Released from treatment.

Pathfinder project completion stage one

Road transport (trike) project begins.…..2 wheels good……3 wheels better !

As I write it’s a cold and wet day in mid December and even now, mid afternoon, what light there was is already failing and the house has cooled off except for downstairs , next to the woodburning stove which runs for at least some of the day every day now.  The month, this whole year and in fact the whole country feels a bit flat and ‘fagged out’ right now as the government flails around not achieving anything useful and every day feels like ‘stupid day’ with yet another thing brought to our attention care of the internet – last night it was another local council (Torbay) in the local news when they decided to rip out a park load of trees (Palms this time) on the basis of some flimsy reason : for those that don’t know my nearest city is Plymouth and just a few months ago they started cutting down all of the avenue of trees that soften the post industrial look of the city center. It was done despite opposition and for no good reason and done at night too until some hero managed to gain a court injunction stopping it. For weeks on end there was the sad remains of mature trees laying around until the council gained permission to clear the damage…..vandalism basically.

As I write though…..I am achingly cold despite just having spent a couple of hours under the spare quilt on the sofa and in front of the woodburning stove too because we have driven from the east end of Cornwall to a similar kind of place at the east end of Devon just to ‘go and see a man about a dog’ – or in my case to see a man about a three legged (wheeled) recumbent tricyle and it was shocking cold at his place out in the wilds of Devon.

Update- first week of the new year.

Yesterday evening I was working at the computer,editing some posts and after a couple of hours work realized that I was getting uncomfortably cold so I logged off, packed up and went downstairs where I dived under the sofa quilt to warm up for a while. I shivered continuously for 4 hours and when I say shivered think rigors….so yes, an ex rigger having a rigor (that was an attempt at a pun by the way). I don’t know how high my temperature went because I couldn’t make the effort to dig out my tympanic thermometer.  The odd thing that happened was that I was peculiarly weak, in fact at one point I managed to slide sideways off the big cushion I often sleep against and ended up in an untidy heap on the floor next to the sofa and whatever I did I just couldn’t summon up the strength to get off the floor and then when I did I could barely make it upstairs – even carrying my cushion felt like a deadweight.

So, i’m obviously sick, in fact we both are. I don’t know what this is but the inside word from the hospital is that there are some very nasty respiratory viruses going around and TBH this feels a lot worse than the dose of Covid we both had (Omicron I guess).  Anyway i’m laid up, poorly sick as we say, having crap nights with little sleep, have zero appetite and little concentration for work. Right now I feel that my body temperature is soaring up and down, I have obviously got a bit dehydrated : the best thing I can do it seems is to ride it out at home and keep away from people,

The sad thing is that I was just congratulating myself on having made it through the first half of the winter without getting a case of the S.A.D, which i,m a bit prone to.  I have recently started a walking exercise programme which should help although the furthest I dare risk at the moment is no further than a slow walk down the yard to the boat just to make sure that the covers are in place.

Anyway…..moving on

For three years Iv’e spent nothing (except for my contribution to the household bills) except on the boat project : my spending on that would naturally slow down over the winter anyway but this year it’s also because the boat is kind-of finished to a basic standard and is now out of the shed. In a couple of months time I will have a flurry of spending (fenders, lines etc) before we go out on sea trials and the only big thing I have to work on will be the better of the 2 sprayhood/tent projects that I have in mind and to be honest it’s far too cold and wet most of the time to be working outside so instead of boat project and/or rebuilding the workshop roof iv’e decided to take this chance and get on with my road transport project in the form of a recumbent trike.

The ICE (Inspired cycle engineering) ‘Adventure’ trike at Tom’s place in deepest Devon

Where to begin ?

This is a whole new adventure (see what I did there ?) for me as I haven’t cycled for thirty years – at a time when I lived in a much flatter county (Hampshire) and used to routinely use my touring bike to commute the 8 miles or so to work – after that I had the bike stolen from outside of the place I was living and shortly after that I left the area sans bicycle. Going back a bit I rode regularly when I lived in Lancashire and then when I moved to Sheffield – riding to work was ‘zoom-y zoom’ and riding home was ‘grind-y grind’ being mostly uphill all the way home. I actually stowed the bike up behind the watertight ‘crash’ bulkhead on the maxi boat that I sailed around the world on and where I had the grand ambition of riding on every continent and major country that we sailed to…..it never happened because I was always doing something more important and when we got back I had a maxi sailors arms and shoulders but also a maxi sailors legs…..sticks basically !

Cut to the chase.

For the time that iv’e been building my boat iv’e also been following several YouTube channels that feature recumbent trikes and other human powered vehicles and I thought that once I got past the major spending on the boat I would be in a position to at least go look-see and maybe dip my toe in the water. I thought that, as a day out, we might head down to Falmouth and while there take in the ICE showroom and maybe see if I could blag a ride on one of their trikes. What happened is that I worked out that this would be an expensive project so I did the obvious thing which for here is to check out the buy/sell sites and it turns out that the local cycle access guy is turning over his stock and, as I write, has several ICE trikes for sale secondhand. Having ‘drained the tank’ a long way with the boat project there isn’t enough left to go to ICE’s showroom and say something like ‘i’ll take the pink one……with extra bells and whistles’. Instead of a new one it’s no big deal for me to buy a less expensive one and then add the extra ‘bells and whistles’ – like an E assist motor, that I think I would need around here. As iv’e said before both Cornwall and Devon are surprisingly steep, narrow laned counties with mercilessly aggressive drivers.

Enter major Tom.

So, I thought I would have to make a trip to Falmouth to visit the ICE showroom- that or be very lucky in finding the right trike on Ebay – the problem with that being that I know nothing about trikes apart from what I have gleaned from several YouTube channels. Anyway….jumping into the picture is Tom from Freetrike Devon who is based just outside Exeter and his business is trikes – mainly for disabled use. Now, i’m not functionally disabled (Tom deals a lot with folks who have had strokes or neurological injuries) but he was very happy to speak to me and ultimately have both of us over at his place to see the various options. I went there with one machine in mind (typically the cheapest one) because that was the one that inspired (geddit ?) me the most but it quickly became obvious that the ICE Sprint wouldn’t work for me as being too narrow and too low but a different model did – that’s the one I rode on the day and have just ordered from him….can I just add that iv’e had a massively frustrating time with Lloyds bank putting the payment through – honestly but the bank was so frustrating to work with this afternoon.

Tom, by the way, is one of the people I have to look up to as he is 6’8″. By way of an introduction he’s a trained physiotherapist and seems to be the cycle access guy for disabled riding in Devon : as I said before i’m not functionally disabled in that I could ride a conventional bike but don’t or won’t because of other reasons – I think that given that this will be the start of a new project (even a new way of life) that I should get a few things out of the way now and then when I come back to the subject I can talk about the larger project ; this part really forming the ‘pilot study’ and physical testbed.

I can ride conventional bicycles but shouldn’t because bouncing around on a hard leather saddle 30 years ago possibly contributed to me getting a urethral stricture and needing that operated on (twice). Thirty plus years of riding to work while bouncing around on rough pottholed streets and than doing 40 years work as a nurse left me with several back injuries and chronic back pain – again, the standard position for road cycling didn’t help. Part of my many back problems were due to my left knee being subtly out of line and eventually needing a new joint – after surgery my knee improved but I had excrutiating back pain that after a few months got so bad that I could neither do my job or even stand the continuous pain of being there…..that’s taken about 5 years to resolve but I don’t have to do an entire back recovery routine just to get to sleep. Interestingly after my knee surgery the surgeon suggested getting an exercise bike so the trike may cover that job as well with a modified cycle trainer that works with the back wheel of the trike ; that might help me with my weight management !