Richard Fairhurst

Café ride to test the upcoming version of the cycle.travel app ☕️

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Gravel track near Chawley

Gravel track near Chawley

Field path near Sunningwell

Headed out on the Bike Friday to explore some bridleways around Oxford.

Indeed it isn’t! There are routinely three Terns on the school run here every morning, three miles of moderately hilly unlit Cotswold roads. (We were one of them until changing schools the other year, but one of the other parents still routinely borrows our GSD.)

The Bluesky theory of moderation is one of those “I’d really like to believe in this, but I am dubious”, but I will put that aside for the iconic reply to “people who have convinced themselves that they are the boss of people they don’t give any money to“, a curse of social media.

Even after 35+ years of Providing Free Stuff To Strangers Using Computers (late 1980s public domain software for the Amstrad 8-bits ftw), the sheer entitlement of 5% of those strangers never ceases to amaze me

cycle.travel app map in Welsh

In one of those wonderful coincidences, the code to display cycle.travel’s app map yn Gymraeg was finished today just as the Welsh Government announced a project to crowdsource Welsh placenames for OpenStreetMap https://media.service.gov.wales/news/new-priorities-to-help-protect-welsh-place-names

just bored and thinking about how Freud's, the cocktail bar in a defunct Grade II listed church in Oxford, has been closed since 2023 'for renovations' but they haven't applied for any listed building consent and now it's the last remaining real estate in Radcliffe Observatory Quarter

Iconic Mean Girls image mirrored to more accurately fit the sculpture

“Get in, loser, we're founding a college”

Tabakova – Truro Canticles (2016) Dobrinka Tabakova (b. 1980), a contemporary Bulgarian-British composer, has emerged as a distinctive voice in the classical music scene of the 21st century. Active during the same period as other c…

Dobrinka Tabakova’s Truro Canticles are just full of gorgeous harmonies and you should listen to them, very very loud listeningproject.blog/2024/01/22/t...

One location!

A completely different location that sounds the same!

neatly illustrating w3w’s complete unsuitability for anything at all

Facebook group query asking “how safe is it to cross Sudan”

“AI says it’s ok”

AI instant answers have their uses but “is it safe to cycle across Sudan right now” is probably not one of them

This isn’t the happiest of posts to write, but it’s just to let you all know I’ve handed in my notice as editor of Cotswold Life magazine. After working for 23 years (this month!) on the magazine –… ... This isn’t the happiest of posts to write, but it’s just to let you all know I’ve handed in my notice as editor of Cotswold Life magazine. After working for 23 years (this month!) on the magazine – f...

Wait. The editor of Cotswold Life magazine was also lead vocalist in Inkubus Sukkubus? www.linkedin.com/posts/candia...

Lol. How well did the last govt insulting load-bearing parts of their electoral coalition work out for them? Like they watched what the Lib Dems did to the home counties and wondered what it'd be like if the Greens did that to the two dozen largest university towns.

Now if they could do a Saturday service and extend it to Beale Park…

(Brilliant little zoo/wildlife park on the Berks/Oxon border. But really hard to get to by public transport. There’s no bus so you have to walk ~1.5mi from Pangbourne station on a narrow footpath by a busy road. With kids.)

"Book me an uber from index home raft to above dock shrimp". NO ONE IS EVER GOING TO DO THIS, HAVE YOU GONE ABSOLUTELY MAD

what3words is pivoting to AI to save their floundering business model and it makes NO SENSE. If "AI voice chat" can book you an Uber to "///frog.eats.donuts", it can also book you an Uber to "my mate Darren's house" and cut out the intermediate step of w3w coordinates what3words.com/products/pro

Deddington, Near Banbury Under the headline “Construction of cycle track,” the Banbury Advertiser reported in 1936 that the Oxford-Banbury road, north of Deddington, would be widened for 1.75 miles “so as to provide for the c...

Amazingly, that was actually upgraded to a (less than stellar) cycle track in the late 1930s, as @carltonreid.com’s research uncovered! www.britishcycletracks.com/cycle-track/...

The A361 through Banbury is surely the most slam-dunk case for a segregated cycle track in the whole of Oxfordshire. (And south along the A4260 to at least Adderbury!)

Oxford’s geography is that of a medieval town with hundreds of historic buildings, the River Thames running right through the middle, and traffic compressed onto a small number of river crossings, whereas London’s is wait can I start this one again

everybody talk about pop muzik

British NIMBYism is truly a sight to behold.

“We are rejecting this solar farm, because one time I saw an electric vehicle on fire, which reminded me that decades ago a coal mining disaster killed lots of children”.

I call my type of cycling and walking “bimbling”. It generally involves low speeds, an indirect route and a pub.

I want to explain a few things and then it might be clearer why UK trans people are upset.
In 2001 I married my wife, Sylvia.
In 2005 I started medical transition. (1/13)

And the New Statesman printed my letter!

A Baptist minister has been arrested in Oxford for holding a placard reading ‘I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action’. Rev Grote of New Road Baptist Church said ‘I am doing this because of my faith. I’m doing this because I’m a follower of Jesus Christ, who broke the rules and created peace.’

cycle.travel | route-planner and maps - traffic-free & quiet roads The best-kept secret of a great ride - find scenic routes with fewer cars.

Fabulous!
Every server I run is named after a cycling climb. cycle.travel routing is currently calculated by a server called tourmalet and served by portet, while the site is served by colombiere.

Jeremy Clarkson’s Farmer’s Dog? 😉

Social Democratic Federation - Wikipedia

And of course all this comes from early Labour essentially developing as a party of organised labour rather than an actual socialist party with socialist ideals; the latter tendency got marginalised and essentially ceased to exist by the 1920s en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_...

There’s a strong Labour tradition of “the working class currently do/think this and so it is de facto right”. It’s just like the Oxford traffic debate with Labour councillors fervently defending people’s right to drive through residential streets to save 15 seconds on their journey