I'm Feeling a Little Ho Ho Ho 🎅🏽
Free book anyone? 📖
I’ve got your gift right here 🎁
I’ll be leaving the UK on Monday the 18th to visit my parents in the US and I’m feeling a bit saucy, so until the 16th, I’m offering you a free signed copy of my book (worth £19!), How to Build a Bike, if you sign up for a year’s membership to our Friends with Benefits Substack.
Subscribe for 1 year, get a copy of my book, plus:
Access to our private Discord chat
All 5 of us women and non-binary mechanics ready to answer any question, PLUS a cohort of comrades for camaraderie and Q&A
Monthly online classes and fix-a-longs
First one is Thursday 28 December at 7pm: Bare Minimum Bike Maintenance
That feeling of security that comes with knowledge 😌
A sense of self-reliance knowing you can use your hands and understand your bike a bit better than before 💪
And smug warm fuzzies for helping LBK navigate choppy disaster capitalist seas 🌊
Once you subscribe or give a gift subscription, I will email you back to get your address to ship your book on Monday 18 December
*This offer expires Saturday 16 December*
p.s. if you are already an annual subscriber, get in touch and I’ll be more than happy to send you a copy!
Makes a great gift, for yourself or a loved one
GIVE SMARTS NOT STUFF
In the heady days of the pandemic, we took our knowledge online and taught via Zoom for 2 years. We’re reviving our online classes, but this time in a more relaxed fashion: only 1 class per month instead of 1 per week.
Date/Time will change each month depending on mechanic availability. Plus they’ll be recorded and will live in a private YouTube library, so you’ll always have access.
If you sign up to our monthly membership for £5/mo, you’re in!
What: Bare Minimum Bike Maintenance
When: Thursday 28 December
Time: 7pm GMT
Where: online
Cost: £5/mo or £55/yr
We are going to start holding 1 online class each month, starting Thursday 28 December - why not get away from the stress of festivities (stresstivities) and unwind by learning how I get away with doing next to nothing when it comes to bike maintenance?
🐥 Sign up for £5/mo for access to our Discord and 1 class each month
🦑 Sign up for £55/year for a free copy of How to Build a Bike plus access all year to our Discord and classes
Right now, things don’t feel very festive. There’s a lot of sh!te going on, which means we have to look after ourselves and each other.
of Existential Dred captures exactly how I feel in her latest essay:
And I always look to
of for insight, love, and hope.
I try to pepper these days with little bits of love: these look like going for cold water dips (5.4 degrees will shock me out of ennui, if only for a moment), warm mugs of cocoa husk tea (this stuff is *chef’s kiss*), rewatching DS9, and petting George-Michael the cat (who was recently released from 9 days in hospital. Thank dog for Celia Hammond!) But I'm not going to ignore what our government is not/doing, and I'm not going to ignore what's happening in Gaza. That would be disconnecting from humanity, from life itself.
In some good news I’ve just received, LBK supporter Sal Woodward has met their fundraising target to hire a specialist counsel for their court case re: freedom of protest. Their trial starts tomorrow, Monday 11 December.
“We potentially could be facing up to ten years in prison for squirting some organic tomato ketchup (to symbolise the blood of the Palestinians) onto the statue of Lord Balfour, and gluing ourselves to the statue's plinth.”
The 2022 Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts (PCSC) Bill changed many of our protest laws in the UK. It has now been deemed a 'serious offence' to damage statues and memorials. This case is the first legal case to come to trial for damage to a statue since the 2022 PCSC Bill came into law.
This case is also going to set a precedent for the future of protest, and we should be keeping a close eye on it. Here is Sal’s Crowd Justice page.
I leave you with a hot take on how the bike industry is going down the wrong path. If you also feel this way, and want to learn how to keep the stuff you have going stronger for longer, join our membership!
Ride on,
Jenni x