I decided to sell my V Festival ticket and instead attend the track day that my bike club have organised in France. But first I needed to buy a set of leathers. After purchasing my dry suit on ebay I thought that I would be able to avoid my dread of shopping and [...]

I had a full biking weekend planned with a social run on Saturday morning and a Machine Control day on Sunday. But after a frustrating week at work and dealing with builders etc I ended up at the staff bar on Friday night and when I woke up on Saturday decided skip the social [...]

I had written to Kawasaki asking for sponsorship if I bought the Kawasaki Versys for my trip and when I didn’t hear from Kawasaki I ended up buying a bike more appropriate to the UK roads – the ER6f (which I love riding after the BMW F650). I finally received an email from Kawasaki [...]

I finally succumbed to joining Facebook. I have been getting emails for a while and a couple of my friends apparently don’t do emails anymore and their primary online contact is through facebook. The final straw was seeing it all over the news today as they are being sued. So I joined [...]

My Spanish classes have been rescheduled from Wednesday nights to Monday nights starting in September which is a real bummer as that is my Toastmasters night. I am not sure what I am going to do as it is more important that I learn Spanish and there are other Toastmasters clubs that run on [...]

After toastmasters finished tonight I went into Soho and met up with Javier who is motorcycling from Alaska to Argentina in 2/3 week stages starting with Anchorage, up and then down to Vancouver tomorrow. We went out with a friend of his from Spain that had ridden to Ireland to see his son and [...]

When is a dry suit a wet suit? When you buy it off of ebay and the seals are too big. I did my dry suit course today in the start to getting my PADI advanced open water diver before I go to South America. It is the first time that I [...]

I signed up to socially speaking. I almost skipped the evening to see the latest Potter movie but my mate that I wanted to go with pointed out that if I didn’t attend I wasn’t going to learn. We practised verbs by playing battle ships (I won, not because I was good at [...]

On Sunday our bike group organised a ‘first on the scene’ course at the Woodford Fire Station. The morning was spent learning about what to do medically if you are the first to a road traffic accident and practising our ABCs (airway, breathing and compression).
If you come across an accident victim you should:-
Check if [...]

I think this is only the second social run I have been on with my bike group. The first was before I had even done the course. Then it was only the sixth time I had ridden my bike and riding on the motorway at 70 miles an hour was scary. You [...]

I went along to my second socially speaking evening. This time the normal teacher was back from holiday and after the break we played some games with Spanish. I am still the worst in the group but it is really motivating me to study. Next time though I am not going to [...]

I had my second speech at Toastmasters tonight. My delivery wasn’t worth writing home about. A précis of the topic was: when I started doing volunteer work after university it was to appease the guilt I felt from not doing something good with my life. But after the amazing experiences I have [...]

On the 7th July Al Gore arranged a number of music concerts to be held in seven different continents. The tickets for London where held with a lottery and the first release was on the 20th April. Unfortunately I didn’t get any tickets but then on the 18th June they must have had [...]

I have taken two Spanish courses and tried to learn French and other than picking up some words even simple phrases elude me. I find languages so difficult that I have even been asked if English is my second language. I am determined to learn Spanish no matter how hard it is. [...]

I fought the garden and the garden won in the end. I decided to get rid of all the overgrown jasmine in the back yard. I managed to pull up a significant amount of it but in the end I somehow managed to get stung by a stinging nettle all over my neck [...]