Resonator

The weather today has been fairly grim. It hasn’t exactly been the kind of weather that inspires you to get out and ride and last night I had trouble sleeping again. Woke up this morning with a pain in my chest. Not sure if it was because I slept funny or had over done it on the sprinting last night, but it passed during the morning.

Tonight I had to go into Manchester to drop some stuff off. I think that if I keep making reasons to go out on the bike I’m going to be able to keep this up. The ride was a city centre route with lots of traffic, drunk pedestrians and heckling. Blowing a hoolie too so spent the entire wind either trying to keep the bike from getting blown into on coming traffic, battling to make headway or getting the daddy of all tailwinds.

I’ve never been a fan of the Beetham Tower. I think it’s fair to say that it’s a hideous fucking monstrosity that is completely out of place in it’s spatial position in Manchester’s city centre and no amount of comments from the likes of Tim Johnson is going to convince me otherwise. Tonight with the wind blowing, it’s like there’s a diesel train engine at idle continually humming. Of course it’s actually the documented sound that is close to standard musical C (approximately 262 Hertz) and is caused by the tower resonating.

The root cause is believed to be the rather pointless glass and steel ‘blade’ on the roof. The fact that Ian Simpson architects were paid a lot of money to come up with a design and didn’t properly model the impact on the local urban environment is bad enough. The fact that no one seems to be doing anything about resolving the issue is a whole lot worse. Attempts to rectify the problem have failed and the humming sound can still be heard, although apparently only on certain occasions and depending on wind direction…

After a week of riding I’m feeling it now and coughing up some interesting stuff. Hope that it’s not anything that’s going to stick around.