Bicycles beyond Brentwood

To Essex yesterday to collect Bonnie Shaljean’s old Bickerton bike from Michael’s mum, whom I’d not met before. We chatted over tea about seaside holidays decades ago and she asked me so many times how the M25 was that I briefly considered using it on the way home.

Dissenters agree But first to neighbouring Shenfield to visit Gillian Grigg, an old friend of Nicholas Battye I’d eventually met only after his death. Over cod and chips we talked of Zen training and the need to reconstitute the institutions of dissent in England following the effective destruction of the trade unions and the Labour party. Should we revive the London Corresponding Society as a start?