Stir Crazy

Sometimes things just don't work out.  Last week, I finally took delivery of my gorgeous new, blue, retrosexual Condor.

Regular readers ("Hello" both of you and "Moshi, Moshi" to my many Japanese followers) will remember that my original fixed Tempo developed a nasty crack in the seat tube -- the result of a manufacturing fault which affected a whole batch of Condor's steel offerings.  To their credit, Condor lent me a spare frame while a permanent replacement was on order.  

This took a while. I like to think that it was because the frame was lovingly handbuilt by an eighty-year old Italian craftsman with a blowtorch and a stick of silver, who did a couple of welds each morning before heading home to spend the rest of the day eating lunch, drinking grappa and chasing the local girls around his kitchen.  I suspect it may be just inefficiency.

But when it arrived last week, all niggles were forgotten.  This year's Tempo's come in a glorious deep metallic blue, with a timeless old-school livery which wouldn't  look out of place at the head of a fifties club run. 

The arrival of this stunning piece of retro-loveliness, however, coincided with a ridiculously busy period of work and the biggest snowfalls in London for nearly 20 years.  So the Condor has sat in my basement workshop glaring balefully at my increasingly fat, unexercised frame.

Most of the snow's now gone -- and I'm hoping that tomorrow morning may bring a chance to ride it in anger. And get some of this flab off.