H is for Haunted Church#

Sat Sep 7 19:11:02 2024

H is for Haunted (allegedly) Church. This is the tower (and all that remains) of Little St. Mary’s (a.k.a St Mary's and All Saints) Church in Thundridge, which is more commonly known as Cold Christmas Church. It's said to be one of the most haunted churches in Britain, but when I was there it seemed quite calm and tranquil. Also boarded up, which apparently is to prevent local teens from drawing more pentagrams on the inside walls.

The church is a ten minute walk from the road: I parked the bike just off the road at the start of the path. On my return as I was putting bike jacket and gloves back on I heard clipclopping so I called out "hello horses hello riders" as advised and managed to spook the horses slightly because apparently they could hear me but couldn't see me around the hedge. TIL, I guess.

I rode out through the forest to Epping then some fun zigzaggy small roads through Epping Green and Roydon, still practising the limit point "getting closer, closer, closer, same, opening" monologues. On the journey back I just accepted Kurviger's default and it wasn't particularly exciting: roundabout, roundabout, roundabout, roundabout, and I think there were also some roundabouts. Still, good practice for smooth downshifts.

(Been working on holding the throttle slightly more open and the clutch in friction zone when moving at speeds under ~ 12mph and it does seem a lot smoother)

Discovered shortly after setting off that somehow when I disconnected and reconnected the battery last week, I managed to change the display from miles to km. A small amount of extra mental effort therefore needed to convert the roadside speed limits (20,30,40,50,60) from mph to the km/h (32,48,64,80,96) that the speedo was showing. Manageable, but i think I'll change it back again as soon as I find the manual.

Filled up with petrol in Ware, forgot to set trip counter. Again.

I is for Inn#

Sat Sep 14 17:29:05 2024

i is for Inn (and based on the name, possibly also for Intolerance; Religious, Historical). But I didn't go in the inn, because after parking up and locking my bike, I realized I'd left my wallet at home.

From that point things started to deteriorate. I took hold of my bike and started to wheel it backwards, and after a few centimetres it stopped with a cracking noise, which turned out to be the disk lock on the front wheel breaking the mudguard.

On the way home the low fuel light came on, so I pulled into a petrol station. Fortunately, after unlocking the tank and readying the hose, I remembered before I actually dispensed any petrol that I'd left my wallet at home and therefore had no means of payment.

When I reached home, I stopped outside the house on a funny bit of camber, and dropped the bike on its right hand side. Fortunately (this is getting to be a theme) it landed on the crash bung and did no damage, as far as I can tell, to anything. There might have been some scratching on the fairing or exhaust, but they were both scratched already when I bought the bike. Also fortunately I remembered from my DAS classes how to pick it up and it's not an especially heavy bike.

Ride report overall summary: aargh. On the bright side, there's only a small chunk broken off the mudguard, so things could have been worse in at least three different ways.

"Inn" for I was a bit of a cop-out in the first place. I wanted to ride out towards Finchingfield but I didn't think I'd have time to get there, so I picked a village along the way (Great Dunmow) and then looked for something in that village starting with I.

In other news, apparently TfL offer a free two hour session of 1:1 motorbike training for anyone who lives or works in London. It seems to be aimed at learner riders but it's open to full licence holders too, and run by one of the better training schools, so am going to see if I can get some of that.