When I woke up this morning I noticed a report on the BBC website titled ‘I’ve been listening to 300 vinyl records to get me through lockdown‘. That’s an impressive achievement, I’m sure, and probably a very enjoyable one. On Monday March 8th I return to work after having spent most of the last twelve months on lockdown. It’s been a mixture of furlough from my job at a local arts centre combined with on-off periods of working in local schools as a teacher but that has only amounted to three months out of the twelve. So basically, like many others across the world, I’ve had a lot of time on my hands. Lots of walking, a fair bit of cycling (including the trip around the UK of course and a few days up in the Yorkshire Dales), reading, TV, films… the usual stuff. Ah yes! There’s also been The Cycling Europe Podcast. On that score, it has been a very productive year…
In numbers…
- 15 podcasts
- 28 guests
- 8 authors
- hundreds of minutes of audio and
- thousands of downloads!
The result of all that effort? Well, according to one source that I stumbled upon the other day “This podcast is one of the top 5% most popular shows out of 2,012,632 podcasts globally“. That’s not too shabby.
So, on Monday, should a student ask me what I spent lockdown doing, at least I have a good answer.
The final ‘lockdown’ episode of The Cycling Europe Podcast will be available to stream and download next weekend. Here’s what it’s all about:
Find out more about all episodes of The Cycling Europe Podcast by following this link. And if you’d like to be a post-lockdown guest, please get in touch.
Yes, the lockdown has encouraged me to get round to some tasks long on my to-do list: writing up old trips, migrating millions of pages to a new website, nailing that recipe for custard tarts etc. But like us all, I’m getting very stir-crazy and desperate to get out for a proper tour again. Sure, I’ve explored Iceland and biked round the Taj Mahal, but only the supermarket and the restaurant in York. I’ve been dreaming of getting away properly, such as to visit the Alhambra. Even just the one in Bradford… Hope the return to work goes well!