• Busy week was out three nights on the trot (Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday) for dinner/drinks which is almost unheard of these days.
  • Great to see people though and it’s really nice to head back into the city. I feel very at home there even though, some of these spots I’ve not really visited since before the pandemic but it’s fun to romp about and notice all the new things.
  • Also, smug alert, living on the Victoria Line makes it so quick and easy, especially being able to come back late and not worry about cabs. I should do it more often… It is as hot as hell down there though!
  • We a bike heavy household, we have five between the two of us. The three ‘nice’ bikes fit very neatly in a cupboard hanging vertically. But the other bikes just sit in the garden taking up space and are getting wrecked by the weather.
  • For a long time we’ve been meaning to sort out a bike box for them out the front, we’ve had a concrete base (and no boundry wall) for nearly two years now, patiently wating. We wanted the box to be fabricated for us out of steel, for that chic rusty corten look, but having gone through three different trades people and it never happening or being prohibitively expensive, we’ve decided to suck it up and build it ourselves.
  • But because steel is difficult to work with (and weld) we’ve opted for a wooden box which we will clad in larch battens which we will char for the shou sugi ban look (plus it helps it last longer).
  • So on Saturday we drove a luton van on a five hour round trip to Wiltshire to pick up ~300m of larch battens! Mad how we need that much to do a 2.75x1.2x0.88m box.
  • On Sunday we started construction and have a full box (no doors) framed and clad in OSB, ready to be painted in waterproof paint before we can begin the cladding.

The work in progress bike box

  • The big excitement of the day though, was that Wildcard Brewery were hosting a competition called ‘Walthamstow’s Loveliest dog’ and our friends had entered their dog Morris and encourage us to enter Maude.
  • It’s not a very serious competition and all the money is for charity but the winning dog does have their photo (here’s the 2022 dog, Axel) put on a can of beer.
  • We very nearly didn’t go because we were busy with the bike box, but we did, I pranced around with Maude for 30 seconds in front of a crowd, made her do a few spins and rollover.
  • AND somehow we ended up winning so Maude’s a celeb dog now.