I’m a keen cyclist living in Kingston-Upon-Thames, south-west London, with my wife and our daughter. We moved to the area in late spring 2009, when we bought our first house. Kingston is such a great place to live with a nice town centre, good transport links, highly rated schools, a calm stretch of the river Thames and of course, Richmond Park. I honestly wonder how we’d never really discovered this area in all the years we lived in London before buying the house.
Having our own house, complete with garden, has been a liberating departure from renting first floor flats on six or twelve month contracts. We’ve been working hard to personalise the place and carry out all of the little bits of work necessary to make the most of it.
I try to cycle whenever I can and you’ll often find me tearing around Richmond Park during my lunch hour, one of the few occasions I actually get out on my bike for an intensive ride. Until recently I was a member of the Willesden Cycling Club although I very rarely got the chance to take part in any club activities. So I’m not a member of any club at the moment. I’ll see how things go this year and if I start getting the opportunities to get out and do some group cycling then I’ll look at joining the local club Kingston Wheelers, or perhaps the new and still quite local Gruppo Sportivo Gazzetta. If for nothing else it will be nice to meet some other local cyclists and make some new friends.
I work as an IT Analyst at a media company in Teddington and my specialities lie in financial and business information systems (I work predominantly with Agresso Business World from Unit4). One of the nice things about my job, in addition to all of the lovely people I get to work with, is that the office is only a ten-minute cycle from home, depending which bike and route I take. If I’m on my Brompton or mountain bike, I usually take a fairly direct route of around 3 km, but I stretch it out to 6 km or more if I’m on my road bike. If I’m up early enough, I can leave the house before 7 am and ride via Box Hill or some other point in Surrey, covering 60 km or so before arriving at work in time for a shower and then getting stuck into the day’s tasks. Working so close to home also means that I can ride home for lunch when I feel like it, which is quite nice!
I blog, when I get around to it, about cycling, parenthood, science, technology and whatever else comes to mind. I also use this blog to link to other interesting things I find online.
