It's Bloody January, again.

This is what you look like when you know you are about to take your 77
year old self out  on the bike, in to the cold, wet, and an annoying south-westerly,
 for no reason other than you'll have a bad conscience if you don't. Why doesn't
someone tell me I don't have to do it? 

As today there was no appreciable rain, nor gales, nor even the suggestion of an icy patch, I felt honour bound to open my 2014 cycling campaign, the 62nd consecutive year of my Battle of Attrition with the bicycle.
     I am aware that this a battle that I can no longer win, and even as I dragged the Trevor Jarvis from the shed, where it has been lurking with malevolent intent since early December, I was still nurturing an unreasonable hope that the tyres had rotted away and the rest of it had been consumed by rust.
     The worst that had occurred was a soft tyre, which, spitefully, responded to the application of the track pump, and I was soon on my way and immediately aware that my legs had no real inclination to participate in the venture. However, this is a standard reaction for first time out, even for the fitter individuals, so I changed down a gear and pretended to enjoy it.
     It took me about a mile to realise that the route that my brain had planned was inappropriate, inclining far more towards the vertical than my recalcitrant legs considered fair, so I skulked off down a side road and did three laps of a flattish circuit instead There was a nasty south-westerly breeze which tried to knacker me up down one side of the circuit and the tail-wind bits, which would normally have me in paroxysms of delight, I failed to appreciate, being generally in the throes of a near-death experience. However, I'd planned to be out for an hour, live or die, and I ground out an hour and ten minutes, just to show who's boss.
     Noticed that there actually  is some rust, bubbling up on the Trevor Jarvis' top tube. Be interested to see which rusts through first, the frame or me.