Even though Emily and Stephen think it's a desperately bad idea (but mom, what if someone sees you?) and I too have slight qualms about helmet-hair, I have signed up for the cycle-to-work scheme which the college has offered us. It's a really cool system - if you buy a bicycle through cyclescheme, you take a salary sacrifice that allows you to pay the loan back over the course of a year from your gross, rather than your net, salary. And because you don't pay tax on the bicycle, you save about 43% of the cost of the bike. So you can get £300 worth of bike and accessories for well under £20 a month. The guidelines say that at least 50% of your use of the bike should be in getting to and from work, but that you can use it for leisure purposes as well. (Practically speaking, though, I don't really see that they can check up on how you often you actually end up riding to work.) I'm quite excited about it; went and chose a bicycle today and emailed the details off to the cyclescheme people, so now all I have to do is wait for them to send me the voucher than means I can go and collect my bike from the shop!

Other good things from today were the movie we just watched - Akeelah and the Bee, which all five of us enjoyed very much, and my new book, which arrived this morning, courtesy of an amazon gift voucher. I plan to spend a good chunk of tomorrow with it. I hope it rains (rather a safe hope, in England in January), so that I can listen to rain on the windows while I read. And I hope it's really chilly, so we can light the fire with a clear conscience.