The Roquefort Files

Although it will disappoint many, many people, I’m taking a break from the saga of my bike build to clear out the queue of half-written (and half-assed, given the obsessional devotion of my spare time to tinkering with or riding said bike) posts about what I’ve been doing so far. My first big excursion was [...]

Well, technically the MS Society of Canada. I’m doing a sponsored bike ride* in a couple of weekends’ time and it would be great if you could sponsor me to the tune of a few dollars! * In case you think that sounds entirely too much like fun — a not unreasonable charge, given how [...]

To recap from last time, I had a pair of dimensionally-challenged handlebars which my brakes would not fit. It was time for radical measures. It was time to spent some money on a set of real bullhorns, given that my penny-pinching DIY approach had been found wanting in more or less all possible ways. This [...]

So, as I mentioned before, I now proudly rock an old school steel-framed Peugeot road bike, complete with skinny tyres and comically incapable brakes. And while it is now a sleek single-speed machine suitable for silent running and blissfully maintenance free cycling, ’twas not always thus. My plan, after buying it, had been simple: ‘chop [...]

Three weeks in, and I’m starting to get a feel for Vancouver. And, too, its resident Vancouverites, whose appellation sounds like that of a race of Doctor Who villains*. I started to write about the various different excursions I’ve been on since I arrived (all courtesy of our customers/hosts in the office in Richmond), but [...]

Dom and Alice left Vancouver on Wednesday, off for a road trip into the wilds of British Columbia, and so I moved my remarkably paltry amount of gear from the hotel to the company apartment. It’s a big place — my rucksack lives in one bedroom; I live in the other — with a balcony [...]

I’ve arrived in my temporary home for the next three months. The plane left London for Vancouver at about 5.30pm on Wednesday and touched down in Canada a notional hour and a half later. We skimmed over the southern reaches of Iceland a few actual hours into the flight, passing over the crinkled grey-green relief [...]

This is the calm before the storm. Very little out of the ordinary is happening to distract me at the moment and so I’m free, metaphorically speaking, to stand and stare, rabbit-like, into the headlights of the upcoming Vancouver trip. Predictably, the HR, finance and management drones involved in this whole enterprise appear to be [...]

Yes, the dog-related puns will just keep on comin’. Things have been quiet of late; not boring as such, but to borrow and roundly abuse a mathematical metaphor, the graph of excitement against time is smoother than normal even as the integral of said graph is somewhat greater. Dog ownership enforces more responsibility and regularity [...]

I was in Vancouver last week for a load of partying meetings for work, along with a motley crew of my colleagues. Among them was the spindly giant Tony, towering morosely over the rest of us at something like six feet five inches. Our company operates a rather fatalistic Lynyrd Skynyrd/Manchester Utd. travel policy forbidding [...]