The Fool on the Hill

The Fool on the Hill

The Biodegradable Tricycle

By Simon Brooke || 14 October 2025

The Biodegradable Tricycle

One of the design goals of my tricycle is as a prototype for sustainable transport. To be sustainable, it has to be fully recyclable, and the simplest way to make anything fully recyclable is to make it biodegradable: nature will do the recycling for you.

Metals, of course, aren't, in the strictest sense, biodegradable, although all except gold will eventually degrade in the environment, typically by oxidation, and the metals I'm likely to use oxidise into not especially toxic oxides; but in any case metals are valuable, and pretty easy to collect and recycle. I'm not guilting about using metals.

Continue reading →


The Point of No Return

By Simon Brooke || 12 October 2025

The Point of No Return

Climate pathways from November 2024. Credit: United Nations.

This evening I have been listening to one of Manda Scott's podcasts and thinking about my failure in trying to lead the village's planning working group, and about the cognitive dissonance underlying my Tricycle project. I suspect this essay will be a grim read; it's not well formed in my mind as I sit down to write.

Continue reading →


Tricycle construction notes and resources

By Simon Brooke || 23 September 2025

Tricycle construction notes and resources

This isn't a normal blog post. Normal blog posts are typically rarely updated. I intend to update this fairly regularly as ideas occur to me.

Composite techniques resources

Continue reading →


Was Charlie Kirk a Christian?

By Simon Brooke || 23 September 2025

A person by the name of Charlie Kirk was shot dead on a university campus in Utah, USA, this month. This piece is not a defence of his assassin. No one should be killed for their political opinions. However, the claim has been made — not least by Kirk himself — that Kirk was a Christian. As an ex-Christian, and as someone concerned with both theology and ethics, I want to examine that claim.

What are my qualifications for deciding who is and is not Christian?

I have none, and do not decide. I am agnostic precisely because I believe that it is blasphemous to make any strong claim about the numinous. I shall set forth the evidence, and leave the decision for you.

Continue reading →


Learning from CAD

By Simon Brooke || 10 September 2025

Learning from CAD

As I reported in my last essay on the tricycle project, I now have a CAD tool which I'm learning to use. So, learning to use it, I'm beginning to be able to visualise the tricycle, if not yet concretely, at least as an assembly I can look at and study. And doing that brings up several things.

That removable subframe

Continue reading →


This site does not track you; it puts no cookies on your browser. Consequently you don't have to click through any annoying click-throughs, and your privacy rights are not affected.

Wouldn't it be nice if more sites were like this?

About Cookies