It's a crying shame because Borders was a good stockist of Ordnance Survey maps, and the remaining stock of those isn't being spared, or even being held and re-sold to another. Owing to too much work recently, and extreme laziness when not at work, I didn't visit my local branch until yesterday, and most of the trusty Landranger 1:50,000 maps had already gone. I did however pick up four of the Explorer 1:25,000 maps, two of which were in rather splendid 'Active Map for all extremes' laminated copy. And those ones, marked originally at nearly £15 each, were also 80% off. Some people were buying armfuls of maps, which I thought was a bit greedy, but if you're not fast, you're last, and I was close to being last so I couldn't really complain.
I did however manage to find a few Landranger titles for Mum and Dad, thanks to them giving me a rather impressive list of every edition of every OS map they already had. Of course, were I in their shoes, I think I would've used a database rather than a spreadsheet.
It started snowing on Wednesday morning, just as I was preparing to ride to work. That coincided rather inconveniently with the wiring on my P-38 for my halogen bike lights suddenly not working; I can't ride to work in pouring snow with just a little LED flashing light, can I? Well, I can, if I act like many other everyday cyclists in town, and it was fortunate that I had only just bought a new LED light to replace my Cateye EL200 which had, in its seven years, been dropped, cracked, disassembled, soldered and reassembled, soaked and thrown across my bedroom. The soft plastic used for the bracket had worn down to such an extent that it'd cracked away at one end and allowed the light to bounce up and down on the handlebar, and having to reach forward to switch it back on a dozen times on a ride home recently was the last straw. Cree, Luxeon and Nichia-powered torches are quite popular these days for seeing, but don't have great side visibility. I'll upgrade my halogens when it's appropriate, but for now I bought the little Cateye EL135. It still has three LEDs, but since it runs off two AA batteries rather than four it's a lot lighter and that should help with reliability - and it's meant I can easily attach it to the top of my helmet.
The lighting problem meant that I wouldn't ride my Lightning, and instead I took my Speedmachine: the bike with the thinnest, slickest tyres and the lowest riding position. I couldn't use Annie because I hadn't put the knobbly tyres back on; I couldn't use my V2 because the disc brakes squeal viciously when they get damp, and my Dahon needs its handlebar bag to use my halogen lights ... and I'd stolen the light brackets to put on the V2! Nevertheless, I slipped and slid my way to the main road, where everything had already been salted and gritted, and I managed just fine.
I later discovered through a process of elimination that it was the electrical Y-connector on my P-38 that had broken. And I at least had the foresight to buy several extras of those, in the days when you could actually buy Vistalite spares. Having taken my Dahon out for a couple of rides, including a freezing Sunday morning in town to experiment with the new tram rails, its gear cable has decided to stop working properly, so that needs fixed now as well!
For Friday I took Annie out in the snow, shod with the old tyre combination of a Panaracer Duster Pro and a Specialized something-or-other. Old is the right word, and both are well overdue for replacement, so I'll look for something in the next round of sales. But it made a change to scrunch my way through the snow and not be too worried about traction, and I took a circuitous route home to get away from the roads and into the dark wooded cycle paths. I'm still not sitting comfortably on an upright bike but I can manage for ten or fifteen miles. Part of me is hoping that the snow melts away quickly and the temperature stays above freezing, if only for my poor fingers, but part of me would really like it to snow like crazy. There's barely enough in my garden to build an igloo for Barbie and Action Man.
