Andy, get rid of that cold! Take some Lemsip!

Hi Andy! If you're out there reading this blog, get well soon. I'm sure you called me and left a voicemail – I haven't checked yet – but I heard from David that you're a bit under the weather and I kind of guessed you're not going on the cycle today. I didn't go either, annoyingly. See blogpost below this one for details and the post before that for details of yesterday's cycle.

Hopefully, see you next week.

The X Factor, David Foster and a late night...

Cue unnecessary God-like music, it's the X Factor judges!

Alright, it wasn't David's fault and we left his gaff around midnight and hadn't had more than a pint of Stella over the entire evening; but once home, and having missed the Saturday Evening X Factor I foolishly checked out the TV and noticed that ITV was repeating it, obviously for those who missed it first time around. I just had to know who had been kicked off the show and so I sat there, reading the Guardian and watching the repeat. It went on until gone 2am in the morning but I discovered, to my disappointment, that Stacey Solomon had been booted off; which was odd as she was, by far, a million times better than Olly Murs whose performance with Robbie Williams was, how should I put this, underwhelming. Alright, fucking awful! I can only assume that Murs will fall at the final fence as Joe McElderry is way ahead. I would even venture that he's a better singer than George Michael.

Anyway, the long and the short of it is this: went to bed at 2am in the morning, felt knackered in the morning and decided not to go cycling. Now I wish I'd gone to bed early as it's another nice day and, well, I've missed a day's exercise.

The Carshalton London plane tree

The plaque above contains the following information (see below):

Just a brief word about the London Plane Tree in Festival Walk, Carshalton: it was measured by the Forestry Commission in March 1964 and was found to be 123ft tall. It has a girth of 20ft 11in at a height of 5ft above ground level. It is (or was in March 1964) the tallest London Plane tree known in Britain and is one of the very few trees of any kind to exceed both 120ft in height and 20ft in girth. The age of the tree is not known with accuracy, but is likely to exceed 200 years. Being that 1964 was over 40 years ago, the tree must now exceed 240 years old.

If you would like more information on Carshalton, a London suburb, click here.