You want to name my bicycle, you want to name my bike

This is my bicycle. I bought him for £20 in September off the colleague of a friend of mine. He’d obviously been sitting in a shed for a while and not being ridden – he was quite dusty and needed oiling, and his brakes were worn down almost to the metal. So I took him home and gave him a wash down and sprayed WD40 on various bits of him till we both smelt like a garage, and I got him new brake pads so he wouldn’t kill me by mistake, and I got him a bell so he could clear his throat at pedestrians (only put that on today, though, so it’s not in the picture), and I got him some wheel reflectors so he would be cool and whizzy and visible in headlights (only put them on today, too – I’m not the quickest), and generally made him all spruced up, and I’ve been riding him around ever since. He’s brilliant. He has a huge cream leatherette saddle the size of your face, viz:

Mmm, leatherette. The Dairylea Slice of upholstery.

and a proper Sturmey-Archer three-speed gearbox, which people think terribly quaint but which I find much easier to use as, if you give me the 18 speeds you get on lots of bikes these days, I just get baffled with the choice and only use three of them anyway. Also, despite being fiendishly complicated, they’re actually more reliable than your normal, garden-variety derailleur gears that you get on most modern bikes. In fact, they’re so reliable that the one on my bicycle (and, as my friend Esther has pointed out, he is a bicycle, not a bike) was made in 1980. Check it out now:

He's older than most of you!

So there you go. He’s wonderful, reliable, comfortable, red, shiny, classic and but a few months younger than me. I simply love him. If that makes me a 12-year-old girl, so be it.

Except he hasn’t got a name. And that’s where you come in. I know there’s at least a dozen people who read this blog fairly regularly (thanks! you make me write; I’m proper grateful for that), and you’re all quite creatively clever types, so there must be some good ideas out there: what I’d like is for you to get your thinking caps on and think of a name for our shiny red friend pictured above. There are a few ground rules:

• He’s a boy. He just is. I mean look at him. Besides, if I rode around on a girl all day what would that make me?
• It has to be a name you could conceivably call a human. Not what you’d necessarily personally call your own baby, but it can’t be the sort of name that only dogs have, like Rex.
• It has to reflect his character. So like, he’s 30, which in bicycle-years is probably just about old enough for him to be described as “sprightly”, and I think he was a bit posh in his day (he’s certainly well made) but he’s now a bit ramshackle, but still good fun – like lovable, probably-a-bit-corrupt eccentric Mayor of London Boris Johnson but probably less Tory and certainly far less probably-a-bit-corrupt. Only he can’t be called Boris because:
• No alliteration.

Then I’ll pick my five or six favourites (assuming anyone responds) and work out how to do one of those clicky poll things you sometimes see on blogs, and then next week you can vote, and That Will Be His Name.

Fancy it? Play my game go on it’ll be fun. =o)

The snow, obviously

When I was a student I spent a year studying and doing cool Christian stuff in Nizhny Novgorod, Russia. One winter afternoon some Russian student friends and I got to talking about how cold it had to be in the various places we came from before they’d close the schools. Sergei was from Dagestan in the Caucasus, as far south and warm and Turkic as you can go and still be in Russia, so he somewhat apologetically kicked us off saying that where he was from they shut the schools when it got to -20C. I think Karina was from Kazan or somewhere like that – somewhere fairly central and continental – and she rather proudly said that where she came from they shut the schools when it reached -30C. Then Tanya suddenly looked as though, if there was ever a time to be proud of coming from Kazakhstan*, it was now, and said that there they didn’t shut the schools until it reached -40C. Her victory was shortlived, though, because pretty quickly Vovchik straightened himself into a more commanding storytelling position, cleared his throat and began:

“I remember one time growing up in Yakutsk, in the far east of Siberia, I was walking to school one morning and it was really weird – there was nobody about. I knew it wasn’t a holiday, and I was pretty sure it was, like, Monday, and not still the weekend, so it was a bit odd really. Anyway I got to school and I couldn’t get in – there was just the security guy on the gate. And I was like, what’s up? And he was like, school’s closed. And I was a bit worried now, so I was like, oh yeah, why’s that? And he said well haven’t you heard the radio? And I said no, and he said well they’ve closed all the schools today ’cause it’s minus fifty-nine!”

We all laughed. Vovchik settled back in his chair - there was no way anyone could beat that unless they’d been brought up on the moon - and then he asked the question I’d been apprehensive of since we’d started the topic:

“So Nathan, how cold does it have to be in England before they close the schools?”

“Um… Well there’s not an actual temperature as such… It’s more… they close the schools… er… when it snows?”

I’m not quite sure how the rest of the conversation went but I seem to remember nobody believing me. I think I must have stammered some explanation about how it never snows so we’re not really used to it, y’know, sold the gritters to China, global warming, trains, very narrow roads in the country…

But now, today, oh goodness me I don’t care IT’S SNOWING AND EVERYTHING’S STOPPED AND IT’S BRILLIANT. Snow in England is like grace in weather form: we didn’t do anything to deserve it, but here it is, covering all the litter and making everything uncommon and new and pretty, and sending us home from work early to throw snowballs and sledge down stuff and make snowmen like kids.

Because I live in Devon, where it really never snows (the rest of Britain had a white Christmas this year but not us), the last ONE DAY of snow has closed every school in the county – no really – so my housemate Christine was home and Fran, who’s learning to be a teacher and therefore spends lots of her time hanging around a college, was free and so we and our friend Iain said yar-boo-sucks to work for an hour and made a cool little snowman on our roof terrace. He’s only four feet tall (not like Karen and Conrad’s seven-foot giant [actually made by Pete]) but he’s smily chap and he’s called Boris. LOOK:

Boris

Anyway, it’s clearly bedtime and more, so I’ll get on with it. Stay safe, stay warm, don’t eat the yellow snow, but mainly have some fun. It’s inconvenient and you’ve got more important things to do but that’s like most of the best stuff really.

(*There are actually lots of times to be proud of coming from Kazakhstan. It’s arguably the most politically and relgiously free of all the central Asian republics and it’s got this gloriously silly shopping centre designed by Norman Foster.)