Author: jane

BRIGHTON, UK, Sat: After almost 8 years together, Richard “glacial” Dallaway
finally got round to proposing to Jane. She said Yes, and there was Joy all
over The Kingdom. We’re looking at a September-ish marriage in Hull. More
news when we know what the hell we’re doing.

Okay, not exactly, but I noticed from a story on the BBC that the Queen has released a message to celebrate the 50th anniversary of her Accession to the throne – on the Royal Family’s website. Do you think she’s going to start blogging?

I had 2 fillings today, both at the bottom right hand side of my mouth, and I’m now walking around with a numb face. Still, the dentist was really good and explained what she was doing at every step of the process (“I’m just cleaning out the decay now” etc…)

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We went out on the bikes again on Saturday, and this time took the camera with us. It was pretty windy at the top of Fulking Hill, and we had a change of route when we decided that if we went along the real route (from the trails leaflet) we’d be blown down into the valley – not so tempting really! See the photos.

I got the bus to work today as we’re going for a pint after work, and it took me longer than it does to cycle. Normally, it takes 15 – 25 minutes for me to cycle the 3 miles from Brighton to Portslade (depending on the weather), but today it took me at least 40 minutes from leaving the house to sitting down at my desk. Pah!

It has been pretty windy around here lately, and yesterday I cycled home along the sea front. What was quite interesting was that the sea had been so powerful that it had picked heaps of pebbles off the beach and dumped it on the promenade above. Really bizarre!

Of course, our weather has been mild compared to the North of England, Scotland and Northern Ireland – for more information, see what the BBC News had to say about it.

Seeing as how we’re doing more cycling, we thought we’d buy some proper cycling clothes. Someone had recommended Ground Effect to us despite them being in New Zealand. We had a look at their stuff, and it certainly looked a bit cooler than some of the other manufacturers, and a whole lot better than what we could find in the shops around Brighton. We made our order on Monday evening, and today the first set of clothing arrived – a pair of Tom Thumbs (cycling shorts), some Witches Britches, a Presto top and a pair of RanchSliders for Richard. We’re pretty impressed with the delivery time – half way around the world in 4.5 days. Hopefully, it’ll stop raining before tomorrow and we can try some of our new purchases out.

Simes and Stuffy had a little girl on Thursday afternoon. I got a text message from them this afternoon whilst we were out cycling near the racecourse, it was kind of nice reading that whilst looking down over the sea.

I saw my first Brighton celebrity resident yesterday. Paul McGann was in Borders waiting whilst a member of staff giftwrapped his books for him. Nobody was pointing, or staring, it was all typically Brighton – chilled.

Paul, Richard and I took our mountain bikes out yesterday for a ride. We decided we didn’t want to do a long ride as Rich was recovering from a cold, and I’d been cycling to work and back during the week. So, we left Paul’s place in Kemp Town and headed off along Roedean Road. Then we headed off the road on a bridleway passing Brighton East Golf Club (this was a pretty steep hill), and onto a muddy track to the top of Red Hill. We had a great downhill stretch, although I wasn’t brave enough to let the brakes off too much as there was so much mud about and I could feel my back wheel slipping away under me. This was a really good bridleway, and brought us into Ovingdean. We cycled through Ovingdean and joined another path heading towards Rottingdean. We had a short stop at Rottingdean (next time, we’re going to take bike locks with us so we can have a quick pint or something similar – although we were all pretty muddy by this point and so might not have been welcome at some places) and then cycled along the Undercliff path back to the Marina. We cycled through the Marina Village and then along Marine Parade. Paul headed off back up Dukes Mound to his house, and we cycled along the seafront to ours. This was a really good route, and I think we might be trying similar routes again as there seem to be a lot of good tracks around the Ovingdean, Rottingdean, Woodingdean areas.

We used the Explorer 122 Ordnance Survey map to plan and follow our route.