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Any southies/centralites have a headset cup removal tool I can borrow? My housemate just bought a recumbent and is having headset issues. Based Oval/Vauxhall, will collect and drop off next day if thats OK. Thanks.

It is indeed an epic shed, I have shed envy. It was obviously made by someone who spent more time in it than the house. My folks got all its contents free with the house, one mans lifetime collection of tools and bits and bobs, its like a museum exhibit.

Its better than google, and Narnia. I can go into the shed for something and get massively distracted, lose an hour and forget why I went in there in the first place. Its a huge time sink, I imagine such sheds have been cited as grounds for divorce. I spend hours in it whenever I'm there, usually looking for something I'd have found ages ago if it was'nt such a tardis :|

or you could just drink all the way on the train I suppose....

But if you get the train you'll miss the pub stop on the outskirts of London, where those girls a few years ago thought we were a London gay cycling group.

Alas can't make this year as I still have no decent lights and am baby sitting my two nieces on Saturday. They exhaust me when I've had a good nights sleep, so I'd end up murdering them if having to do it sleep deprived.

@Spindrift, Haha, that takes me back. Hogweed is evil stuff. I remember hacking through a mini jungle of it down by the river as a teenager
and ending up looking like the singing detective.

I just back from my folks in Wales, they have a rather splendid hankerchief tree in their garden that is quite a sight.

It looks like a great year for gardeners. My folks are about to have a glut of strawberries, with rasberries and blackcurrents to follow. They also trying tayberries and boysenberries this year, I can't wait for this years jam.

Gutted that down here in that London I don't even have a garden and I've been told the waiting list for an allotment where I live in Lambeth is 12 years!

Boo I am out now I'm afraid. Have to dog and cat sit in wales for an extra few days and won't be back in London until Monday. Gutted as was really looking forward to this, have fun all.

Any feeder action happening?

I'm probably going to ride out from Oval/Vauxhall way. I'm not in London until Friday and have'nt even looked at possible route yet. Looks like an early start, I'll draw up a route over the next few days and happy to lead, if anyone wants to tag along just let me know.

If weather looks OK are we skipping the visit and just doing tramp beers or a country pub or something? Just wondering if there is a need for a spare pair of shoes in case they are anti clippy-cloppy cleats or are they OK with us skidding about in our socks?

Also assuming we do do the science park and grounds bit that we need to bring locks.

Ooof multiple staples in the head, sounds like a ram raid on Rymans. Sorry to hear of your spill Bruce and glad you're on the mend and hope you're back on two wheels ASAP.

I'll happily take any get well Tunnocks off your hands if their presence offends you.

Thanks, very kind. If anyone offered me a job doing stuff like this for a living, whatever the job title for stuff like this is, I'd bite their arm off in an instant. (Insert Yozzer Hughes giz a job clip here)

Ticket prices for the team presentation have just been announced, they range from £45 to £85.

That's an increase of between £45 to £85 on previous team presentations.

Glad to see some Yorkshire traditions remain.

Cheeky fuckers. Bollocks to that.

And Buttertubs was one of the places I was thinking of watching from, but if they ticket that too thats another option blown out of the water. I'll end up watching it on telly at my aunties house with some tinnies at this rate.

^ Ahh I had heard she could be a bit economical with the truth so who knows.

I also saw a comment that she wrongly named a few streets in an early edition, instead inserting family members names, so that if anyone dared copy it she could prove it was a copy. Again I don't know if this is true or not but it adds to the legend.

I did have a play around with Animaps but its the buggiest website ever and repeatedly make my computer crash. I'd have thrown my computer at the wall in frustration if I'd continued with it any longer. If it worked properly it had potenital, but the site seems a work in progress rather than the finished article so I've given up on it.

I went to my local library to look at some road maps to get print outs of my missing roads. I got lucky as they had a jumbo A-Z which covered more than my A5 versions, so I used the photocopier to complete the missing sections of the District Line, Central Line, and the tiny bit of the Piccadilly line around the western end of Heathrow. It also had some of the Metropolitan line, but only as far as Chorleywood. Like me it seems the folks at A-Z HQ consider including Amersham and Chesham a bit of a stretch.

The problem with the jumbo A-Z was the scale was different, my A5 A-Z's has a scale of 4.55cm to 1km, whereas the jumbo one had a scale of 5.26 cm to 1km. Luckily the library had a photocopier that did re-sizing so after some quick sums I was ready for some downsizing. The copier did'nt do fractions of a percent so the rescaling would be out by 0.5%, but thats close enough for my purposes. The section from Chorleywood to Amersham and Chesham was going to be more problematic as none of the library maps had any decent detailed pages of this wilderness area. I'd probably have had better luck getting similar scale maps of Antarctica or the moon. I return home for another session with the scissors. The copies are in black and white as I'll be colouring them in, so the overall amatuerish appearance is maintained.

That evening my mum phoned to say she'd read in one of the Sunday papers about an exhibition in the Museum of London about Phyllis Pearsall, the inventor of the A-Z. I looked it up only to discover is was only on for a few days, and the last day was in fact that day, arse marbles. Oh well, I would have liked to have seen that. Anyway having never even heard of her, I googled for more info and she sounded a right charecter, who led an interesting life, worth looking up.

The story goes she come up with the idea of the A-Z after trying unsuccessfully to find her way to a party using some OS maps. Finding the existing maps wholly unsatisfactory she set about, the very next day is it said, making her own version. She claimed to have walked 3000 miles up every street in London, sometimes up to 18 hours a day. It does'nt say how long it took her, but walking pace is an average of 3mph so thats about 1000 hours, which is bloody epic and puts my efforts to shame. She should have used a bicycle. It also turns out her life has recently been made into a musical, starring Izzie Suttie of Peep Show fame, not that I'll be seeing that as I hate musicals. My googling also revealed she had a blue plaque in her honour, at her place of birth, 3 Court Lane Gardens, East Dulwich. Now phones are smart and everyone has maps at their fingertips the A-Z is not as invaluable as it once was, but I decided to take a pilgrimage up there for a photo. It would have made a good tag on this forums Bicycle Tag thread, but I did'nt know the current one so did'nt bother.

So I decide to try some print outs from google maps to get the roads out to Amersham, so I'm back round the library again. Typically enough none of the google maps 'zooms' are the same scale as the A-Z, so I do some printing and am again resizing on the photocopier. I finally have the right scale but the roads are very different in size to the A-Z, so its back home where I paint the over the roads in white, making them the same width as the A-Z version. Bloody hell this whole thing is much more of a faff than I'd hoped. I then cut up some more cardboard for the new roads and gaffer tape then onto my existing map. The results are pretty shoddy but an improvement, and I finally have a full map at 1:22,000 scale . It is a shade over 3 metres wide and nearly 2 metres high. Its now like the story of the bloke who rebuilt his car in his living room and then realised he can't get it out of the house. The flats got stairs that double back on themselves so the map is to big for me to take outside to photograph in the sun. My eyes almost bled lining that bastard up, so that's not a job I'm volunteering for again in a hurry.

The next day I decided to go to Stuart R Stevenson on Clerkenwell Road, to see if they had any acetate and some permanent markers so I could trace the lines as Rhowe suggested. Not being an arty type this of shop is totally off my normal radar, and what a proper Aladdins cave it is, much more than a grown ups colouring in shop. I confessed my artisitic ignorance as soon as I walked in the door, and the two guys there could not have been more helpful. I told them what I was doing, they steered me away from the expensive roles of acetate (£180 for a 10m roll! Who knew clear plastic could be so expensive). The guy behind the counter then got out his A-Z and we must have spent 15 minutes testing a huge range of pens on the cheaper acetate to get good colour matches for each line, so a massive thanks to them.

It was then back home to start the epic tracing.

Some of the pens are a bit wishy washy looking, so for the Jubilee and the DLR I have to outline them in dotted black lines to make them stand out a bit more, and the overground I decide to do in a solid orange line. This takes a couple of days. I have'nt been able to write on all the stations, the bit in central London is just too congested. This really brings it home much of a masterpiece Harry Becks design is, his whole maps fits on the back page of my A5 A-Z. and I can't fit all the station names on a map 3 metres across! There are one or two slight station name changes, Wimbledon becomes Wombledon, as a Spurs supporter Arsenal is shortened to Arse and I can't resist calling Lewisham, Lewishambles. I also trace in the river Thames in a clear blue that makes it look like a lagoon in the Caribbean, I did say I was going to take artistic licence with that.

I then take it off the A-Z cut out and temporarily blutac it on the livig room wall so I can get a good look at it on a white background. The cheap acetate is only marginally thicker and stronger than clingfilm so I'm terrified of tearing it after all the effort so far, and I spent nearly an hour trying to get the tiny sodding creases out but don't manage it completely. At a later date when I can afford it I will try and get a big single sheet of acetate so it looks better. It still looks good and I'm pretty pleased with it, though as usual my crap compact camera does'nt do it justice. I plan to finish it off by having a header along the top with the London Overground, Underground and DLR roundels and add a simple matchstick drawn bicycle to illustrate I've ridden it. My brother has a decent SLR so I'm going to borrow that to try and take some better pictures.

I then head off to WH Smith to get some white stickers to add to the map for the stations that have connections to other lines. Incidentally WH Smith were the first company to take Phyllis' A-Z, setting her on the road the fame and fortune. True to recent form they don't have any small white stickers, only coloured ones.

So its back home to paint them white, before drawing black bicycle wheels over the white. I can't find anything small enough to draw round so in keeping with the sketchyness so far I do it freehand. I can't build real wheels and its clear I can't draw them either.

Once on they're unlikely to come off without trashing the map so I'm putting this on hold for now until I'm sure I'm going to use them. I still have'nt started painting over the orange and yellow roads on the big A-Z map to make the coloured lines stand out more so that's another big task.

As part of a longer term project I hatched on the idea for a short film clip. I thought maybe a crimewatch type reconstruction, where I can move a tiny bicycle along the big A-Z map, like some WW1 General moving battalions around a massive map. I need a small model bicycle, The problem is I need a really small one, the size that would be considered too easily swallowed by a young child, therefore finding a toy one in the correct size would be unlikely. Praise be for the interwebs as I then stumbled across a tiny Hornby model bicycle to allow train nerds to achieve the complete village scene in their girl free attics or sheds. After calling 9 different Hornby stockists in London with no luck, I was beginning to feel like J.R Hartley trying to locate his version of Fly Fishing. l finally struck gold, in who'd have thought it, a train model shop run by a woman, Jane's Trains in Tooting. They agreed to hold it for me as I raced down there, and secured my first bike purchase in years. A pack of two red bicycles, complete with flat bars and front basket, obviously part of the the Hornby hipster range.

The bars and basket I could live with, but my main gripe was they were'nt blue. So, yes, its back home and out with the white paint again as undercoat, I dont have any blue paint so its felt tips to get acceptable blue livery for this most minute of steeds. As the wheelbase was only 2cm this involved brain surgeon levels of fiddlyness, but I'm happier now. I did'nt fancy my chances of finding any atom sized Mercian decals so settled for plain blue.

On the teacake theme I realise I've come this far without even going into the specifics of teacake eating, which is long overdue. As far as I'm aware there are 3 main methods of eating them, which psychologists can probably map a complete personality profile from. 1. There is the wolf it down in one approach. I don't so this, I'm not a complete savage. 2. Prise the top mallow and chocolate bit off with your teeth, then have the biscuit base afterwards, ideally with a swig of tea (this is my preferred method) and 3. The nibble the chocolate coating off in meticulous fashion, taking care not to remove the mallow, which is eaten second, and finishing off with the base. Far too time consuming and OCD I say. Ahem sorry, that bit of housekeeping is now out of the way.

I plan to attach my tiny bicycle to an unravelled metal clothes hanger to complete my first prop. I need some more props and need to build a botched jig for my battered old gopro to film it, then come up with some of script or commentary. I'm off to Wales again this week for a stag do and visiting friends and family, so this is all being put on ice for now, back soon.

you be dissing my hood, my crib and my honey
you be jabberin on like you think yoo is funny

i be stealin you wheels, your watch and your swag
gunna bitch slap your mom the rancid old hag

my rhymes stop u dead and making you think
i'd be up in your grill if your breath did'nt stink

all you dumb fuckers be making me snore
too many blank posts from the twats on ignore

^Wahey! Sounds like the return of the mojo.

A bit late, but congrats to all the double hard bastards that did the marathon. Those medals were earned, but you're all completely mental.

Great pics Corlis, road porn galore. Gutted my geared bikes up on bricks, I'm pining for epics like that.

And the weather gods seem to smile on you whenever you're in that part of the world. I don't think I've ever seen sunnier pics round those parts than the ones you and Fox took on your last visit up there.

Chapeau for riding fixed around there. I love your second picture.

I'm going to be in Bala on the 26th, but alas with no bike as I'm white water rafting on a stag do. We've hired a minibus for the day and I'm going to persuade the driver to drive up Bwylch y Groes and then down to Bala, still one of my favourite descents.

^That bike looks ace.

On the subject of weird types erecting masts (no euph) I cycled from my parents' place to The Cloud yesterday (a hill near Congleton). On top there was a guy who'd set up a mast and was listening in to air traffic control's conversations with planes entering and leaving the airspace round Manchester Airport. Not how I'd choose to spend my day but each to their own.

Today I did something I'd been meaning to do for ages and cycled round some roads I've driven on before in North Wales. I planned a 70 mile route yesterday starting and ending in Bala, heading up the A4212, which I love, and then going down the coast from Harlech to Barmouth and back to Bala.

The only bike I have up here is fixed, and I was running 49x19. I would love to do it again on a road bike, because there are some amazing descents, and I'm not a big fan of fixed descents, especially at 35mph on that gearing.

North Wales has some amazing scenery/road porn:

And Barmouth has some great chippies.

A pleasant day's riding, all in all, apart from the fact that my well-worn Flite (previously owned by an 18-stone gent) droops so much that I can feel the seatpost through it. Remaining seated for too long becomes incredibly uncomfortable. And also my cockpit setup is so stiff that I still have pins and needles in my left hand 6 hours after the ride has finished from the road buzz. Thicker bar tape and better gloves in order.

http://www.strava.com/activities/128859983

Terminal five courtyard
Lucy in the sky with wheelbarrows
http://tubeforlols.wordpress.com/2013/06/03/portals-of-feeling-portals-of-flight/

^ Ha, this blog was written by the father in law of Harold, from here, who posted about it in my Underground thread.

I'm guessing the new one has something to do with the boat race, but may be wrong.

Yay, good work Ruserius. Rep winging its way over.

Stewart Lee did a good bit about pretend folksy beer this week, giving examples of Hadrons Collision, Gandalfs Memory Stick and Hogwarts Bukkake.

Whether or not you're American I plead with you to take the 5th.

Its a lovely sunny day for a ride and you'll have a tailwind all the way back to town.

I guess if there's no movement in the next day or so I'll consider setting another one, but I'm hoping it won't come to that.

oops sorry, it looks derelict in the photos so I thought its theatre days were behind it.

Cheers Andy, and knowing how you don't exactly ladle out acclaim, that is high praise indeed.

I inexplicably woke up at 6am this morning despite not going to bed till after 1am, so I expect I will be asleep before that ride even starts :) Have fun though.

Cheers mate. I hope you enjoyed your rest and you heal up properly. And if your pigeon problem is unresolved let me know. My sisters work had a major issue with them, they are a healthfood co-op so wanted to solve the problem without resorting to the councils evil plan of spraying the eggs or something. I don't know what the end solution was but can find out if you like.