My brother has been going through old photos from my mum's house and I've just retouched and enhanced this one. This was taken on the occasion of my grandparents' 50th wedding anniversary in 1970 at their home in Hartlepool. This scene consists of my grandparents, their children, their childrens' spouses, and their grandchildren - minus my brother who I think is behind the camera.

That's me on the bottom left. Only the persons in the front row, and my mum (immediately behind me) are still alive. To my left at the front are my cousin Martin, my brother Eric and my cousin Fergus.



Sorry to say that my cousins' family has been touched by tragedy to an unusual degree. My Aunt Alwyn, pictured on the right, succumbed to cancer this same year, in her mid 40s. Six years later her husband Gordon, top left here, suffered a fatal heart attack in his early 50s. And their daughter Katherine, standing between Gordon and my dad at the back, died in January 2016. I think she would have been 59.

This rather cheap-looking thing is a new bike light I've just received from Amazon. I have a lot of bike lights I must admit. They're one of my go-to options for retail therapy.

So why did I buy this one? Well - my mum has gone into a nursing home now and for some reason, she had a very large number of AA batteries in her house, most which I've now inherited. This rear light is unusual in taking AAs rather than AAAs. Just a way of using them up.

The light with batteries is substantially heavier than a AAA-equipped light would be, but - I did have an idea that on a very long ride, I could leave it empty all day then swap the AAs from my DAB personal into it. Then I could use my phone to listen to the radio for the last 30 or 40 miles.

So in that circumstance, it would actually save a bit of weight.

It seems to work well. My only question mark would be the water resistance.

Looks like Leeds are on the slippery slope to the relegation places.. dire run of results recently. The two teams immediately below them in the league have two games in hand and if both of them get two points from their two games, Leeds will be in the bottom three.

Would be sad to see them drop back down again. I'm not a fan but there's a certain nostalgic appeal in seeing fixtures like Leeds vs United, Leeds vs Liverpool etc.

By the way at one point this afternoon Leeds had conceded 22 goals in 7 games, roughly an average of π goals per game.

I've read the first six Jack Reacher books over the last 18 months so I was pleased to see a TV series turn up on Amazon Prime.

I've also watched the two films, with Tom Cruise as the titular hero. I liked them a lot but Tom just isn't Reacher, in terms of personality or physicality. The guy who plays him in the TV series, Alan Ritchson, is pretty much perfect in the role. It must be said though that Tom is a much better actor and he has a charisma and presence that Ritchson doesn't. That's why he's Tom Cruise, I guess!

Only watched the first two episodes. If I hadn't read the book they're based on, Killing Floor I might have enjoyed them more. Not bad, but the direction feels a bit ITV-ish.

One thing that's disappointed me is that there's a moment in Killing Floor that, for me, defines Reacher. Two bad guys are out to kill him. He sets a trap for them and dispatches them in the most matter-of-fact casual, cold-blooded manner imaginable. It looks like the TV series has copped out from that.

I'm going to upgrade the site to SMF 2.1.1 at 11:10 AM GMT. I'm going to take a backup shortly so if I do need to back it out and restore the backup, anything typed from now-ish until I do the restore will be lost.

You may have noticed that a surprisingly high number of people have registered, and in most cases they are random spammers. Will remove their accounts when I've positively identified them, but I've added a simple registration question that should deter most of it in future. In the meantime if you see strange topics appear with links to cheap digital camera sites in Eastern Europe or similar, that'll be why.

Saw Sea Power last night at Rough Trade in Nottingham. They're doing a small "stripped back and signing" tour to promote their new record. Played as a four piece, without Abi (viola operator) or Phil (keyboards, cornet, occasional third guitar). The set was only about 65 minutes, tiny little venue that's a sort of annex off a bar and it was mostly the new material (with a bunch of oldies at the end).

I queued up to get my CD sleeve signed and Yan (singer / guitar player) recognised me and asked how I was doing, which made my night! Presumably I'm a familiar face from my forays down the front at gigs in recent years.

There's always a wonderful atmosphere at Sea Power gigs, a real sense of community. All four of the band present were having a drink in the bar before the set and no-one bothered them apart from one punter who politely asked Yan to sign a poster.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/cycling/60470420

Great Britain's most successful Olympian has decided to retire, not much left for him to achieve in his chosen sport I guess.

But what I find odd about that piece is that although it mentions his knighthood more than once, he's consistently referred to as "Jason Kenny" rather than using his title. Ditto Laura.

Lucky with the first word today, but unlucky with the guess that followed. Got it in two, yesterday.


Wordle 249 3/6

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Couple of things .. first thanks to the new members who have joined, happy to be able to keep in touch with all of you.

Secondly - the "forgot my password" function doesn't work yet, because I haven't set up the email config for the site. I'll look into doing that at the weekend. In the meantime if you do forget your pass or have any difficulty logging in, pls email me at:



Also - to make the topics a bit more readable I've taken the liberty of importing a few avatars from TNMS. I hope no-one minds, but if you do please delete them from your profile, or let me know.

I upgraded my Strava membership to the paid version because the route planning function became paid only, and I was using it quite a bit. But I ended up downgrading my subscription again because when they removed the planner from the freeloader membership, they actually made it a bit less usable, for me anyway. It has a few more features but it's slow.

This is the best online route planner I've found so far:

https://ridewithgps.com/route_planner

It's much more responsive than the Strava one, it has a really good selection of different maps and it even has Street View built in, which for me is massively useful. Saves me having to look for a road on Google Maps when planning a long route.

You can use it without signing up. If you do sign up for free membership, you can save your routes on the site - and/or download them in a variety of formats, so you can save them offline or upload them to a Garmin or similar.

You can upload routes to it as well, for editing or analysis - but you need paid membership for that. Pity, because I could have transferred my Strava routes to it en masse.

I've tried out a few different themes for the site and they were frankly a bit inelegant, so I'm going to stick with this one for now. For some reason it looks a lot nicer, with a dark colour scheme, on an Android browser than on a PC. I may investigate some others at the weekend.

Welcome to Between The Wheels. I've just set this up today, didn't take as long as I thought it would. I will continue to use T-N-M-S in the usual way, but will post here as well for testing and familiarity. I'm sure there will be a few wrinkles to iron out.

I'll be looking to see if I can install some themes and tart it up a bit, as well. It's very basic at the moment but it should work. You're welcome to sign up and start posting any time.

Just a test post