Had a wonderful time yesterday afternoon cycling around Greenham Common with Jim. It’s such a large place – used to be a US airforce base until the troops left in the early 90’s and since then it’s been demolished and they’ve put in nature reserves and gravel footpaths. We had a nice long cycle around the place on our mountain bikes just playing around on the piles of gravel and things like that and stopping every few minutes to have a chat or change bikes.

Anyway, I was riding Jim’s bike on the way back to the car and I’m not too sure what happened, but I must have touched one of the breaks (on his bike they bite a lot more than on mine) and this caused the bike to stop with me carrying on going forwards. I flew over the handlebars, and fortunately put my hands out as I skidded a few meters along the gravel (last time Jim did this he didn’t put his hands out and ended up with gashes all down his chin). I cut my right elbow quite deeply, bashed my left wrist so I can’t really use it at the moment and have minor cuts on all my other limbs but other than that I’m fine. I managed to cycle the mile back to the car and drive the few miles back to the house. When my mother saw my right elbow she fainted and wanted to take me to the hospital/doctors but I just picked the bits of gravel out and we bandaged it ourselves. Oh well it was good fun biking while it lasted.