I'm not a sandal wearing hippy vegan really!

I saw the post on the cycling forum asking for a self-portrait with my bike, so here it is. I got a colleague to take it just before leaving work. It's in the shiny new National Cycling Centre.....more character inside the building is required.

I've got several bikes, one even equipped with Shimano Di2 but my Brompton is my favourite. It just works so well, it folds rapidly and I can get up most hills on it..... not as well as my girlfriend Rosemary who once went training on it and did around 1000m of climbing in under 2 hours! Serious stuff on any bike!

After work, I went to The Soup Kitchen in the Northern Quarter and had a good bowl of sweet tattie and chilli soup with a very average roll. I would have gone to North Tea Power wanted to avoid caffeine because I was off to the Buddhist Centre.

It was my first Sangha night, a sort of community meet up with some meditation, intellectual chat on some Buddhist principle or other and a puja (a ritual with some chanting). Chandana talked about The Three Lak­sanas, which I found rather challenging intellectually. Sometimes in my eyes many Buddhists over intellectualise stuff and it can seem rather inaccessible unless your mind works in a certain way. Maybe it explains why most people look like slightly hippy academics.... and no smart comments.

We had a poetry reading and then chatted about it for a while the there was a beautiful puja with Judy leading the mantra in a moving way. I do struggle with the ritualistic side of Buddhism and I'm not sure what Gautama would make of it either. Still, it doesn't do any harm and some people enjoy it. There's no evangelical type rubbish though and everyone is allowed to feel comfortable.

Ian, a chap I met at yoga a while back gave me a lift home. He is completely leftfield but really funny once you get to know him. He lived in Antarctica for 3 years, spent time building climbing walls including Alien Rock in Edinburgh and is nearly fully trained in homoeopathy.

I got home feeling happy. The world seemed not so bad and I had met some really cool new people.