Monday blues? spend a monkey on shoes!

It's grey, it's probably raining outside… and it's Monday. You're more than likely at work, we're churning up a drizzle-soaked M5 on the way to the launch of the new Boardman range, and we all need a bit of distraction, so here's some exotic and colourful bike bits and bobs to cheer us all up. And what better way to start than by looking at some fancy shoes? Australian footwear-mongers Bont were founded by a speed skater and started out by making skates in the 1970s - their big innovation was one piece inserts in fibreglass. Bont junior joined in the 90s and as a keen cyclist moved the company into cycling footwear; these brightly coloured offerings are the fruits of their most recent labours. They're not a well known name over here but the shoes saw success in the Beijing Olympics, picking up six gold medals (not on their own) and Mosquito Bikes are bringing them into the UK. There are three different shoes. For £210 you can have the whole shoe heat moulded to your foot - the uppper as well as the lower - and you can remould as many times as you like. £300 buys you a shoe hand constructed to your individual foot measurements, and the full custom option at £510 involves making an individual mould from your feet, and sending that off to Bont to make your perfect fitting footwear. check out their website for details: www.bont.com/cycling/

Now for some unusually woolly thinking from the CTC - they've teamed up with Woolistic to produce a limited edition retro CTC jersey in finest sportwool (a Merino/synthetic mix), which is based on an original design from way back when. Everybody's doing it, it seems, but that doesn't seem to be making the jerseys any less desirable. Or cool. This one is a limited edition - we don't have the figures to hand but the number 50 is floating large in our heads, we'll add the details at the next service station...