Ride: Lovely Lea & Springtime Epping Forest Explorer When: Saturday 8 June 2013 Meet: 10:00 @ Cutty Sark Gardens, SE10 9LW (by foot tunnel entrance) There are a number of group rides that I like to do every season, and Epping Forest is one of them. Following my last Lovely Lea and Epping Forest Explorer [...]

Yesterday morning, whilst on my way to the start point in Lewisham for an all-day social ride around the North Downs of Kent, a local teenager commended me for cycling. “I don’t know how old you are,” exclaimed the well-meaning chap, who was sitting on a park bench, feeding stale bread to pigeons, “…but it’s [...]

While the health benefits of a low sodium diet in humans may be unclear, it appears that the amount of sodium in older stars has a strong effect on their physical condition. Sun-like stars live for billions of years, with greatly expanding waistlines in old age, a final burst of nuclear burning, and the puffing [...]

And so it goes… Islamists murder an unarmed soldier; the ‘English Defence League’ goes on the march and the British National Party threatens same; Muslims are verbally abused and physically attacked in towns and cities across the land; mosques are graffitied by the functionally illiterate. Behold an age-old narrative of hate replayed. Only it gets [...]

My friend the Canadian journalist Terry Glavin writes of the cant and bullshit that invariably surrounds incidents such as the terrorist killing in Woolwich this week of soldier Lee Rigby. Terry makes some good points, marred only by his mis-definition of Woolwich as a London borough. I would have left this comment following Terry’s article [...]

Woolwich is my manor. Back in the late 1970s I went to school close to John Wilson Street, and today often cycle down the road on my way to the ferry. The kitchen knife and meat cleaver-wielding youth with bloodied hands pictured in a video broadcast all over the interwebs is a product of the [...]

It speaks volumes about the neurotic British obsession with youth that an otherwise interesting lifestylee article on the UK’s first official European Space Agency astronaut carries the headline “Major Tim Peake says he is not too old to go into space”. What on Earth is that all about? I mean, the last thing you want [...]

Two months following the death of its little red leader Hugo Chávez, it looks as if his Catholo-Trostskyite revolution may not be so permanent after all. According to an Associated Press report, the “pink tide” at the top of Latin America is fast turning into a shit tide, with nary a sheet of toilet paper [...]

We hear much talk of a scientific consensus on anthropogenic climate change, or at least we used to. Global warming has since fallen down the political agenda. At the same time there is a challenge to the thesis from mostly but not exclusively right-wing commentators who claim that there is no scientific consensus. They insist [...]

Where: The Delights of Newham (Greenwich feeder) When: Saturday 18 May 2013 Meet: 09:00 @ Cutty Sark Gardens, SE10 9LW (by the foot tunnel entrance) Our friends in Newham are currently running a series of Saturday rides, with support from the borough council. After speaking recently with Bernard McDonnell and Emma Harper of Newham Cyclists, [...]