Strange but true! It’s a bank holiday, and the sun has been glorious all day. Feeling quite tired, my old left knee has been giving me gyp, not from cycling on this beautiful day, but climbing ladders and painting, my sons’ recently vacated bedrooms. Up and down stairs all day, standing on the step ladder has certainly taken its toll and this here body. My back is sore, and my knee feels very fragile and unstable.

On top of that, my foreman, her indoors, has had me up the step ladder re-hanging curtains of the massive kind. All the time chatting about doing this and that to the old homestead, from the back garden to the various rooms around the house. Where will I find the time? It is going to be all go this summer, if the boss has her way!

No bike rides since Saturday evening, my commute home after a day shift in my signal box. It was a fantastic ride, despite the fact the weather changed from sunshine, when I started, to a thunderstorm 20 minutes in to the pedal.

Strange but true, I love a pedal in a thunderstorm! It really makes me feel alive. I have often wondered whether or not I am in danger pedalling through hail, hammering rain, those flashes of lightening and blasts of deafening sound. Would the rubber of my tyres save me from a lightening strike? I really don’t know.

But back to the ride itself, it ranks as my second best thunder ride, I’ll call them, in my experience. The best was, undoubtedly, a pedal a couple of years ago. Again, it was my homeward commute from work, but this time it was much later in the year, and it was quite dark when the storm interrupted my journey, the flashes of light were brilliant.

Pedalling through a thunderstorm is my idea of heaven, or one of them at least.

Cheers.