Messing about in the snow, bicycles and perfumes

Well hello again it seems a lot of blogable material has been coming my way recently and so here is yet another awesome post complete with pictures and witty comments. Firstly I went off in February to part of Wiltshire in the depths of winter's icy, snow covered grip to reenact the French Indian Wars of the mid 1700s...

French Marines and local milice form a rough firing line under the command of a Lieutenant of the Artillerie for once they aren't running away.

It was an awesome weekend of shooting, reenacting, historical wargaming and most importantly drinking. Another experience I had more recently was less fun but just as hair raising. The organisation (my employer) had a PR event that it wanted any employee with a bicycle to attend and I decided to borrow a colleague's bike that I'd been eyeing up for ages (see below).

A Long John Delivery Bike made by S.C.O. of Denmark

It's a very heavy bike but once rolling it's a fairly nice bike to be on though my muscles disagreed with me after riding it. It's one of the few bicycles I've come across that requires you to do a three point turn to turn around in any narrow street, it is huge. On the way to this PR event I was peddling through the centre of Bristol and at the Haymarket I had to brake for traffic lights (mainly because cars were in my way) and this is where I discovered that the tiny front hub brake was shit. In blind panic at the bike showing no intent on stopping I yanked at the other brake handle which wasn't a brake at all...

...it was, as the picture above clearly shows, a horn... A very loud horn... That scared the shit out of me, a large number of passers by and the car drivers in front of me who suddenly made space for me to filter through them and stop using my feet at the front of the queue shaking with fear. After the light turned green I set off again and discovered between there and the next set of lights that the rear break was operated by back peddling about a quarter of a turn to apply a powerful brake cue me almost falling off again whilst making this discovery. The rest of the journey there and back was quite uneventful but the experience left me slightly shaken and my unsympathetic colleagues amused as I recounted the tale.

After all those fun and games today a package arrived for me and the Boy. It was a range of perfume samples some of which were suitable for both men and women however some were more suited to one sex than the other. Marianne was most put out when she discovered I had ordered for myself eighteen different scents (to her pathetic six) of which I wittled down to eight to try and hopefully get down to a short list of just three for a larger order. We got them from the Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab based out in California and a very nice range of scents they offer too it's a shame about the rather flowery and oh so unhelpful descriptions of some of the scents.

Myself and Marianne debating which of the scents are suitable for a gentleman such as myself to wear without smelling like a tart's boudoir.