer clear the chain guard. So the bike shop guy's fix for this is to remove a bit of the chain guard. His explanation is that the bike must have been left leaning on something. But when pressed further his only answer is 'dunno'. So the pedals turned fine before he touched it, but don't now but he has no explanation. Nor does he have any proposal to fix, beyond taking more bits of the chain guard off.

The Union, a fine Dutch ride

I'll take the Union to a different local bike shop.

The other shop can be pretty bodgy too, but they are cooler and more friendly so I don't mind so much. On my own bike they have bodged my gears a bit. My Shimano 7 gear shifter jammed. They replaced with an 8 gear shifter. It's what they had in the shop. Another time they replaced my chain but then couldn't get it so it would go on to my super-low gear. "No-one could use that gear anyway" they told me. Well, as a person who likes to ride up all inclines without getting out of my seat, I could use that gear. But the guy was cool and I didn't want to appear to dorky with my stay-in-saddle style so I live without my super-low gear. Now I am down to six gears on my eight gear shifter.

As far ask I can tell this is normal bike shop service. Perhaps bike repair is not about perfection but more about making do. Perhaps I should learn to do this bike fixing myself.