Hello everyone
It was great to see so many of you on the “not the AGM” social Zoom call earlier in the week. The big news is of course Lockdown 2.0 and unfortunately it is now confirmed that for the club this means no group rides until at least 3rd December, and any informal rides are restricted to riding either with your household or with one other person. It’s been encouraging to see people already offering their services as ride buddies and we agreed on the call that it would be good to try to extend this provision via WhatsApp groups. These already exist for off-road rides and for the Thursday morning group, and we would like to set up some more as a way for individuals to buddy up for rides through the lockdown period. Can I therefore please ask the following: if you have access to WhatsApp and are willing to put your name forward as a potential buddy, please let me know by replying to this email with your mobile number and your criteria – including the existing groups and, for example, we might set up different groups for 1, 2 and 3* ride levels and perhaps also for weekend versus weekday rides. You can join as many or as few groups as you like, so please just let me know your preferences. We then envisage that an individual would put a note on the relevant group along the lines of “I fancy a ride on Wednesday morning, anyone want to join me?” For safety, we will keep this restricted to those who ride regularly with us.
Another good point of discussion on Monday’s call was how to be creative with the Mince Pie Rides this year. Although the date we had selected (6th December) falls just after the expected end of lockdown, we can’t see any realistic way that the normal format would be remotely possible. Therefore we are going to suggest that people set themselves an individual or household challenge to ride up the great Uffington White Horse Hill, take a photo or selfie at the top as proof and that we link this to a donations website so we can still raise some money for Whizz-Kids as we normally do. We will also get this message out to the other local clubs who normally support the event and plan to have a route sheet available for the wider community to get involved too. Just a placeholder for now, but look out for further details in the next week or so.
One final piece of good news – Robin Tucker has been duly elected as a new Trustee on the Board of Cycling UK nationally. Further details at: https://www.cyclinguk.org/news/new-trustees-join-cycling-uk-board. Encouragingly, there was no need for any recounting and as far as we know there are no lawsuits pending…
Hope to see you out cycling as those duos of riders criss-cross the Vale!
Best regards
John
