Strapped

(tl;dr - I got home)

Completely selfishly, I am gutted that Wilko has gone into administration. Years ago someone in the Oxford Photography Society recommended their plain, sturdy, black frames with mounts and I have bought several. I was going to buy quite a few more for when I eventually get round to hanging pictures on my walls but the ones I want have vanished from their website. On spec yesterday I cycled to a Wilko shop in Bristol, found they had some on display and some in stock and bought the lot. It took me two precarious bike journeys to get them to Firstborn's and this morning I repackaged them so I'd be able to carry as many as possible on my bike rack on the train journey to Oxford tonight (this is ten).

This afternoon we went to an exhibition at RWA (Royal West of England Academy) that I'd really wanted to see. A big disappointment - both that and the free exhibitions. We shrugged and cycled on up the hill to the Suspension Bridge vantage point I was at on Thursday evening when the balloons didn't take off but where RobBris50 was successfully 12 hours later.

Maybe this evening?

We had a drink in the drizzle on a pub terrace overlooking the gorge while we waited, walked up to the Observatory and waited some more. Eventually a news website (but not the Fiesta website which is next to useless) told us the take off was cancelled again because of bad weather.

Revised plan: cycle back to Firstborn's on the other side of town, load up my bike, have something to eat, cycle to the station, get my 10pm train home.

Except that on the way back my front tyre punctured suddenly and completely. I'm so glad it wasn't a few minutes earlier while I was 30mph-speeding down Queens Road and Park Street, making up for all the hard work going up.

Re-revised plan: we push our bikes from puncture-site to Temple Meads station and lock mine up, I get a train to Firstborn's nearest station then walk to his while he cycles home, we carry he carries my heavy package of photo frames back to his station, we get a train to Temple Meads, attach the package to my bike, he gets a train home and I get my bike on the train, get off at Didcot and onto the Oxford train, then push it from Oxford station to home.

Which is kind of how it worked (apart from a platform change at Temple Meads where two kind passengers helped me negotiate the lifts - a laden bike with a puncture is not very manoeuvrable) except that I hadn't banked on 70 drunken people getting onto the train at Bath jostling my picture frames as they looked for non-existent seats. For a short naive while I thought they were as tired as me and were going home after a long day in Bath. Not a bit of it - they were setting out for a night on the tiles in Swindon.

The space my bike is in is what GWR allocates for two bikes on a train. Designed either by a non-cyclist or a super-fit 29-year-old.