{"id":1787,"date":"2006-12-25T23:23:04","date_gmt":"2006-12-25T23:23:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/?p=1787"},"modified":"2006-12-25T23:23:43","modified_gmt":"2006-12-25T23:23:43","slug":"the-2512-london-cycle-ride","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/?p=1787","title":{"rendered":"The 2512 London cycle ride"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A lovely <a href = \"http:\/\/www.lcc.org.uk\/index.asp?PageID=55\">Christmas Day cycle ride<\/a> today, and much bigger than I expected &#8211; my rough count got easily past 100, which made it almost a mini-Critical Mass as we streamed through the streets. <\/p>\n<p>Most of the scant traffic was tolerant &#8211; helped perhaps by the festive air &#8211; we had a white dragon, an official ride Christmas tree on someone&#8217;s back rack (well it wasn&#8217;t a very big Christmas tree), and many Santa hats.<\/p>\n<p>It was billed as through the sights of London but mostly acquainted me with bits of  South London &#8211; Bermondsey, Rotherhithe and Peckham that I&#8217;ve never previously met: well we did see the &#8220;iconic&#8221; <a href = \"http:\/\/www.open2.net\/modernity\/3_18.htm\">Peckham library<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Handy to know that the pub on the Thames outside the Tate Modern is open on Christmas Day, and packed with refugee tourists who&#8217;d come to realise that spending December 25 in London hadn&#8217;t been such a great idea since nothing at all is open.<\/p>\n<p>The riders I spoke to ranged in origins right across continental Europe, with quite a few Americans, a couple of Scots, two New Zealanders, and even the odd Englishman &#8211; although most of those left early for family responsibilities. The youngest must have been aged about one, and as for the oldest I won&#8217;t estimate, although they must have had a free bus pass for a while.<\/p>\n<p>A fine institution &#8211; I&#8217;ll probably be back next year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A lovely Christmas Day cycle ride today, and much bigger than I expected &#8211; my rough count got easily past 100, which made it almost a mini-Critical Mass as we streamed through the streets. Most of the scant traffic was tolerant &#8211; helped perhaps by the festive air &#8211; we had a white dragon, an [&hellip;]<\/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-1787","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\/1787","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=1787"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1787\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1787"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1787"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1787"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}