Wheels

Here’s the sky on Sunday morning well before sunrise.

See the end note about enlarging illustrations.

Besides the giant planets, you can see some notable constellations.  Queen Cassiopeia whirls upward in her endless cycle around the celestial north pole.  She is strapped to her throne, though with a little imagination you could see that familiar shape as the frame of a bicycle, or even a figure pedalling.

Rubber on the road department

Two ladies in wheelchairs were among the folk out in our street watching the June 10 eclipse.  By the time I took the photo, one of them had departed.  Only afterwards did I learn more about her, and it’s worth knowing.

She is our next-door-but-one neighbor, and her name, Eileen Sheridan, is famous, as you may have known but I didn’t.  She was described to us, when we moved here last year, as a “local legend.”  She is more than that: one of the world’s greatest athletes.  She will be 98 in October.

Her name before marriage was Eileen Shaw.  Under five feet tall, and of “dainty” build, she started at age 15, during World War II, to dominate the sport of cycling.  She broke countless records for time and distance trials, 10 miles, 25, 50, 100, 237…  In some of these her times and distances were exceeded by only two or three men, and narrowly.  The longer the better; she said it took her at least 25 miles to warm up.  She came from Coventry in the middle of England but has lived here in Isleworth since 1952.

In 1954 she set a record of 2 days 11 hours 7 minutes for the Land’s End to John o’ Groats ride = the whole length of Great Britain, 874 miles.  She did the first 470, all the way through England, without stopping, then paused to attach lights and put on wet-weather clothes because in Scotland there was rain and high wind, which slowed her; yet she took more than 11 hours off the previous record.  And after a rest of less than two hours she got going again, so as (after two more short breaks and one breakfast) to set a new 1,000-mile record of 3 days and 1 hour.

Does that make you ache?  She undertook that feat because it was requested by the Hercules cycle company, which sponsored her after she turned professional.  Hercules – he was a demigod who could lift mountains.  It’s easy to invent feats for a demigod.

Another spin-off from Thursday’s story was that one of our commenters took the trouble to psychoanalyze me and suggested that my last three sentences, about an eclipse in India, were a fabrication.  I was amused to realize that this could have some plausibility, because the three sentences gave too little information (why were there crowds of “thousands” in an “abandoned city”?).  Explaining, I had to mention the cycle journey by which I had reached that place.

It was real and India was hot even in October, and I’ve made a few other long rides, but have never tried to be an athletic cyclist.  I imagine Eileen, in her wheelchair, could leave me standing; we would be like Achilles and the tortoise in the fable.

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ILLUSTRATIONS in these posts are made with precision but have to be inserted in another format.  You may be able to enlarge them on your monitor.  One way: right-click, and choose “View image”, then enlarge.  Or choose “Copy image”, then put it on your desktop, then open it.  On an iPad or phone, use the finger gesture that enlarges (spreading with two fingers, or tapping and dragging with three fingers).  Other methods have been suggested, such as dragging the image to the desktop and opening it in other ways.

Sometimes I make improvements or corrections to a post after publishing  it.  If you click on the title, rather than on ‘Read more’, I think you are sure to see the latest version.

This weblog maintains its right to be about astronomy or anything under the sun.