December and January - on paper it's all been very warm, but in reality there were one or two days that were colder than a witches t*t. I had at least one bike-slides-out-from-under-me-sideways-like-jane-torvill-gone-wrong incident. My route to work is quite hilly, and largely off road so there's not much gritting going on. I just kind of gave up on icy days, safety first and that.
Cycling in general has had something of an early spring, with the Cycling World Cup being held at the new velodrome in London. The velodrome looks fantastic. Still, I am more into watching the road racing myself, the velodrome looks dicier than the black ice I've been skating to work on over the brief winter.
Meanwhile, tunewise I was reminded by the Lyte Funkie Ones that summer is only a couple of seasons away. 'Summer Girls' is the only song I sknow by LFo as they are known. I was about to say that 'Summer Girls' has the worst lyrics of any song ever written, but then I just wikipediad them and found out that the lead singer/songwriter Rich Cronin died a year or so ago of leukaemia aged 36, which is pretty sad, bad lyrics or not. So with the hindsight of not speaking ill of the dead I'll say this - 'Summer Girls' was a tune. It did what it said on the tin, it was a song about Summer and Girls, and everytime I hear it (when I've finished tittering about the lyrics) I get transported back to the Summer of 1999. The lyrics unashamedly reference the 80s and 90s (Home Alone, Footloose, Larry Bird, Kevin Bacon, Abercrombie and Fitch) but it's the opening lines of the chorus which stick out most:
New Kids On The Block,had a bunch of hits
Chinese food makes me sick.
(This is not a song you can sing along to seriously, and Eminem even parodied it in 2000). So anyway, here's to the ice that's gone away thank god, here's to summer which is just around the corner, and most of all here's remembering the late Rich Cronin, who dared to be in a boy band that thought they were a hip hop band and most of all dared to write lyrics about the stuff he liked (and the food he didn't).
