No harm no fowl#

Sun Apr 12 15:33:05 2026

My quest to visit all the duck ponds in Essex and Hertforshire has involved a lot of looking at Google Streetview, and when I saw this one near Epping Green it looked a bit overgrown and unloved but I figured I'd stop by anyway on the way to pick up new brake pads in Harlow.

Just like the previous pond, there were no ducks - I may have to broaden my selection criteria - but despite that, I am feeling tremendously pleased about having stopped there anyway. It's obviously seen a bit of maintenance since the Google car went past, and was so much lovelier to visit in person than I was expecting. It's sited in a small grassy area with some trees around and it's just ... sort of heartwarming. Probably helped that the sun was out.

The pub is across the road and has been closed since 2019, which is a bit of a shame as it would be a lovely place to sit outside with a drink and look across the road. As far as I can tell from the internet there are/were plans to reopen it as a community pub but I found no news on that more recent than Dec 2024.

From Epping Green to Harlow via a tedious litany of suburban roundabouts, which would have been less faff if my satnav wasn't giving me the silent treatment. Collect brake pads from Sportbikeshop, then a mildly circuitous and much more rural route home via Old Harlow, Matching Tye, Matching Green, Moreton, North Weald Bassett, Epping etc. There's a very nice stretch of road between Harlow and Matching: bendy enough to be fun but open enough that you can see further than one bend ahead.

I have booked an ERS which is happening in about ten days and I hope will be fun/interesting/informative. I'm not going to be at all defensive about having my riding criticised, no, definitely not.

Zoom and enhance#

Thu Apr 23 23:00:21 2026

A first for 2026: on Saturday I visited a pond with ducks in it. Ride out to Dunmow, in which we find a large pond, an island with a duckhouse, some ducks, a small child (not pictured) feeding them, and some willow trees. It's set in a dip in the land, so the grassy banks slope downwards towards the water. Top marks for duckpond.

Two points deducted for the journey there, though. Joining the dual carriageway, I identified a gap in lane 1, matched my speed to the traffic speed, did a shoulder check as I crossed the line from the slip road into lane 1, and when I looked ahead again there was a car alongside me in the same lane I was in. So, wearing my surprised face, I dropped back behind him. Reviewing the camera footage later it seems that he had moved from lane 2 to lane 1 as I was moving from the slip road into lane 1.

Accepting that these things happen and considering what we can do to avoid it, the obvious strategy is to not be doing a shoulder check at that time.

... which brings me neatly onto the second topic of this post: I did an ERS day on Wednesday and I have the certificate to prove it. It was billed as an introduction to advanced riding, so we touched on topics like limit points and IPSGA which I knew about in theory but don't always practise in practice. Most of the day was spent riding - a mixture of some very fun contry lanes, a bit of dual carriageway and some villages. I did a couple of overtakes (no, not through the villages) that I don't think I'd have gone for if I were on my own.

Most of my takeaways are riffs on the general theme of "information gathering" (as the IAM would no doubt describe it):

• Avid readers (both of them) will remember that last year I did a TfL 1:1 training session in which I was told I wasn't doing enough shoulder checks. Well, I started doing more shoulder checks after that and ... now I'm doing them too much. As in the dual carriageway not-actually-an-incident above: no point in looking backwards for danger when I already know the lane is clear and the most likely source of danger is ahead. (To tie this into the theme: don't look round if there's no information to be had by doing so)

• seeing the shape of the road ahead by looking at where trees/hedges are, or the lines between telegraph poles. Even just, sometimes, looking sideways across the fields to see the road past the next bend and the the oncoming traffic. I've watched videos where riders say they're doing this but it didn't "click" until I saw it in real life. Thinking back, I had the same experience with limit points.

• commentary riding: a few times I missed opportunities basically because I came out of one hazard (e.g. a roundabout) looking at the back of the car in front instead of already planning for the next hazard (a slow lorry on the exit, or a queue of traffic). I've tried commentary riding before and I found that my brain can't form words fast enough to explain everything, and what comes out of my mouth is "that thing is coming out of the thing over there, oh look, no not you, ok, let's take that, no". But the instructor took the lead along one leg of the ride and commentaried(sic) it and it was noticeable that I was faster and smoother listening to his commentary than I would have been without it, so definitely worth persisting.

  (I have an idea that this is related to the cognitive psychology concept of chunking: by articulating what's happening and what we'll do about it, it encourages the brain to form associations, and so allows operating on more information because individual units are combined. Caution: I have entirely no evidence to support this hypothesis but it does sound beguilingly plausible, which is very often the case for things that aren't true)

• positive feedback on machine control and "making progress", which was good to hear

According to my trip counter it was a 150 mile day (including about 50 miles to get to the start point and home from the finish) and I was feeling pretty bushed afterwards, as my usual ride is 2-3 hours and about a third of that distance.

Returning to the original topic: I don't think there's much else worth saying about the ride to Dunmow, except to admit that the flying duck photo was a fluke. Lots of traffic meant not many opportunities to get up to speed, but it was warm and sunny which kind of made up for that. First (and only, so far) ride this year in mesh jacket, summer gloves and Bowtex leggings. On Wednesday I had a 7:30am start and was was back in full leathers.

Ducks in Danbury#

Sun Apr 26 14:41:16 2026

My wife says my motorbike is a mid-life crisis thing. I don't agree, but (very reluctantly) concede that I'm easily old enough for one, and one consequence of that is presbyopia. So, last week I ordered varifocals (the presbyopia accompanies the myopia I've had since I was about 11). I picked them up on Friday and was getting stabbing pains in one eye on Saturday morning - by all accounts they take time to get used to and apparently this is to be expected - so I was in two minds about riding anywhere that afternoon. But I did, and it worked out OK (actually, they've been less trouble for riding than in a bunch of other situations).

This is Danbury, just the other side of Chelmsford. Duck pond, island, and duck house in the shape of a church. When I was there, the pond contained two ducks, which you can just about see in the second picture at the base of the left-hand tree, though maybe only if you knew they were there already. So, this the second of two rides where the destination duckpond was not empty, which means I can claim that I'm getting my ducks in a row.

The ride there was along the A414, which is a long straight-ish single carriageway with a rather boring 50mph limit and an even more boring continuous line of cars travelling at 43. There were signs the length of it saying "this is a high collision road", which I suppose explains the speed limit because it was definitely a 60 in 2024.

On the way back I got bored of the A414 quite soon, and decided that if I were going to ride in a straight line forever I might as well hop on the A12 and get home sooner. But then after a couple of miles I saw a sign for the B1007 and decided to come off there and stress-test the satnav.

I'm glad I did. I didn't end up on the B1007 much, but on a sequence of minor roads that took me through Stock, Ingatestone, Fryerning, Mill Green, Hook End and Marden Ash, before emerging into terra cognita just outside Ongar. And Kurviger must have been having a good day because nowhere did it route me down a single track road with strips of gravel down the middle.

My commentary rides still sound more like stream-of-consciousness rides, but there were definitely a few opportunities to practice looking-sideways-to-see-past-the-bend, even when the road appeared at first sight to be bound on both sides by tall hedges, so yeah, I'll take that.

Satnav didn't save the route, so I had to reconstruct it from the dashcam footage. If I watch it back on 5x speed it looks like the Isle of Man TT.

Next destination (unless I find a better one during the week): Chapmore End.