Mountain biking at the bottom of the lea valley in London

Leaside, my kayak club also does mountain biking. Six of us are doing our Mountain Bike Instructors Award Scheme Level 1 this weekend. Ian. our course tutor, is also being assessed so that Leaside can offer these courses in future.

The club is on the Lea, in Clapton (part of Hackney), facing the Walthamstow Marshes, with Leyton Marshes and then Hackney Marshes further south.

Rising behind the club is Springfield Park on the nearest hill to me. I am going to have to go there on my Saturday morning ride to practise getting up those steep paths!

Ian took us on a ride as if we were part of a group he was leading, but also explaining what he was doing. Interesting off muddy road bits - alongside paths I have often ridden along.

Not that I am likely to do that with my bike in wet weather - I don't clean my bike (though cleaning the club bike I had been out on today was part of the course!) so I don't like getting it muddy!

There were also lots of short sections of up or down cycling. Some muddy.

I never thought that "my" part of the Lea was surrounded by such good off-road cycling.

In the old days when I was young spotted woodpeckers were larger

I have just listened on i-player to Tweet of the day showcasing the greater spotted woodpecker, a "starling-sized bird".

I was brought up in a hamlet in Cornwall with a large garden. One of my memories is of seeing on several occasions a spotted woodpecker on the other size of the lawn. It was a bird larger than a starling, more magpie-sized. So, unless the lesser spotted woodpecker is larger than the greater spotted woodpecker(!), either my memory or Tweet of the day is wrong.

I know it must be my memory, but I feel it must be Tweet of the day!

Logs finished, luckily off-cuts remain

I will finish the last of my logs this weekend. Luckily I have scrounged enough off-cuts from skips and cut up enough pallets that I hope to be able to have the stove lit as often as I want to for the rest of the winter.

I got 30 bags of logs two years ago and used just over half of them, so I didn't buy any last year. I am a little surprised to have used up the logs so quicly when I only occasionally had the stove lit until Christmas.

Hopefully the February cold-snap that my friend Tony predicted (see my post of 23 January) won't happen, as that will use up the off-cuts too quickly.

At one point last Sunday night, when it was very windy, the flames were racing around the inside the stove so fast they weren't properly burning the log!