The Roquefort Files

you may remember that I decided to auction off my very rocking and very underused Epiphone Thunderbird. What an all-round farce that turned out to be. Firstly, PayPal extracts an uncomfortably large fee for accepting credit card payments. Secondly, eBay requires a similarly bloated fee for any sort of reasonable item listing. Lastly, Parcelforce managed [...]

This bike building malarkey isn’t half drawn out, I can tell you. It’s finally all bolted together, but while I’d like to excitedly jump up and down and write gushing prose about its many and varied unique features, it’s not really finished. I eventually got all of the minor niggles ironed out (the correct crown [...]

there is very little other news. Jeff and Devon hosted a pleasant little dinner party on Wednesday night and on Friday Finlay and I finally met up again for a bit of non birth-, death- or marriage-related chat. The chat turned quickly into a light-on-food, heavy-on-beer and ultimately messy evening that I’m in no hurry [...]

So, most of the parts have arrived and I’ve started to build the bike. I started with the front end of the bike – forks, headset, stem, bars and brakes. The first thing to do was to fit the forks and stem, and I hit the first hurdle straight away. Fitting the bearing cups in [...]

I’ve become a fully-fledged internet auctioneer. Anyone need an Epiphone Thunderbird?

continuing in the biking vein, I went mountain biking on Saturday. I loaded up the bike and headed down to Glentress, just outside of Peebles, to meet up with a load of workmates. Bikes were hired, boasts were made (incredibly, Shaun could in fact ride a bike backwards), helmets were grudgingly donned and we headed [...]

I’ve embarked on a foolish quest to build a single speed commuting bike; i.e, a bike with only a single gear and no complicated derailleur mechanisms. Mostly I like the simplicity of the concept, but partly I want to get a bit more exercise out of my cycle to work and back without making things [...]

Neil showed me some of the photos of Ali’s stag last week, and while the jolly japery was much in evidence, it became apparent to me that my hair was getting a trifle ridiculous. So much so that while sporting the requisite fake moustache and Hawaiian shirt I made a startlingly credible drug baron. It [...]