I picked up 2 kg of rice from the no-packaging shop on Tuesday, along with a few other things, and with all that in one pannier my bike was noticeably unbalanced as I cycled home. That’s OK: I’m used to cycling with a one-sided load. What I’m not so good at is manoeuvring the bike when I’m walking it. I stopped off at Lidl to pick up a couple of things, and as I pushed my bike towards the stands it fell over.

I really should just have let the bike fall, but instinct took over and I grabbed it and wrangled it upright again. I won, but at what cost? My leg and shorts were covered in muck from the tyre, and my leg was gouged by the pedals. They don’t call those grippy flat pedals “shin tenderisers” for nothing, but at least it was a meaty bit and not the actual shin.

When I got home, I had to clean the wounds. I washed off the muck, and took advantage of the fact that pain signals only travel at 12–30 m/s (i.e. in the order of 100 ms from my leg to my head) to quickly rub in some alcohol gel to disinfect them before my brain forced me to stop.

It worked, and they are healing well.

I went to Blackheath for drinks on Thursday evening. It’s not far: just shy of 7 km, so about half an hour by bike. Even on a rainy evening, that’s not bad, and as they say in Dutch, Je bent niet van suiker (you are not made of sugar).

The first 5 km is very pleasant, with a gradient of about 0.1%. The last 1.5 km is similar. However, between them lies a climb of about 30 m over the space of 350 m, with a gradient of 11% at the steepest points. They weren’t lying when they called it Maze Hill. At least the rain helped to cool me down after the exertion (or hide my sweat).

The gradient was terrifying on the way back, too. Notwithstanding, the pub, or as they call it, Independent Beer Café and Microbrewery, the Green Goddess, is lovely, and well worth a visit.

We spent Saturday volunteering as stewards for London Trans+ Pride, (a) for solidarity, and (b) out of love for everyone there and rage at the minority bashing and eliminationist rhetoric that has suddenly become the orthodoxy of state institutions.

Several trans pride flags billow in front of the 19th century stone buildings of Piccadilly, along with Intersex and Nonbinary pride flags.

Flags on Piccadilly

I bumped into an old colleague, with whom I worked a full ten years ago, in the same stewarding bloc, and we spent the idle time before the march beginning chatting and catching up.

I was exhausted by the end of the day, but also proud to have been there for the largest such event anywhere in the world ever, with over 100,000 people attending.

Right now, it seems like the deck is stacked in favour of those who want to force trans people out of public life. In reality, the miserable toilet policing bigots in our legislature, judiciary, and statutory bodies could never hope to get out this level of support.

My favourite sign was a very simple one that said just this:

Trans lives are lives

Remember that.

I remain full of despair at the situation in Gaza, at the obvious and deliberate killing and starvation being carried out by the Israeli government, and at the continuing unwillingness of the morally bankrupt Western “rules-based” order to take even the smallest steps against a campaign of obvious genocide and ethnic cleansing.

There were a lot of Palestinian flags at Trans+ Pride, and I’m not surprised: these are both groups who the system is happy, for its own interest and convenient, to treat as somehow less than full humans. Liberation means liberation for all.

A few links this week: