About me
I’m a middle-aged Irish man living in the southeastern corner of Austria, in Graz. Graz is Austria’s second-largest city, which if you translate it into Irish, would be Cork. As a huge Dubliner I could get by very well without even registering that Cork exists. But in Austria I am a Grazer and have a grudge against Vienna. I like to think I’m special and have found part of Austria that doesn’t have high pointy mountains. We do have a lot of hills that would count as mountains back home. But here they’re just hills.

In another way though, I am not a proper Dubliner, because although I went to school and university in the city, I lived in a commuter suburb. Maybe from wanting to be a real city hipster, or wanting to escape the dreariness of commuting, I have very intentionally taken the chance to live in the centre of a city. This has made me an everyday urban cyclist. Related to this, for quite a few years, I was a cycling campaigner. It’s more than 10 years ago that I stopped doing that, but it’s hard to shake off.

The other product of being a suburban kid, though, was that my original use for a bike was exploring the countryside. That’s something I’ve done on and off since I was a teenager. Some of the “off” periods have been quite long. The year 2016 marked the beginning of a bit of a revival on this front, though 2020 and 2021 and 2022, dammit have brought quite a dip in activity. Now in 2022 2023 I want to believe I’m really regrouping to come back better. Everything in Rides just now is old stuff and there’s a lot of riding that hasn’t made it beyond a few notes in Strava. But hopefully I’ll manage to blog about riding soon.

Since 2016, for out-of-town purposes, I’ve been riding a steel-framed bike that was custom-made for me over 30 years ago. I kinda like that neither I nor my bike are brand new; we both need a bit of work. It’s not necessarily my aim to keep the bike as an authentic museum piece; it’s just that for my purposes, technology from around the 80s and 90s arguably adds up to a good kind of bike for the sort of riding I want to do. If you look into the story of New Old Bike, you’ll see that I don’t just ride bikes, I also obsessively tinker with them. Bikes is my container for notes on bike parts and mechanical things.

Things that aren’t bikes or rides will go in the category of Musings.

Despite all this bike stuff, a lot of my life revolves around Herself and Young’un, who are the most wonderful people on earth, but you won’t hear or see too much of them here, because I don’t want to create an online trail for them. Just this much: Herself is from a small town about 20 miles up the road, which in a way confronts me with my own suburban past …

Apart from Dublin and Graz, my first home from home was in Scotland, and I spent a couple of years in Germany, too.

Contact: eat@twobiscuits.at