Is£4.

That’s the exorbitant cost of abandoning one’s car at the station. It’s also the price of guilt for abandoning one’s bike based good intentions in the barn at home. A skewed parable would be The road to poverty is lined with frosty mornings”.

Since I bottled it the first time, various sly amendments or controversial loopholes have been applied to the rigid philosophy I’ll ride every day regardless of prevailing weather conditions”. Oh yeah, I’m still in the game but only by cheating.

The list is complex and every expanding but can be simply grouped into the following categories:

• It’s cold
• It’s dark
• I’m tired
• I’m hungover
• The Cat’s not been well.

So what that list cleverly staves off any guilt, the resultant karma implosion is less easy to deal with. Mainly this concerns the ability or otherwise of Chiltern Railways to delivery a train on time. Except if I’m running late then they’re running early. Yet in the last month “ while I have been stoically riding and getting progressively sicker “ the actual trains and published schedules have co-existed in the same time zone.

Coincidently I met a friend of mine who works for the Railway. I explained how well things had been going lately and how I’d stopped nailing a horseshoe on the main traction unit or carrying the entire lucky rabbit” into the carriage. He smiled carefully – I think he knew that the weekend engineering works would badly overrun. Possibly until June or when the overtime budget was exhausted.

Well it was either that or my serial non riding that ground us back to the bad old days. Based on historical evidence I’m placing the blame firmly in the camp of ˜The most successful train franchise in the UK‘. Lucky I’m not forced to use a crap one eh?

After an extended rail trip that would have benefited from a red cross food drop, I was keen to see how this morning’s commute compared. It was a huge improvement; I was sat at my desk at 07:30, there was no queue for the showers; the entire journey was warm and dry and the coffee was much improved.

I really must work from home more often.