fresh feet

I was never entirely sure why radial on the front and cross-ply on the back caused the car in the public information warning-advert I remember from the telly when I was small to skid but it worried me for years that the implication was that such a combination would result in an immediate crash if one were driving a car so shod in the rain and attempted to go round a corner even if one wasn't driving like a twat. Such public information things would be much better if they added more caveats warning against twattery, often the additional component required to turn a normal situation into the dangerous one being warned against. Unfortunately, twattery predominates. On my way in this morning I was able to correctly identify when the car about to overtake me was a BMW simply by deciding whether or not it sounded like it was far too close and accelerating far too pointedly just before it appeared over my right shoulder. This has happened a few times on almost the same route so it might even be the same cars each time.

Whilst skinnyish tyres and rain are a generally a bad combination (though not as bad as a tight corner, a pool of bus-oil and bad camber) skinnyish and quite old and worn tyres are worse, so I eventually got round to sticking on the replacement tyres I bought two months ago this evening. The amount of mess this usually generates was halve since the last time I changed both tyres at the same time by since converting to using normal proper rubber brake blocks on the front instead of the apparently-now-the-default weird powder-creating stuff which might be better at locking up wheels when braking in heavy rain (making them probably not the best thing to use on the front wheel which is why it currently has nice cleanish proper rubber blocks in place) but make the current situation in which the bicycle is stored inside slightly messy when it's been raining and the powdery residue is leached off the rim and trickles down to collect at the bottom of the wheel, once (when I forgot) onto the carpet and today onto a more wipeable surface, albeit one which had unfortunately just been mopped when I got home.