{"id":1288,"date":"2006-05-27T20:05:41","date_gmt":"2006-05-27T20:05:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/?p=1288"},"modified":"2006-05-27T20:08:26","modified_gmt":"2006-05-27T20:08:26","slug":"my-new-toy-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/?p=1288","title":{"rendered":"My new toy"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"bicycle\"Ok, so you’re wondering why I went to Peterborough. Well the answer is this, otherwise known as an eBay rush of blood to the head. I’ve been riding a staid and heavy, but nicely stable hybrid (mixture of road and mountain bike) ever since I started cycling in London, but having been taking it out past the 30 mile-day mark recently started to think that it was really making life hard. And if I was ever going to have a hope of making the Dunwich Dynamo’s 120 miles I’d need all the help I could get.
\nI’ve always thought that my back wouldn’t take drop handlebars, but I came to realise just how much extra work I was having to do to push the torso against the wind. So for \u00c2\u00a331.05 plus a \u00c2\u00a320 train fare, I decided to give this a shot.<\/p>\n

I’ve only taken it out once so far, for a tootle around the block, and I realised then it is going to take some getting used to, particularly in traffic. It is like switching from riding an old hack to a young thoroughbred.<\/p>\n

It is not unstable exactly, just highly responsive to the slightest movement. And I really haven’t worked out the gears at all yet. I seem to be able to change up but not down, so now have it on the highest of the gears. There are no marks on the two gear levers, and I think they move the gears rather than have fixed positions … can anyone explain?<\/p>\n

(Otherwise I’ll have to go down to the bike shop and look really silly – “got this bike; how do I change the gears?”)<\/p>\n

P.S. While I was trying to understand my gears came across the wonderfully comprehensive Wikipedia entry on “bicycle”<\/a>. Some fascinating physics in there…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ok, so you’re wondering why I went to Peterborough. Well the answer is this, otherwise known as an eBay rush of blood to the head. I’ve been riding a staid and heavy, but nicely stable hybrid (mixture of road and mountain bike) ever since I started cycling in London, but having been taking it out […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1288","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cycling","author-natalieben"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1288","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1288"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1288\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1288"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1288"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1288"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}