Find your own place

 

A lifetime ago, well, back in my twenties, a former girlfriend and I would invariably buy one another a book as a gift for birthdays and suchlike. Inside the cover we would write a quotation. One birthday she bought me Milan Kundera's 'The Unbearable Lightness of Being' and in it wrote: Find your own place and fill it with you. Needless to say, she dumped me shortly afterwards. But the point still stands.

Last year, the rear derailleur on one of my bikes got sucked into the rear wheel. The wheel survived unscathed but the frame did not.

Sub-optimal shifting

The rear derailleur hanger was part of the frame and although it could be bent back in place, it wasn't perfectly aligned and where the derailleur screwed in (struggling to think of the proper name for this) it was oval rather than round. Being steel, it was fixable but an excuse to purchase a longed after Surly won out.

I bought a Midnight Special as a frameset only, and built it up with what I had lying around, along with a few new bits and bobs. Bit by bit I'm replacing the parts that don't fit my preferred build. I was short of silver spacers (SimWorks 'With Me' CrMo ones) and made do with a black plastic one. I've now replaced it with another SimWorks spacer and one with a Crane Mini Suzu Bell attached - it has a lovely clear ring.

Being late June, the untouched fields around Heath End Plantation are full of grasses in flower. As I wheel along the bridleway that traverses them dozens of meadow brown butterflies are sent a flutter. I see small tortoiseshells and small whites too. Good to see nature in decent health.

It's singletrack as the plantation begins.

But then the path widens.

Once out the other side, the bridge across the brook is today's place: pause, look, listen.

Looking back, a faint line through the grass tracing the path pedalled.