Nobody can lock you in your bicycle if it catches fire.

As others have said, using a flat bed scanner will save some work. If you need to photograph it though:

• Use paper with grid lines as background (not sure the name, used to use it in maths at school). This will give you not just an index for scale but also for ‘squareness’.

• Position camera perpendicular to subject

• Use a telephoto or zoom lens from a distance rather than wide angle from close up to minimise lens distortion.

• Import image into GIMP or photoshop and use rulers, guides and transform tools to scale the image correctly and make it perfectly square.

• Matching the colour perfectly is more complicated and I won’t go into that here.

Let me know if you need any more tips. I photograph a lot of artwork and documents.

You should definitely ask a qualified expert. I would think swimming might be a good option though. As well as being good exercise it can also be really pleasant and relaxing to just float and play in the water.

I don’t think that dropping rubbish is necessarily that bad. The problem comes when it persists in the environment for hundreds of years because it’s not biodegradable.

Buy a bicycle that makes you want to ride it. If you get to the point where you no longer want to ride it, trade it in for another one that you do.

I can’t overstate how important it is take care of your mental and physical health. In fact, I would say that this is far more important than buying a house. Your mind and body are your primary home.