Job done - kind of

Last week I adjusted the left pedal on the bike. It had developed a bit of play, and had started to make annoying clicks.

As with most things that need fixing, the biggest challenge was to figure out how to get into the thing. Once that was sorted, the mechanism itself is quite elegant and simple to work out. Adjusting it proved quite fiddly, though. Presumably bike shops have some special tools to do this, but I struggled for a while to tighten the lock nut while leaving everything else moving freely. However it all seemed to come together in the end, and on yesterday's ride it worked fine.

David Ogilvy famously wrote that at 60 mph, the loudest sound in a Rolls Royce is the ticking of the clock. The pedal has stopped clicking. Now the only sounds on the bike at normal speeds are the creaking of the saddle, the rattling of the chain when I've muddled up the gears, and sometimes wind whistling through the cycling helmet. The clock on the cycle computer doesn't tick, and in any case, at 60mph on the bike, I imagine the loudest sound would be me screaming in terror.

Anyway, having fixed the pedal, and tried it out on a longish run, by the time I got home, the dust-cap had disappeared. I can't have fixed it back firmly enough and somewhere on the thirty miles I covered between here and Pangbourne it must have dropped off. I'm ignoring the family suggestions that I should go back and look for it. For now, I'll stick a bit of tape over the hole, and I suppose, after all that, the next job will be replacing the pedals anyway. Ho hum.