where canvas is no help

Until replaced with a rubbery springy thing from a market in Amsterdam my old bike's seat was a bit of barely-foamed plastic covered, for some reason, in water-absorbing cloth in colours inexcusable even back in 1990ish when it was new. As I would often have to shuttle back and forth between campuses when studenting my bike often had to be left out in the rain. There are many things less pleasant than sitting on a cold, wet bicycle seat but it's not the most comfortable of sensations and would probably have led to comments from colleagues or embarrassing damp patches on lecture-theatre seats if allowed to happen so I would generally follow the common practice of sticking a carrier bag over the seat if it looked like raining. Occasionally I wouldn't remove it and was then momentarily puzzled about the strange purple marks on the gussets of my trousers when sticking them in the wash until I noticed the rubbed-off blue stripey bits on the Tesco bag covering the seat.

I don't usually bother taking bank holidays off work as the absence of large amounts of people in workplaces generally makes it much more pleasant to be at work and permits much more work to be done but my week off next week had to be amended after I didn't add it to my email calendar and was subsequently booked into several meetings. Monday, Thursday and Friday are still safe but I dropped a day and took today off instead and subsequently spent a large amount of the day relaxing alongside watching more Wire and poking about a bit further within the holidaypics to fill the gap in early March. I ended up spending a lot of the early part of the day inside despite usually feeling that a day spent inside when not working is a day utterly wasted but I had the windows open (not possible at work) and was moving around a lot (discouraged at work) and also prevented myself from encountering the huge crowds likely to be present in the city over the bank holiday weekend and which will generally remain from now until the middle of September. When I managed to get out for a walk along the bike path it was reasonably quiet apart from a bunch of kids apparently having a competition to see who could shriek the most piercingly.