Hello everyone

Apologies that it has been a while since the last Newsletter – it’s been a busy summer, extending some nice weather into September and October to give us some bonus extra cycling opportunities. Will this coming weekend give us a final opportunity to don the shorts?

Anyway, a few things to bring to your attention as we look forward to the winter season:

MINCE PIE RIDES AND THE WHITE HORSE CYCLE CHALLENGE

As always at this time of the year, we are starting to plan for the great Mince Pie Rides. For those not familiar with this, it has long been the club’s tradition to offer mince pies and mulled wine at the top of Uffington White Horse Hill on a Sunday morning in December to all riders who make it up there. We have our own programme of club rides at the varying levels heading off from Wantage Market Place and we also invite all of the nearby clubs to join us. It is always a wonderful time to gather the cycling community together and we also use it as our primary charity fundraising opportunity each year, raising typically over a thousand pounds for the children’ mobility charity Whizz-Kidz. During lockdown in 2020 we couldn’t run the event and so came up with the idea of the White Horse Cycle Challenge where we invited riders to go out and conquer White Horse Hill at any time during a two week period (and, just for fun, offer some photographic evidence of eating a mince pie at the top). We set up an online donations page for Whizz-Kids. We were surprised and delighted that this proved to be a great success that year and indeed we raised more money than we ever had before. So last year we decided to run both the two week challenge and the main day of rides – this worked well and we will do the same this year. So dates for your diary for now:

– The White Horse Cycle Challenge will run from Saturday 26th November to Saturday 10th December.

– The Mince Pie Rides will take place on the morning of Sunday 11th December.

– as in previous years, we have a block booking for Sunday lunch after the rides at the Fox in Dechworth.

More details on all of this coming soon!

WINTER SOCIAL EVENT

Thanks to our new committee member Andy R, we have access to Grove Rugby club’s facilities for occasional meetings. We had a committee meeting there a couple of weeks ago and it was all very pleasant. As a result we intend to hold a winter social event one evening where, apart for the sheer novelty value of seeing each other in normal clothing and availing ourselves of isotonic recovery drinks at the bar, we want to focus on two themes:

– the supplier of our club clothing is no longer providing a ‘club shop’ facility on their website for individual orders. However, they are open to a bulk order being placed. Therefore we thought this event could be a good opportunity to take a look at the kit on offer, try things on, check sizes etc so that we can get a good bulk order together. Of course if we can get the timing right, the phrase ‘Christmas presents’ could come to mind…

– there have been quite a few conversations on rides recently about the best way to use GPS gadgets (Garmin, etc) and the associated websites (Strava, etc). We think the time is right to gather the collective club knowledge on all of this and offer some practical advice and assistance. We will keep the tech nerdiness to a minimum and keep things as practical as possible. If anyone would like to help out presenting or acting as an expert advisor on the night, please contact me. 

Date and further details to follow.

MILLBROOK HALL TOILETS

A slight crashing of gears as we switch to a new topic here, but I have to let you know that there have been a couple of incidents where users of Millbrook Hall have objected to our club riders entering the Hall to use the facilities (typically before rides). I have been in touch with the Parish Clerk on this and we had a good discussion at the committee meeting. There are some valid issues in relation to safeguarding of children and indeed the simple fact that the facilities there are not a public amenity and so we have to accept that we shouldn’t be using them. There is a pay toilet by Millbrook shops and so we need to ask you to respect the wishes of the Hall management and to use this facility (for a payment of 20p) rather than the Hall facilities. Thanks for your understanding!

ACTIVE TRAVEL OPPORTUNITIES

As many of you know, I have retired from the role of Bursar of St Cross College recently and one of the things I am planning to get more engaged in on a personal basis is lobbying for and facilitating better provision in the area for active travel (including but not limited to cycling). A group of like minded individuals has begun to meet regularly and a Wantage and Grove Active Travel group is emerging. I am well aware that this is a relatively thankless and tedious area, and it is easy to become cynical and despair of making progress. However, I am willing to give it my best shot and I want to take this opportunity to ask if others in this community may feel the same. There are a lot of different areas where resources and expertise would be welcomed, from scouring planning applications to getting involved in Bikeability training, to helping our friends at the Mix on Mill St with repairing and refurbishing bikes to give away to those less fortunate, to tying in with social prescribing from the NHS of bike rides rather than pills, to local route mapping and signposting. Please let me know if you are interested in getting involved.

I wish you all happy cycling and I hope to see you out on a ride soon.

Best regards

John