Category: Off The Bike
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I’m Not Even Supposed To Be Here Today
Kevin Smith, without me noticing, made a third Clerks film, released Summer 2022. I’m not a Smith superfan by any means, but I would be lying if his films did not sit somewhere between guilty pleasure and cinematic comfort food. We’re not far apart in age, and his 90s output (I originally wrote oeuvre but…
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Dream Time
The North of England. It’s a Sunday. My trip is over, and it’s time for me to go. There is a familiar feeling in the pit of my stomach – some call this butterflies – and I can feel the minutes tumbling away, as a veteran procrastinator can. Somehow, It’s now the afternoon. I have…
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Tim Bisley Is Wrong About Babylon 5
Spaced S02E02 is a playful tale about the pitfalls of fandom. I have to say up front that I am at great risk of doing exactly what Bilbo Bagshot (Bill Bailey) cautions against: “…Defending the genre with terminal intensity” Yeah yeah, I know. In the episode Tim (Simon Pegg) gets himself sacked by Bilbo for…
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Death and all his friends
February 16th, 2005 I’d got the call I was waiting for, from my older sister. “You’d better come”. It was time. My mum had been fighting terminal cancer since the previous August, over the new year we were waiting for the other shoe to drop. She’d become increasingly frail and had lost a shocking amount…
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45 pt. 2
Eyes By March my vision had continued to deteriorate to the extent I was becoming quite afraid. I made an emergency appointment to try and figure out what the hell was going on. I got a visit with an ophthalmologist that just happened to be a retinal specialist. She is French, had only been in…
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45
December 27th, 2018 On the morning of my 45th birthday, I stood before the bathroom mirror’s harsh, yellow light, looking at a lump where my armpit should be. I’d felt something under my arm in the shower, a bulge where the hollow of my armpit is, the ‘axilla’ as I would learn to refer to…
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Looking back
I’ve had a rough year, health wise. I’ll write about it at some point. Consequently I’ve had lots (too much?) of time to think, and as is human nature I’ve looked backwards a fair bit, so excuse the nostalgia. I’m not sure what prompted it, but I got thinking about my college days. College in…
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Why Scoobi Is Probably Doomed, In One Picture
UpdaTE: March 2023: I was revising a lot of these posts from the previous WP blog and found out that Scoobi have ceased operating, as of August 2022: https://www.bizjournals.com/pittsburgh/inno/stories/profiles/2022/08/01/scoobi-shuts-down-electric-moped-operations.html It is deeply unfortunate when any business shuts down – it’s jobs and people’s livelihoods, and even if I wasn’t enthusiastic about this scheme I’d rather…
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Sight
9th May, 2018 My Ninja 300 with Shane’s KTM 1290 Superduke, hours before I realised something was going very wrong with my vision. I’d had a great couple of weeks. I’d just got back from visiting my Dad in Spain, along with my sister and beautiful niece (whom I had never met). My sister and…