Grumpy Old Men On Bikes

The mixed grill didn't disappoint, and we caught up on all the news.  We are men so this just involved Neil telling me the status of his car restoration project while I pretended to listen. We flew with Vueling, an airline I haven't used before.  They are part of IAG, along with BA and Iberia, and positioned as the budget alternative to those two flag carriers.  Some of you will know my opinion of BA so the prospect of flying on their even crappier sibling didn't fill me with optimism.  Fortunately, Ryanair exists to save all other budget airlines from being the absolute worst and Vueling turned out to be just run of the mill crappy rather than spectacularly crappy. When we rocked up at the Enterprise rental desk the guy took one look at our bike boxes and swapped the hatchback we had booked for a cargo van.  170 miles later and were in Gijon...a much bigger place than I was expecting!.  We have now ditched the van, assembled the bikes and procure...

  Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick   During a moment of boredom I wondered when I started with this blogging nonsense and discovered it was more than 15 years ago.  May 23 rd 2011 to be precise.  In the process of looking up this fact my eye was drawn to the readership stats page which informed me that I have had 170,000 page hits.  This sounded quite a lot but a quick bit of maths tells me it equates to a mere 30 hits per day or, more relevantly since I don’t blog every day, about 300 hits per blog entry.  Even this miserable number is falsely inflated due to an entry in 2013 which, bizarrely, has accumulated over 5,000 hits.  Out of curiosity I then researched how many hits one needs to properly ‘monetise’ the whole thing and it seems 30,000-50,000 per month might earn you a very modest income.  Any dreams I had of becoming an Influencer are now dead.   Take This Job and Shove It   May 23 rd 2011 was actually a very big day for ...