in spite of

As my portable telephone's stepcounter facility would show (if I ever got round to downloading the data and making some interesting graphical statistics thereoutof) and as my bicycle's distance-O-meter would indicate (were it clever enough to have recorded the distance travelled against a particular date as it is surely well within the capabilities of the manufacturers to achieve) for the previous year up until last month most of my motility was conducted as a pedestrian with only the occasional use of a bicycle such as when popping to industrial estates in Newbridge or stationers in Hermiston Gait. It was an inevitable consequence of the combination of only living two kilometres from work and generally carrying a camera and two or three lenses around all the time and requiring space in workbag for flasks and things which meant that the camera required its own bag which made cycling less pleasant due to the many straps' restriction of free airflow about the body. Despite my extended period on feet rather than pedals my extreme wariness and loathing of buses has not been reduced; being on foot meant that it has been easier to notice them deliberately driving into advanced stop zones or reading newspapers as they drive. I'm faintly surprised that it's taken as long as forty days' full-time cycling-resumption for one to have deliberately attempted to kill me but I've sort of missed the cathartic though generally pointless experience of writing emails to LRT describing their drivers' stupid behaviours. At least they generally respond, even if only with a cursory "What? Oh yeah, that, that's like a driver training issue, y'know?" rather than the "What! Fuck! Shit, sorry, that really shouldn't have happened. We've alerted all our spare drivers near that route; the driver will be removed from the vehicle as soon as possible and brought in for questioning straight away before being sacked and stripped of his PSV license" which is what should really happen after someone tries to swipe you off the road with a busful of innocent passengers. Makes a change from people trying to kill you on the cycle paths by training their untethered dogs to dart under your wheels, though.

In addition to the mostly-emptied plant pots which have survived unthieved after sitting outside the flat for the last two months we also retrieved the ironing-board after checking lots of new ironing boards in the same sort of shops we picked up our replacement dustpan/brush and clothes horse from. I hadn't realised until checking the internet just now that the reason why all currently-available boards seem to have a useless wire-mesh pattern to the surface is that such construction is now apparently considered a bonus feature, referred to as a 'steam-flow mesh top' rather than being regarded as a showstopping hindrance, perhaps titled 'linen employment-trouser waffle-iron-effect diamond-pattern shininess creator' which affects roughly 15% of my iron-usage and thus about 14% of the ironing currently conducted in our household. I'd thought it was just a feature of cheap ironing boards in order to save materials and weight, not that the manufacturers of boards who considered that a few holes in a solid sheet of metal were sufficient to allow the passage of the occasional waft of steam back in the early nineties (when Nicky bought the old board when she left home) would now laugh at the idea of anything more solid than a gappy mesh permitting sufficient steam-flow to be able to cope with modern irons' steamiferous outputs without creating unsightly dampness and potentially dangerous condensation. As a result the old board gets kept and our flat's future tenants will just have to lay enough sheets or blanks atop the ironing-board cover to stop the pattern coming through when ironing their least-unfavourite work trousers.