This morning the spitfire was still playing silly buggers so I cycled into work. As I got up to speed I rediscovered the missing cable for changing the front gearset. No worries, thought I, I’m late for work anyway so I’ll drop in Cycle Heaven en route and pick up a replacement to fit tonight. They open at 11:30 on Tuesdays! Bizarre.

My experience of Cycle heaven has been “not appalling”… But they refused to clean the chain as part of a service (though replaced a tyre unbidden which brought the fee up to £32 or thereabouts), and they want £12 for a headstock spanner, which you can get for £7 in Halfords. The main reason I go to cycle heaven is that it’s near me.

I used to go to York cycle works until once when I was restoring my old bike I ordered two new wheels from them and when I got them home, the bearings were worse than the wheels I’d discarded. I took them back to the shop and explained about the rumble. The response was “yeah, they’re not very good, those wheels.”

WELL DON’T SELL ME THEM THEN!!

Anyhow. I later bought a cheap bike from Tony Boswell’s Cycles on Tang Hall Lane. A year after that I took it back for a service. He charged £8 (or maybe £12 it was a while ago) and it ran like new. So you can see it was a shock to the system to pay £32 for a service at Cycle Heaven.

Today I popped into Tony Boswell’s - he’s near to our new office - to pick up the gear cable. £3 with a couple of bits of metal for crimping on thrown in for free. THAT’s what I call service. Now to the point. I don’t expect Tony Boswell makes great profits, what with the amount of service you get and the amount he charges. So all we can do is boycott the pretentious, brand-conscious, lazy bike shops and patronise Tony at every opportunity.