brokes

The only time I've broken a spoke previously was when my rear changer decided it wanted to be closer to the wheel and edged sideways enough to be eaten by the spokes, breaking a couple and ripping the rear hanger. This one just suddenly pinged apart with no immediate cause visible though I suspect it'll have been undetected spoke-tension imbalance probably not helped by a prolonged period sitting in a cupboard under the stairs in the old flat, though I did try to rotate the wheels a bit every now and then during any periods of bicycular inactivity.

Fortunately I was going reasonably slowly dowm a quiet street at the time and neither flapping spoke-end took anything else down with them, though had it been the rear wheel they might. I was only a couple of hundred metres from the flat but had been really looking forward to using and retrieving my track pump alongside retrieving mail and getting some pictures of the water-damaged bedroom ceiling to send to the insurers, especially after a couple of tedious hours at work finishing off what I was way too tired to consider staying to finish on Friday evening and which turned out to be even more irritating to complete than expected thanks to the stupid design of Quality Centre, formerly Test Director. At least after two days last week in a building in which none of the drinks machines had had their hot chocolate powder reservoirs refilled recently I was able to alternate flask-coffee with soothing and energy-rich machine-chocolate. Another useful side-effect of being in the office at the weekend was that I was able to indoor-test my difficult-to-acquire replacement bouncy trotting-shoes, much easier to do in a large office where there is sufficient distance to run rather than in the house where the longest distance able to be run in a straight line is less than four metres. Their disturbing bounciness is perhaps exacerbated by the extent to which their predecessors have lost all their cushioning. I'll hopefully get round to testing them in the real outside world soon now that I've decided I'm definitely keeping them (which at least makes the need to order them specially to get them in the extra-wide fitting then wait a month for them to be delivered eventually worth it) though will probably not (despite the pleasing wide fit) bother about getting another pair for everyday non-running use as they're a bit too pricey and probably too bouncy for normal walking, even though normal walking-tasks now include taking the wingpiglet out for a calming turn around the links each evening when a little bit of extra cushioning might be handy to stop him being overjiggled.