The rookery opposite goes up like a black firework as I crunch down the garden path at first light. It’s been a blustery night and one of fitful sleep, for everyone. Poz lets us know when he’s ready to get up by shouting “hulooo!” from his cot at the top of his voice. The pine board doors in our cottage don’t offer much resistance to the passage of sound, so he’s pretty much in charge of mornings.Jane’s new used Honda glistens with raindrops in the car park. A colleague gave me a lift to Milton Keynes yesterday to pick it up and I’m fitting Poz’s car seat in the gloom. It’s a bit of a fiddle but at least the seat is now clean. I shook out as much of the atrophied snack material as I could when I rescued it from the write-off but the cover needed a good wash. I pulled this off and stuffed it into the washing machine before catching my lift up to MK, this way I could almost be said to be doing two things at once.
It’s an unremarkable story but one which serves a point. I’m lazy but I also like things to get done and out of this tension comes the family creed, such as it is, of No Journey Wasted. In its most prosaic form, No Journey Wasted means taking your plate back to the kitchen when you’re on your way through to the bathroom anyway, but I like to think this can be expanded to apply to any process you care to mention.
In terms of bike maintenance it would include a good clean and check of associated components when you do a particular job. A change of brake pads, for example, might include polishing as much of the brake piston as you can push out, without removing it completely and having to re-bleed the whole system (that would be two 'journeys'). No Journey Wasted is flaming obvious and infuriatingly subtle in turn. Sometimes I even have three things on the go at once and, as with juggling, you're bound to drop one sooner or later, and then you have an anomaly.
You can generally spot a NJW anomoly by its out of place-ness - a spanner in a tea cup on the stairs, a set of keys balanced on a sandwich by the door. To a careless bystander NJW anomolies might look like sloth or forgetfulness. It’s taken me ages to persuade Jane that a spanner in a mug on the stairs was the momentarily misplaced fruit of higher thinking. In fact, I might still have some work to do there but you try it and you’ll see what I mean, it’s addictive, in the same way that bargain hunting is addictive. At its best, NJW is almost something for nothing, and that’s got to be good, right?
