make do und mend

A couple of weeks back I had to find and fit my spare rear mudguard, using an old rear blade which had become a spare when I bought a pair of Flinger clip-ons when the front blade of my old pair of Raceblades snapped just to the rear of the rear stay. This morning I was just accelerating over the cobbles and potholes of Rutland Place to scowl at the dingbat who unnecessarily overtook through too narrow a gap when I heard exactly the same noise as had occurred when the previous one had snapped, when the snapped-off bit started flapping against the rear spokes, prevented from escaping by the wires for the rear light, whose weight was responsible for the increased flap leading to the snapping and which had unfortunately lost its reflector and cover in this second snapping-occurrence, though I didn't notice until I left work at the end of the day, by which time the only remains were a number of reflective red shards at the bottom of one of the larger potholes around Rutland Square. I'd been avoiding replacing the Raceblade at the back with the rear of the pair of brown Vaverts I bought off Mr Wilmington a couple of months ago due to the pains in the bottom I anticipated in the attachment process; the front was bad enough as the bracket is incompatible with the morphology of my front fork crown, requiring lots of bending and washers before I found a secure method. The rear would require cutting at the very least - it was also missing the official brake bridge bracket thing, and though I'd found one in a drawer at the Bike Station I don't know where I've put it and so eventually settled on using the spare bracket I bought for my front light along with the two angle brackets I was intending to use to replace the single angle bracket currently in use to hold the front light to the handlebars (seeing as it too cannot be fitted to the fork crown) which were just long enough to reach the over-long bolts on the pannier stays, resulting in an extremely firmly-fixed guard with much greater rearward coverage than previously and which can hopefully withstand the extra waggle-weight incurred by the presence of the rear light, which will hopefully survive the weather long enough for me to find something to replace the waterproofing with.