Your letters and photos, including some safety tips for solo rides and more of your best riding snaps

Thanks for a great mag! I have two points to make in my letter. Firstly, because I work shifts in the week, I tend to do a lot of solo riding. Reading your article on the subject in last month’s mag got me thinking. The tips about taking your phone with you are very true. However, to add my own personal experience, I now always carry mine in my front jacket pocket. It does add to the risk of damaging your mobile, but I crashed a couple of years back and popped my shoulder out. My phone was in my bag. As you can imagine, the only thing I wanted to do as I lay in a crumpled heap was ring someone to get me. Frustratingly, I couldn’t get my bag off my shoulder. Luckily, a lovely lady walking her dog passed by and helped me.

I now always carry my phone somewhere I can reach it.

In addition to this, when I’m out riding with my mate, we both know how to unlock each other’s phones and have each other’s wives’ numbers stored in our own (not in a ‘keys in a bowl’ kind of way!). Luckily, I haven’t had to ring his wife yet, but he has had to ring mine from A&E (there seems to be a theme here!). ‘Fully charged’ and ‘accessible’ are my personal phone tips for solo riding.

Secondly, is there any way you could put all the adventure riding features in a one-off special? I’ve loved reading them because they’ve transported my brain away from home-schooling two children! Last month, instead of sitting trying to explain what a noun is, I was on top of Alpe d’Huez with Dan Milner!

Ryan Younger, via email

That’s smart advice, Ryan. Because we ride and test a lot by ourselves, we keep our phones easily to hand, too. As for your second point, we like the idea of a one-off adventure special. It’d be good to include some new content as well as reprinting older articles, though, and there’s probably not enough adventuring going on right now to do that! Hopefully it won’t be too long before that changes.