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This is the third batch of home-made bread which I’ve made within a week. I love it. I think it is difficult to get too much good bread. For a few years I have tried to just get my bread at independent bakeries, as Aberystwyth has several and they deserve existing. Y Popty is a mini chain (Aberaeron and Tregaron I think), and I have heard rumour that they don’t bake a lot on site in Aber. Their stuff is usually less impressively fresh than the others, but they do cream cakes within range of the seafront.

Slater’s make the tastiest brown bread I know of, and offer slicing with a ‘thick’ option (the thicker the better for bread!), and The Hot Bread Shop on Chalybeate Street has a local dominance on Chelsea bun quality. The price has rocketed in the last two years from 50p to 80p (well before the ‘current economic climate’ was an excuse), but they are still the best sugary hunks of moist bready, currenty goodness around.

But even nicer and more heart-warming than buying bread from any of these fine bakeries is to bake it yourself*. I am discovering just how simple and effective it can be. For years I have heard with awe stories of people regularly baking their own bread at home, and found it hard to believe that anyone could spend so much time and keep on doing it. But it really only needs to take 20 minutes or so to mix and knead, then an hour or two in the airing cupboard to rise and then shove it in the oven for half an hour. So most of that time you can be doing other things. With moving into a new flat and starting a new job, I want to make this part of my new set of habits - let’s see if I can keep it up.

And you end up with the smell in your house of freshly baked bread. You get the steamy burst of warmth when you cut open the first slice from a hot loaf. You get the fuzzy feeling inside to know that you have made this, this beautiful thing of nutrition and pleasure.

Then you get carried away and make too much, and end up eating bread for every meal just because it is there and is fresh and ‘needs eating up’.

Oh well. Here’s to bread!

* I haven’t got a good conclusion to the economic query over the ‘good life’ benefits of doing/making stuff for yourself rather than buying from others. I know practically it doesn’t matter as there isn’t about to be a wave of complete self-sufficiency enough to impact business of any size, but would we even want there to be? Should we really aspire to use our ‘free time’ to do things like grow vegetables at the expense of the revenue from, say, a poor farmer who grows them to sell? Or a family bakery on the, ahem, breadline?

I’ve just had the privilege and pleasure of attending the biggest event every two years in the unicycle calendar - the World Championships and Convention - in Denmark.

This one was the biggest ever, with almost 1000 registered competitors and a further 500 participants. It is a wonderful and surreal thing to have so many unicyclists in one place. Seeing t-shirts of random unicycle brands on people in nearby supermarkets becomes quite normal.

Some countries have definite specialisms - Japan dominates the freestyle (think ice-dancing on unicycles) and track racing, Germany is all over the hockey, french guys provide most of the street and trials competition, and Puerto Rico remain absolutely unstoppable in unicycle basketball. This last fact could be one of the most seemingly random things to bring up as a piece of trivia. I don’t know why Puerto Rico are so good at basketball on unicycles, but they have been winning the world title for years.

I held my breath during moments in the basketball final; was awed at the first succesful unicycle front-flip in the street comp; watched freestyle performaces which made me laugh, gape and even cry, they were so beautiful; and got to judge one of 59 ‘lines’ in the trials competition for six hours (and get repaid with free food).

I also had a fantastic time meeting old friends and some new ones, and competing in the long races. While at the front Chuck Edwall (on my team in Ride The Lobster) was doing a phenomenal job of crushing the records for 10km and Marathon times, I got 5th place in each, with personal bests both times. The standard of unicycle distance racing has just gone through the roof since last Unicon in 2006, and I was very pleased to even make the top ten!

We also got to groove about in Copenhagen a bit. It is a kind of cycling dream - real, respected, constantly-in-use bike lanes on every road, and a culture of normal people cycling around their day-to-day life in the city. Not to mention how everyone there seems to be slim, tanned and attractive. It must be the bikes.

Now, a geeky aside for unicycle nerds…

A lot of the top riders, including all those who went faster than I did in the Marathon (yes - excuses, excuses), are now using Schlumpf geared unicycles. That means that they can drive a single wheel without having to pedal at the blistering cadence needed in traditional unicycles; keeping more stability at high speeds (well over 17mph) and using energy more efficiently. The magical bit is that they can still shift back down to standard pedalling speed for steep hills and starts without loosing control of the unicycle.

These are rather expensive, and I have not been fully convinced by their merits until now (they also have a slight flip-flop feeling due to the internal gears meshing which isn’t as nice as the sublime beauty of direct-drive single-wheel pedaling). But at last I’ve had enough tries on other peoples’ and been creamed in good top-level races where I was doing my best possible speeds without gearing. So I think I have been sufficiently seduced… I’m saving up for one now.

How this fits into radical Kingdom living, I still am not sure (and would love to be challenged on it). I think my current way of rationalising it is that it just happens to be a single significant cost, but isn’t really that different in scale to the amount of incremental upgrades I’ve made to my unicycle. It feels like a much more worthwhile item to create than a big-screen TV. And it’s still less than (most) cars would be. Or a yacht. Or a second home in France. Or a private trip into space. Must be OK then…

Oh, did I mention that it’s all fairtrade? Not officially of course (the FT mark doesn’t really do high-end engineering business models), but Schlumpf hubs are all meticulously hand-made and directly support the super-skilled cottage industry of a man with a very phonetically satisfying surname. Plus I got to visit the ‘factory’ (i.e. workshop on the back of his house) last month, as he is only a short bus-ride from Leichtenstein. Very cool.