Fully Loaded

To save me writing anything new, text is from an article I wrote for our work intranet:


Those with long memories will be able to cast their minds back to a time before lockdown. A time when we received many generous donations to our charity clothes collection for SmartWorks. For those with shorter memories, SmartWorks is an excellent organisation which helps women get back into the workplace, no matter the reason for having left in the first place. They help with training, and practical career advice, and also with good quality clothes for attending interviews, and employment that hopefully follows.

Our latest collection was to be delivered on the very day the office was closed due to Covid19.

 
However, with SmartWorks back operating and accepting donations, the time had come for a sustainable two-wheeled adventure, to truly build on the good corporate karma. “It’s a nice day for it,” I was told on more than one occasion, as I plugged away uphill on my workhorse Elephant Bike (more on which later*). It’s a far cry from my racing bike that takes to the muddy fields of cyclocross in the winter, but it offers no complaint to being forced to carry ridiculous loads. In fact, it offers up numerous mounting points for bungee cord retention. It was made for this.
 
It’s roughly 7 miles from the office to the Edinburgh SmartWorks office, in which time there were numerous strange looks (not least from those people I overtook…), and one case of being mistaken for a cycle courier (because I clearly looked so hipster). Did I mention the heat? And the weight of your generous donations? Yes. Thank you for being so generous…
 
The clothes arrived unscathed (as did I, thank you for asking) and you can take pride in the knowledge that you have played a part in helping and incredibly worthwhile cause. Thank you all.


* for those interested the ‘Elephant Bike’ is the result of another charitable organisation, just to bolster that karma more. It came about partly after my wife wanted me to slow down after breaking my arm (for the third time….) on a commute to work one fateful morning. I needed something more upright. More ‘cargo’. More, Dutch, if you like. Elephant Bike take old Pashleys that were used by the Royal Mail, which were destined for the scrapheap, and they refurbish them. They do this with young offenders, who as part of this are training for new qualifications. And for every bike sold here, they donate one to Malawi (where they were originally used to patrol Elephant reserves, hence the name). But more than this, money raised here helps fund projects in Malawi, including setting up a full time workshop to refurbish the bikes in-country, which are then passed on to those in need to provide social mobility. The price to the UK public? Less than 300 quid.