Cycling, Cheese, Cider and Community – Mark

Hi I’m Mark and I will be contributing some posts on Weston-super-Mum so I’m following Laurie’s lead and introducing myself.

I live in Central Ward and love it, we seem to be five minutes from anywhere, the beach, the woods, the train station and all the great cafes in town.

I have lived here, or hereabouts since 1998 when I returned to Britain after a 15 year stint in the army, during which I spent the best part of a decade living in our twin town of Hildesheim in Germany, a great little city that I would highly recommend visiting if you have the chance, or maybe of giving your children the opportunity of visiting through the youth exchange programme, but more of that in a future post.

Before joining the army I was born, and lived, in Hyde, Manchester.
Manchester feels about as far away from Somerset as it is possible to get, despite only being a few hundred miles. Back then I had no awareness of Weston-super-Mare, or of Somerset, beyond the obvious stereotypes. But you just never know where you end up though. If this is an end.

I work as an Instructional Designer and Learning Technologist, silly titles but a great job where I help teachers create, and improve, lessons and content. A far cry from playing around on tanks as I did previously.

Outside of work my interests seem to be too varied to put on paper; cycling and being outdoors in general has to be up there, close to the top. I ride most days to work, a round trip of 40 miles in winter, but longer as it gets warmer and lighter. I’ll definitely be writing about cycling, and provision for safe cycling, in our town as it is something that hits me, sometimes literally, every day.

I camp as often as is possible at weekends, but this has to be balanced with staying local to look after the fruit and vegetables growing on our allotment. Most of our camping is very comfortable, Bell Tent in a flat field kind of affair, but I’m not averse to bivouacking in Snowdonia or the Beacons when I get chance.

About four years ago I started to get more interested in food, food security, local food and how it was becoming the exception rather than the rule for most of us.
I was lucky enough to meet the founder of Incredible Edible Toddington and have dreamt about something similar for Weston ever since. I’ve already mentioned the allotment, so we grow, and we forage, and we bake and we brew, I’ll be recording successes and failures in the blog as they happen.