I woke fuzzily Saturday morning to find Storm Doris desultorily lashing the house with gusting winds, sleet and frozen rain, like some apathetic, under-paid, over-worked and put-upon dominatrix. It sounded quite nasty out – but for once, I didn’t care and knew I didn’t have to spend half an hour mixing and matching various bits of kit to try and find that perfectly impossible balance between insulation and ventilation.

Daughter#1 and Daughter#2 (aka Thing#1 and Thing#2) had embraced their role of Porton Down disease vectors with all the enthusiasm of a genocidal settler distributing smallpox infected blankets to Native Americans, leaving a patina of virulent germs on everything they touched and trailing a toxic, disease-laden miasma in their wake.

My poor, frail defences had finally been overwhelmed and whatever mild cold they’d managed to infect me with quickly mutated into a full-blown case of man flu’. This even had me waking late Friday night to what I thought was a full-blown cat-fight taking place in the bedroom, only to finally realise it was my own torturous breathing that had disturbed me. There would be no riding this week.

Still, someone actually told me that the Met Office had “issued a yellow snow warning” over the weekend. You know what they say about yellow snow and how you should avoid it. Perhaps I was better off the bike after all.

YTD Totals: 949 km / 590 miles with 8,937 metres of climbing. (Still)