Meaningless, meaningless

Oh my goodness!  What has Lucy got against Lauren Laverne?  She's brilliant, damnit.  Wash your mouth out girl!

 

So this is my first weekend off on iin a while.  No Tom, no obligations, bloody brilliant.  Yesterday I wrote a big list of things that I could possibly do and started working my way through it.  I've finally installed the right decoders on my PC so I can listen to mp3s and watch video stuff -- and it was easy.  Woo! 

 

Have started learning Spanish again so have been downloading muchas mp3s en Espanol -- this site's very nice; you can even play Wheel of Fortune in Spanish!  Tom's lent me his Harry Potter y el Prisionero de Azkaban, which I am steadily working through at a rate of about a page per half hour, but I can feel the language slowly osmosifying into my brain.  Soon I will be so fluent that I won't remember how to speak English and you'll all have to communicate with me by talk-ing ver-y slow-ly and add-ing "o" to every-thing word-o you say-o.  Oh yes.

 

Thought I'd take advantage of the lovely weather in the afternoon and decided to check out the cycle link to the Trans-Pennine Trail that you can supposedly access from Victoria Quays (by the Park Square roundabout).  The crappy map I managed to find on t'Interweb seemed to imply that this was along the canal -- but it turned out to be a poorly signposted and rather scabby road that smells of tramps' wee and runs alongside the canal but on the other side of a high wall.  So I cut back on to the canal as soon as possible.   And twas here I was reminded once more that Sheffield folk aren't like Leicester folk at all.

 

See, on a pleasant afternoon in Leicester at any time of year you're likely to come across a plethora of cyclists, families and other people out for a stroll.  In Sheffield the towpath is populated at sporadic intervals by fisherman of various ages and ethnicities and nobody else.   And, for the first time since I got by shiny new bike I was reminded of the few benefits of all terrain bikes -- they're suitable for all terrains.  The canal towpath is very muddy and not at all suitable for swift and narrow road bike wheels.  Although might be quite a good ride on munis?  Still, I like canals.  All the tumble-down Victorian buildings slowly reverting back to nature and the people on narrowboats saying hello as they go by, as though a remnant of a bygone era of universal friendship and goodwill.

 

Finally found the TPT but no sign of Meadowhall, which was what I was nominally aiming to find.  I realised when I saw the M1 that I'd probably missed it, and by that time the sun was looking rather low in the sky and I didn't fancy riding back down secluded backstreets in dodgy areas in the dark.

 

Got quite lost on the way back -- didn't want to take the canal and the signposted cycle path just disappeared, as they are wont to do in this part of the world.  A nice police woman who was just coming off duty told me I was on Attercliffe Road (which appears to be a Meadowhell ghost town) and it was easy from there.

 

After all that excitement, today is cleaning and shopping day.  And I might go and see my bizarre ex-neighbour, who is currently being put up in a Grimesthorpe B&B filled with people on the council housing waiting list.  Should be interesting.