Bhopal

Bike cleaning comes in two parts. One involves washing down the frame with mild soapy water - essentially rubbing the dirt off - and the other involves degreasing the chain and cogs. I initially tried using a citrus based degreaser to get the gunk off the chain, but gave up in disgust after a litre of it only managed to remove a small portion of the goo that had built up in the chain and cogs.

Riding in the rain flicks all sorts of crap up off the road into the chain and cogs, where it is ingested and worn into a fine paste that bonds with the chain lubricant to form a paste that is remarkably similar to very sticky axle grease. Since I don't degrease that often, by the time I get around to it, the chain is no longer a series of links with gaps in them, but a single solid ribbon of goo. The cogs have gone from their original shiny silver colour to a matte black. The wonderfully silent mode of transport has also turned into something akin to a squeaky horse drawn cart making its way across the prairie.

Such laziness requires an industrial strength degreaser to put things right. It's similar to when you don't clean the oven for a year - you need to conduct chemical warfare on the oven and then evacuate the premises for a week.

I gave up buying environmentally friendly citrus muck-remover from the bike shop and instead bought a bottle of degreaser from a hardware store - the kind of stuff that is guaranteed to clean up that mower that has been sitting in the back shed under a few sacks for 20 years. I gave it a go last weekend, and discovered that I should have done it on someone else's lawn. I only used a few cup fulls, but I now have a patch of lawn that looks like a crop circle - a very dead crop circle. I am going to dump the weedkiller and use this degreaser in future. It looks like it can kill just about anything in the garden.

Luckily, I did the degreasing near where I park the bins, so I have covered it up by simply moving the bins around a bit. The green waste bin now covers a site of industrial contamination similar to a Dow Chemical factory. I call that section of the garden "Bhopal".