Without my bike, today would have been a wreck. I'm now only 4 weeks away from my dissertation deadline, so what I really needed to be doing today was working on it with 100% attention. Now, I'm quite easily distracted, so my approach has been to barricade myself into the University library, where I am cut off from the world: just me and my mission to produce 15,000 coherent words (I have 12,500 incoherent ones at the moment) by the deadline. After faffing about this morning, I decided to go into the library again, but with the heavy laptop would be coming with me the plan was to bike-train-bike it rather than ride all the way. Oh, what a foolish idea! I arrived at the station, 2 minutes too late for my train. Then I missed the next train (on the wrong platform!) and finally, 1 hour and 20 minutes from leaving home, I was on the train -- still 30 minutes away from the library! I could have ridden there in under an hour, so now I was rattled.
So, I arrive in Manchester, tootle off to the library, get totally intimidated on a short section of dual carriageway so miss my turning, so another delay, arriving at the library at 6.15pm to see this sign: The library closes at 6pm today. Oh what an idiot! After briefly toying with the idea of riding back then deciding that 6.30pm on a Friday is probably not going to be the most relaxing bike commute home, I headed back to the station, and luckily hopped on a train straight away, heading home again!
Anyway, the point of this mindless ranting is to praise my bike. After an entirely pointless trip into the closed library and back, I got off the train a stop early and decided on a nice round-about detour to get me home. It was dark, the roads were quiet, my lights were blinking away, there was drizzle in the air and a slick glisten to my tyres from the rain. Perfect.
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