Month: February 2013

To Colchester and back

Poor Bertha’s battery seems to get sluggish left in the cold for more than two weeks, so taking the opportunity provided by a dry but cold Saturday, I rode 122 miles down to Colchester and back, surrendering to the GPS’s fast route down the M11 and A120, instead of going across country.

I wanted to have a look at the enduro bikes at GH Motorcycles with a very tentative view to investigating a small light but road legal companion to Bertha to zip around that is less of a handful than the 1200gs.  But everything there had neither headlight nor indicators and seats about 4 inches wide. Not the right shop…

T E Lawrence and Brough motorcycle

I’ve just got hold of a lovely edition of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom by ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ who changed his name to Shaw in later years to shake off this identification. He was a motorcycle fanatic to the extent that he was killed while hurtling his Brough around the west country. I found this nice picture of what I presume is his motorbike (or one like it) at an unnamed museum. If you can read the poster behind the bike you won’t be surprised to learn that motorcycling was his demise.

Look at this website for someone’s reconstruction of some of the routes Lawrence took on his motorcycle rides.

lawrence brough

I hope the text is readable

Look no tables (if you find geekery offensive look away now)

Finally I worked out how to replace my tables within tables with css on my website.
Screen Shot 2013-02-02 at 15.22.11
My normal approach is: surround myself with library books with colourful screen shots, ignore them, proceed using trial and error and slight familiarity, feel frustrated at the unpredictability of results, spend daily train journeys on it, forget which file is the most up to date. But suddenly, everything comes together and the end result is a much neater clever layout that stays centred, where the content doesn’t splay sideways at the slightest opportunity…