A pleasingly mild day, with a moderate wind coming from the south, and – assuming the BBC weather forecast was to be believed – 0% chance of rain. I wanted to do about 65k, and I thought I’d try a new variation on the southbound route, in which I’d go down the “old” way through Desford, but cut across to the “new” route before Enderby, meeting it just west of Broughton Astley.
So I did that. It was OK. But not great. Too much traffic along Desford Road, and along Coventry Road, which is a main road leading in and out of Leicester. The stretch between Desford and Narborough was nice though. Hadn’t been along there before. It goes through a village called Huncote, where I bought some crisps, a sandwich and a Mars Bar.
There was a news item this morning about a man who had bought a a smooth Mars Bar. He opened it to find that it didn’t have the signature “ripple” pattern in the chocolate, and later received £2 in compensation. Just thinking about this made me want a Mars Bar, and that’s why I bought one.
Of course I don’t know how many others were similarly affected by this news item. Actually I’m not sure why it was considered for inclusion on a national news bulletin in the first place. But for £2, I suspect that Mars Wrigley UK got themselves a very cost-effective marketing campaign. Maybe other vendors will consider releasing mis-manufactured products from time to time. Perhaps someone will open a packet of Polos to find that none of them has a hole in the middle.
But I digress. From Broughton, or just west of Broughton, I came back the regular way except that I did a bit of meandering around Barlestone and Nailstone. The sun came out for a bit in the afternoon, and I started to wonder if I should do a longer ride. But an hour later conditions were a bit gloomy again, and although there’d been no rain or even drizzle, the roads seemed to be getting wetter. I suppose a fine, invisible mist must have descended and settled on the ground.
Listened mainly to footy chat on 5 Live, but I also listened to the Rush album Fly By Night. I took the photo near Earl Shilton; the large tyre is known to me as the Belarus Bench, because it has MADE IN BELARUS embossed on it.
I trialled some new memory foam earpieces for the earbuds I use with my phone and my DAB. They work really well, extremely comfortable, stay in your ear nicely and they do cut out a lot of external noise (some will argue that that’s not a good thing for cycling of course). The main problem with the old silicon ones was that they tended to pop off the earbuds, sometimes remaining stuck in an ear or sometimes falling to the ground, necessitating a search.
Back on 69.36. I did 972k this month.