V E L O N A U T

The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness / JOHN MUIR

[thevelonaut]

Down time.

Dear driver of the car that brought me to the ground,

I admit it, I spat. And that spit hit your windshield. It was not my intention that it hit your windshield. In the milliseconds I had to act in defiance of your decision to take away my right to the road, I spat. I spat because I felt, in those moments, powerless and without any ability to express my disgust. In those fractional beats of a response, I had no time to remove my hand from the handlebar, where I was holding the brakes to avoid hitting you, and give you the V-sign or the wank-sign, both of which are known to me, both of which are almost unconscious responses to an act like yours. I had priority in the road, and you were meant to give way; the road narrows to enter a short tunnel beneath a bridge, and this bridge ain’t big enough for the both of us. You’re meant to give priority by slowing, stopping if necessary. You’re meant to assess that there is no oncoming traffic, pedestrians, cyclists, horses. Some of us occupy a position slightly out of your view, which is why you’re meant to stop at the line which instructs you to stop. It says you have no priority over things coming toward the bridge from the other side. I was. I was on the centre-edge of the left lane, taking the priority position that I have in that situation. You took that from me with speed, acceleration and oncoming fury. I had to brake and dodge you, and I wanted to express my frustration in an act of revolt. It was disenfranchising. It was abject despair. It was powerlessness. It was vulnerability. I cannot argue or oppose your decision without giving up my safety - to do so makes no sense. I am nothing, a particle of no impression, I mean nothing to you, you did not tolerate my position nor my right to be there. My legal right, yes, but I mean the simple right I have to share space with you. You did not want that and you pushed through. I spat. I spat at the road you were about to fill. Your speed put you further into the path of that little ball of saliva that I’d anticipated. I am no crack shot, no hawkeye, no physicist. As Han Solo said, it was one in a million. I did not know it had hit your vehicle. I would never have known. Unless:

You came after me. Which you did. Unknown to me, as I stretched back out from the momentary adrenal surge that accompanies such moments as having one’s road position threatened, however briefly, you had stopped immediately and turned your vehicle around. You must have done this so quickly, so ruthlessly.. with so much rage. That someone had defied you with a small ball of moisture. That your windscreen was sullied by a damp spittle that could not be removed. That your honour had been called into question? By now I was a few hundred metres along the road. It widens out alongside some houses. I was unaware. That you had accelerated, again, to my disadvantage. That you were thoroughly intent on this pursuit, which I knew nothing of, and had no chance to consider. Because you caught me. Before I knew from where you came, or who you were, or that your windscreen carried my evaporating spittle, you were on me. You pulled immediately into me, sideswiping me. The rear left portion of your car was pushing me sideways toward the curb. In this moment I realised I was about to fall. The world always turns white when you’re about to crash. Your eyes dart for the horizon. The only intent in your being is to resist the fall. When something as alien as a vehicle touches you, compressing you, restricting every freedom that you have, driven by a human so intent on violence, you lose all sense of understanding. Physics takes over. You pushed until I fell, and I lost my balance, my bicycle, and landed hard on the concrete. My bicycle careered into the verge outside someone’s house. And you skidded to a stop. This took four or five seconds.

I calculate what is happening. At first I think you must have been avoiding a car coming in the other direction. I think that maybe someone else is involved. A man shouts if I am alright from behind, having just left his house. His wife is nearby. I am on my back. A banana smell, crushed underneath me. A pang. Blood running along my forearm. I am conscious and sore, but nothing is broken. You always know when something doesn’t work. My arse is evil ache. My eyes dart for the horizon. On it is you.

You are perhaps four or five years older than me. You wear a gilet. You are a human being, I note for the first time. You do not look sorry. Why aren’t you sorry, I wonder? And then the tirade comes. You aren’t sorry. You are angry. You begin to accuse me of something, and you tell me to get up. I do get up, which hurts. There is a girl there next to you, about eight. She’s your daughter, I realise. You demand that I atone for something.  “You know who I am”, you yell. I really, really did not. You shout something about spitting. You say “my daughter saw you spit on my car”. I look at her. She is crying. I think she is crying because her Dad is yelling. Or maybe because I am bleeding, and that it is your fault. Or perhaps because she sometimes spits, and worries that an act of random violence is the price one pays for it. “You ran me over” I say, understanding slowly what is happening. I spat. You came back to hurt me.

“I didn’t run you over” you say. “I came to stop you”. Stop me.

Others intervene. Can you call the Police, I ask one. Another says I can have a cup of tea, which I politely refuse. So so English. They call the police. You continue to shout at me. Your daughter is wailing, so you tell her to sit in the car. I hear you reinforcing her story for when the police come. I speak to a policeman and he asks me to explain what has happened. I tell him that a man has run me down, into the ground, and I am sore but otherwise alright. He asks to speak to you. You are still busy squaring the story with your inconsolable daughter. I tell the policeman this, and it enrages you some more. My adrenaline has subsided. Internal urges to hurt you have subsided. Revenge, which never escalates for me into anything physical or actual, is now out of my mind. It’s the first time I realise that I wouldn’t do what you’ve just done. You’re on the phone to the police, telling them about my spit. You told them I shouldn’t have been in the middle of the road, earlier on. I thought about going and seeing if there was spit on the windscreen. And then I rationalized that this is in no way about spit or about road positions. It is about the moment where you had a choice to act, and that act caused me harm. The act you were referring to deprived me of a sap of moisture and allowed me a moment to feel like I had a right to protest. Your act involved the rapid movement of a heavy, metal object which contained your young, terrified daughter, into another human being who had nothing to protect him, nor a warning, nor a rationale. I did what I did, and you did that. You did not stop yourself doing that. You engaged with it. You were fuelled by it. A windscreen wiper and an angry comment would have removed both the spittle and the sense of the act. You could have chosen to feel like I was an arsehole, a human being who has no sense of respect. You could have complained about me to your daughter and wife, your friends and family. You could comment on articles about cyclists, decry us as a menace. You could have said ‘these things happen’. You could have been calm. You could have breathed. Your thoughts could have been gentle and above my own act of respite. You wanted more. You neglected everything we are taught.

I was taught not to spit. My mother would be shocked that I spat in disgust. She hates spitting. I hate it when kids on the street do it. When footballers do it. When I cycle, I am an essential fountain of snot and spit. I do it relentlessly. I spit out dead flies, bits of nuts and dates, I spit in protest or sometimes because I drank some dairy. I was also taught not to harm others. It is the foundation of my childhood, as it was yours, and is probably what you teach your child, in stories and morality, if not in actuality. Spitting is uncouth. It does no harm, but I understand how it is a provocation. Someone disapproves of you. Someone expresses their distaste, their lack of respect for your decision making. Note, I did not spit at you when you had felled me. I did not make a threat, I did not offer a response to what ascends to so much more than a provocation. You harmed me. You did it because you wanted it. And you stayed at the scene waiting for the police because you needed to rationalise it.

Until that moment, I thought you were waiting because you were worried about the consequences of this action. But you did not appear fearful of reprisal. It took me about ten minutes of being here, on this vacant, quiet Surrey road to realise that you were here still because you needed to believe that the status quo had returned to equilibrium. The rationalists theorised that nature is a violent place, where humans are engaged in a constant battle with elements, with themselves, with dangers and urges and actions beyond control. They said that social contracts were our way of remaining balanced, able to work with and around each other. Even if, this morning, the law hadn’t forbidden you to threaten a vulnerable road user’s right of way, and then attack a vulnerable road user immediately after, then your sense of innate moral obligation would have stayed your hand (and accelerator). It did not. You were, in this moment, coming to terms with the worst of realisations; you are a bad person. You cannot remain faithful to the contract you have with others, and you cannot stop yourself from using your power and superior force to subjugate, and damage, a weaker individual. That’s not good. That is the very definition of an egregious, self-centred and amoral act. I spat. I took a standpoint. I declared that I did not like being threatened. I rebelled. I said no. You did not like being told “no”. And you wanted to right a perceived wrong. And, like I have said, you could not prevent it happening. That is not good. Not good at all.

I like to think I am invincible. I think I am protected. I do assert myself of the rights to which I am entitled as a person on a bicycle. I think that, mostly, rules are accepted and followed. You told me that you are a cyclist. I said I didn’t care. It has no bearing on this. You said that it does; because you understand cyclists. You accused me of cunning. You said that I was making it seem like you’d done this on purpose. You did do this on purpose, I remind you. I am sat down on the floor. You tower above me. You like to retain authority where you have none. I tell you I respect you for staying. You say you have nothing to fear. I know this. I know that the witnesses are indifferent. That one had said “these things happen” and that the “roads can be dangerous”. I reject her assessment like I reject her cup of tea: politely. I know I won’t press charges because it’s not worth time or effort. I am damaged a little, my bike is more or less fine. A dangerous human being will be on the road at the end of this, whether I like it or not. At worst you would have a caution or a few points for dangerous driving. At worst. In this moment I choose a new path. I ask you questions.

Are you here to try and square this with yourself? You tell me again that you are a cyclist. That there is spit on the windscreen. That I am a menace. That I give cyclists a bad name. You do not answer this question. You make excuses. You refer to past events, nothing I know of, people who can attest to your decency. I speculate that you are trying to achieve a rational status quo. I say this to you. You tell me that you didn’t do anything wrong. That you were only trying to “stop me”.

You did stop me, I say. You knocked me onto the ground. You achieved that. You did not call the police, pull alongside me and demand that I stop, just ask me to stop, pull in a hundred metres in front of me and shout at me to stop. And even if you had, and I hadn’t stopped, you would have been in no way legitimised to harm me. You did not simply drive on. You did not ignore it. You turned around. You got angry and this happened. Are you okay with that, I asked you. Are you okay with that series of decisions?

“It was a rush of blood to the head” you say. Coldplay? COLDPLAY? Now I realise how lost you are. You tell me again you are a cyclist, I’m a menace, you’re a good person. “You think I’m stupid don’t you?” you ask. I say no. My head’s in between my legs. No, no no. I don’t even think that what you did is stupid. I think it was, in that moment, absolutely intentional, the result of a series of illogical decisions made by an irrational human being. I think you’re probably an intelligent person. You probably act decently. But this is what you are capable of, I tell you. This is your nadir. This is what you are, when the core is exposed. I tell you my name, you tell me yours. You offer your hand and I say no. I don’t want to shake hands with you. That is conciliatory. You are my enemy. You are an enemy of the way that people do business with each other. If you spat on my bike, I wouldn’t take a hammer to your leg. I would not. When you harmed me, I did not act harmful toward you. I realise that I am not that and I am not like you. I tell you that, too. You say you are not a bad person. The police come.

The police officer is kind. She asks how I am. “Sad”, I tell her. Watch where you spit, she says. I smile. “Perhaps that guy needs to watch where he puts his car”, I say. She asks if I want this to go to court. I tell her no: it’s not worth time and effort, and it’s not worth trying to punish someone according to a set of laws that aren’t so good at protecting me. When the shit hits the fan (when the spit hits the window) then here is a person who disregards all avenues of morality, control and rationality; the law doesn’t matter. He may well think he operates within the the law, but he does not. “What do you want to do about it” she asks. “Give him a bollocking” I ask. She says she will talk to you. I am sure you will be given a token warning.

She says I seem really sad, not angry, and that’s unusual in these instances. “I have more to be sad about,” I tell her “than angry.” She smiles, wishes me luck, and says I can head off. I do.

I head past you and nod in exchange. This is not an acknowledgement. This is not a conciliatory gesture. You go to your conscience and I go to mine. I cycle for three more hours, sore; sore, mentally, sore in my physical. I need to process this and think about you some more. You are not free of this. You did something that you might process and might work out, might reconcile with your moral compass, might fit within your spheres of action and codes of being. But here is a man who knows you at your very worst. You know it, too. And worse than that, the people closest to you - like your daughter - know it. She knows that you will do harm when you are questioned or confronted. She knows what you will do. She knows you discriminate, that you accuse, make excuses for terrible actions. She will be worried, scared perhaps. She might think I am bad because I spat at her father’s window. It’s questionable, for sure. I’m not proud of that.  But I am proud of every single thing I did immediately after. I don’t think you can say the same.

If you ever see this, then thank you for reading. I am not sorry to have defied you. I am not sorry that I spat at you and your actions. I am sorry that I exposed you to yourself and to your kin. But I am glad that you know what I know. I hope you become better. You need to be better than this.

[thevelonaut]

I’m a professional cynic but my heart’s not in it. Actually it is.

So I rolled down Bayley’s Hill today, which is practically Alpine. It’s a real favourite hill, both ways in fact. Most hills you either love the clamber up, or the bobsled down; rarely both. I’ll tell you about the Lecht (which Ed Y and I knocked off three weeks ago to the day) another time.

Rolled down Bayley’s, and if you take a cheeky left at the little row of cottages, you can roll on all the way down to Chiddingstone Causeway, thence to Penshurst, and a whole heap of fun and japes. I thought I’d do that, squirrel my way back to Holtye and have a naughty ride home from the bottom of the High Weald. I’ve been on my holidays with HC; we went out to Basque, and spent most of the time in the sea. HC likes to average 2 sea swims a day, and I’m alright with that. I sorta treated the 10-day spell like a bike recovery camp; it’s the only week or so in the year where I don’t cast my leg over a bike frame. And I’m surprisingly okay about that. We passed a gazillion velonauts, old timers and young timers and in-between timers. Lumpy as fuck along that coastline, and better mountains just inland. I will take a bike, of course, at some point. No the now, though.

ANYWAY.

Rolled down Bayley’s, got to Hale Oak Road, which is where the two dip-bends come into play, whip some Gs into your front end and you can just freewheel the hell out of the road.. and they resurfaced it in April so imagine my face IMAGINE MY FACE. So glad. SO full of glad. Then, just as I‘m pelt-to-whip, I come upon two riders waiting at the junction, with a road closed sign in front of them. I roll up to them and see a mad pack of joggers doing a stupid jog up the way, and for some unknown, absolutely nonsensical reason, they closed my road up for it. I couldn’t help but exclaim “WHAT’S ALL THIS SHITE?” as I braked adjacent to them. One’s looking on Strava, the other, who’s about to become my new six-minute mate, is saying “some run”. Some run. Some shite, more like. I ask how long they’ve been there and Strava-lost-man says it’s been a little while. Cooling down, are you mate? Checking in on your social media, are you mate? I spin the bike around, lock it into the 39 x 21 and cane it back up toward the cottages.

I hear the gentle breathing of my new fwend, caressing the near-silent Colnag up alongside me. “Guess it’s the long way round” I say, as he seeks a bit of solidarity... clearly he’s not with the lost-strava-bomber. It’s no bother, a smooth-silk climb and the full ride around Bore Place. It’s also a beautiful road. I’m sticking it to the Whip, the little 725 Genesis is doing a bit of graft today because Huey’s off the road with a somewhat tarnished cone in the front hub. I’d ridden the Whip down to Weald on Friday in a post-holiday anguish, and up to a wedding last night in Stoke Newington, razzing home at midnight lest I turn into a pumpkin. It was a nice wedding and I ate three helpings of the main course, which consisted primarily of mushrooms and broccoli. The smells, oh the smells.

Anyway, new mate is chatting a bit. Tells me he lives in Chiddingstone. I detect immediately that he is pretty well-off. He’s got the two-day stubble of a man who shaved on Friday, which means he lets himself go at the weekends after leaving the City, and he’s riding a Nag which is about as new-looking as these things get. It’s making no noise in comparison to the clunky, Brasso-loving rig I’m hammering; I imagine he’s using Unicorn spunk to lube that drivetrain because it’s singing the song of the sireens. Says he moved out of Brixton to be in the country, because the country is nice. Says he’s heading for the Muur de Weald which makes me inwardly scoff; nobhead Stravavists naming Kent lumps after bits of Belgium. It ain’t no bastard Muur.

Says he’s out for an hour. “An hour?” I ask. Only an hour? It’s a nice day. Sun’s out. Little bit of wind. And this hoofer lives on the cusp of everything that the South East has to offer. Greensand, the Downs. Hell, he could get some action around Lewes, the Forest, the magic wild places. If I took my four-hour loving self about these places, departing from Chiddy, I’d be rapturous. An hour. I imagine he had something important to do like head to a garden centre; he was in good shape and was making me work to keep up on the climb, so I imagine he rides more than an hour at a pop. We’d had a nice old yap... He goes his way and I go mine. I didn’t head to Penshurst, I instead found some form and big-ringed it to Chiddinstone village, where it later turns out I was seen by one of my colleagues from college. I was a bit worried I’d heckled her for being in the road by shouting “[Wa]’tch out!’ which is, I suppose, better than yelling “WHAT’S ALL THIS SHITE?”. That last one’s my stock response to pretty much anything that fails to meet a sensible standard of activity; closed roads for joggers? I mean, seriously, what is all this shite?

[thevelonaut]

Homefront.

This is absolutely classics country. Fortunately, any semblance of romance gives way, quickly, to pain and frustration. On the way South East, I’d known in my heart of hearts that a tailwind (and occasionally swipey cross-wind) was helping me out. I knew that I’d be turning back into it, and that however gentle it felt as we wandered the streets of Brux, it would be multiplied significantly as I crept back across the ridgey-flats of the North West. The reason that the early-season classics are a hotch-potch of gurn, of hellish faces and awful weather, is much the same as the reason why this was a crap place for a crap war; once the sun goes in (and to some extent when it’s out), the endless flat lands, farm smells, headwinds, sideways drizzle and cobbled tracks become as steadfast an obstacle as the Pyrenean cols, the switchbacks of d’Huez, the ramps of the mighty Lecht. I’d prefer some hardy cols to this. It’s the kind of place suited for those broad-shouldered monsters of the old days, who could puncheur into wind like a force of nature. I can, for a bit. For a little bit.

The fifth day / Brussels → Ieper

Ypres, the French call it. Some five days (and 100 years) after the Battle of Paschendaele, I roll into Ypres through the Menenpoort. I say roll, I think it was the least uphill-feeling part of the day. I’d hung out with HC, her brother and sister-in-law in Brussels for two days. I’d had a cheeky swim to spin my legs, I’d noted a twinge in my groin which I imagine is due to over-cranking a gear for 200k, loaded with luggage, and not ever stretching it en route. I curse it. It needs rest, two days probably won’t cut it, and the Cambium isn’t so comfy after a four or five hour day. Maybe leather is better. I think so. I’ll flog it.

Anyway, I was up and out at 8am; the paths and back streets of Brussels are fairly easy to navigate, and the sun was out to remind me to head in a NWerly direction. I ended up on the ring-road and saw no way to head further north without a) riding on a motorway or b) turning back and trying again from about 3 miles back. With a 90-mile day ahead, I decided to head for Aalst, due west of Brussels, then turn to the north-west after about 30km. It wasn’t the worst idea. The pastoral, calm canalside riding that had seen me down seemed to desert me; instead, I was often on paths alongside the murder roads of NW Belgium, caning it up decentish-tracks and pavements, lamenting the canopied, wind-free joyfest of days two and three. This is another of my problems - I never set out a good return trip. Or, perhaps, I am so addled by the sense of return that I fail to enjoy what is nice about it. Or, the wind is a hell-ferret that never stopped in its attempts to break me. Eventually I stopped at a Spar and sprayed my face with Appletiser, and at 2.30pm when the sun hot-spongs for a spell, I applied suncream and ate a baguette and houmous on a housing estate by a dual carriageway. If it sounds exciting, then it is. I picked up a little of that TCR spirit. Fuck the views.. they all look like this anyway. 

They do. Seriously. I did about 90k of this. There were marginally more leaves on the trees, but most of them were blowing into my face. Still, it is pancake flat, ironing board, smooth as Christ riding. Let’s not mince words. Easy-hard. Or hard-easy.

I get to Oudenaarde, then Wevelgem, and hit the final 20k to Ypres where I know there is a campings. Those last km are sign-posted all to hell with Commonwealth War Graves. Evocative names, famous craters, hills, memorials, regiments; atop the ridgeline, white crosses, monoliths and megaliths, the bright stalagmites that point to where most peoples innards ended up; scattered into the pressing wind, lovely human beings fractioned into micro-particles, cast into a land ever-fertile for the growing of war-dead cabbages and sprouts. They say each breath you take will contain at least an oxygen molecule that Julius Caesar himself would have inhaled. (They don’t say that in the song. They should.) Along the Menen road, you are sucking in the literal and figurative remains of almost a whole generation of human beings.

I don’t like it. I’d seen Ypres was en route to Dunkirk, from where I spring home, and figured that it made sense to pass through. If I did a long-day-short-day two-day ride then I could stay here. I crept in through the gate; the sun is now out glorious, and the town is a magnificent sight. HC navigates me (she’s in London, having taken a bus to the station in Brussels, a train to London, and a bus home in the time it has taken me to yam some houmous in a lay-by) to the campsite; it’s a nice one, if you ignore the Canadian grave-baggers in the mobile homes, the people wearing T-shirts that name regiments and feature photographs of eternally-young great-great-uncles. I put up camp, wash, and stroll to Lidl to bag the last baguette, 3-flavour houmous (oh MY ACTUAL GOD THIS IS AMAZING) and a tin of mackerel. Whilst I demolish this on Ypres square, I note a bunch of people dressed in their going-out clothes walking purposely through town. I’d forgotten that they play The Last Post every night at the Gate, and ambled along covered in beetroot and parsnip dip to pay my respects.

Except I didn’t really know how to. Or why I should? TO what, exactly, am I paying respect? And where are the Germans? Why is the Poort covered with only the Allied dead? And it’s nice that we honour the Indian regiments, when they were forced to dig so many trenches and graves, and be treated like shit for the privilege. Plus, I recently read that an explicit promise to release India from the Commonwealth in return for military support was never honoured. So, really, the whole thing leaves a strange taste in the mouth. Not just the race, the nationalism, the anti-nationalism, the visible lack of outreach; the spectacle itself feels like a fetish. There cannot be a person here who actually knew the dead of Ypres; too much time has gone by. And it is important that we honour this stupidity in order that we may not see its like again. But the crowds, the iPhones, the inane chat when it’s finished. I wasn’t in the mood. Is it the case that a ride across the Maginot Line is the perfect pace to consider the distance and futility of a war that became a mass-grave, formed into a perfect borderline? The Last Post had been, on some unconscious level, playing in my head for hours. It’s the soundtrack of a dark, sad place. So, so sad.

I woke at 6.30am the next day and hotfooted it out of town.

The sixth day / Ieper → Dunkirk → Dover → London Bridge → My bed.

The roads from Ypres to the border were quiet, uneventful, still windy. I got lost two or three times. I’d cycle later this month with my friend Ed, who uses Strava and Garmin and magic; the ease of navigation with devices astounds me. It picks out exactly where you are, and tells you exactly where to go. I almost give in to the temptation to update my by-now 4 year-old Blackberry to something worth a shit, that could do such things. Handlebar mounts for phones don’t do it for me, though. I use every square millimetre of space on a handlebar for, well, my hands. So... not yet. The phone still works. I got lost. Added six miles onto a 40-mile day. Nae bother.

I reached Oost-Capel after a spell of anonymity. I craved a coffee, hoped this French border town would have someplace to sit. It did not.. Belgian towns are decidedly absent of cafes, I know not why. It’s one of those subtle differences; you feel as if you are in France, but it’s the upside-down version. Instead of a nice cafe, there are about ten border guards sleepily waving down cars, mirror-checking the chassis, asking where people are off to. It’s an unsettling sight, but they wave me right by. (The guards at the port would later give me the same bored wave-through. I’m not carrying weapons of mass destruction (400k of fixed touring has savaged my groin and patella, mind you) but it’s both curious and somewhat alarming that a bike can get through to the ferry easily.)

There’s a nice small walled city called Bergues, where I stop for a brew. I dip the remains of last night’s baguette into it, soaking up about half that black glorious. I love soaking bread in coffee, but even though I still get the coffee, I feel like I’m denying myself something. Bergues is right pretty; I trace the little canal network to the North and take a cycle path alongside a canal to Dunkirk. It’s the nicest part of the day. I reach Dunkirk at about 12.30pm, and orbit the old town for an hour or so, then take the dock road up toward the ferry port. I load my bright pink musette with a lunch from Lidl, carry it over a motorway overpass, under a gyratory, behind a Travelodge, past some cranes, around ten roundabouts, over another autoroute, along a busy truck road, around a slag pile and just beneath some fire-spewing chimneys. The ferry port is not a pretty place. Pretty, in that industrial sense, which is to say not so pretty at all. I eat lunch in the weird cafe where no staff work, only machines; it’s a post-Marxist approach to the service industry. I wonder if the docking ferry in front of me is driven by a human being. I think about all those human beings who waited for a boat home in 1940 and all the ones that never got a chance to leave the cruddy fields of Flanders. I am covered in houmous, again, at a moment of silent contemplation. The world is a calm sea, choppy in the middle, and some white chalky downs that leap out of the channel at Dover. Everyone takes photographs of the sharp teeth of England’s mouth, opening up in a bucolic snarl to gobble up its visitors. Pretty soon, I am in torrential rain outside Dover station, throbbing legs, pack of peanuts, Spar lemon-lime and a newspaper to tell me what I missed.

Tour over. Legs recover. I pull out of London Bridge and spin crazy-legs to home. HC makes porridge. The sun goes down.

[thevelonaut]

The Right Stuff.

Reader, I took a train. A student I’d worked with at college told me, at graduation last week, that his legs had been pretty shonked after a tour from The Hook to Amsterdam. He said he was covering 50k a day for 5 days, and that’d been plenty. I didn’t ask his gearing, but I know he was riding something nuts like a 48 x 18 when last I saw his rig. I’d loaded my own Rig a couple days before, and taken it for a yeager round the block. Not unwieldy; the gear felt okay, but it’s true that the 5 or 6% climbs about West Norwood did give me cause for uncertainty - it’s clear 80-miles to Dover from here, and I did not want to be locked up on some 11% gradient hammering my legs, my teeth locked up in a shitball self-hatred, and a curse heard around the world.

The first day / West Norwood → Cannon St → Dover → France

I cycled up to Cannon St on the same day that the Prudential-Ride-London-hubris-fest was heading back into the city (or, at least, the 100-mile maniacs who were done and dusted by 12.30pm were..) and found it quiet and nutso-simple. Two hours later I’m at the Dover seaport, eyeing the monstrous climbs over the North Downs and the clifftop roads that would, most likely, have devoured all my goodwill before I even left the continent.

So the train was a smart idea. So was the ferry. Even though it is, essentially, a motorway service station that happens to float, I was first on (a cyclist’s real advantage) and first off. This meant I bagged a seat at the front of the sea lounge, sat with my espresso and watched the white, sunlit cliffs in the late afternoon. The weather was breezy, nice, the sea calm. Other passengers seem to be Dutch or Belgian, since the boat was heading to Dunkirk and not Calais; this is some 25 miles further East, and thus a half-hour closer to the flatter end of continental Europe. It’s hard not to lament the end of the UK’s involvement in the EU as you pass over the short water; the channel feels very small indeed, and it’s almost impossible not to think of how close the potential for invasion has always been in the history of our small islands. We land in Dunkirk at 8pm, and I hoon it off the ramp. A man and his son, about thirteen, are on their Joe Waugh supertouristes. I pass them, and the man says he’s never seen a fixed tourer before; me neither, I say, although I do see a fella in Ypres five days later, churning it on a piece of retro steel. It’s not the worst plan. The ride into Dunkirk town is about 20k from the ferry port, a mainly uninspiring clumber through the industrial architecture and chimneytops of its massive port, through the old town and past its 19th century villas, and out to the campsite on the eastern side of the town. The bike works, cruises right nice; as expected, the only ballache is stop-starting, and this grates a little when you’re all loaded up. My right knee is a bit grumbly; I think I hurt the ligaments a while back, and it’s recurring when I train or ride harder. I also recognise I have a total bias toward my right leg; I always start on that side, I trackstand on that side, and I push harder there when I’m tired. Someone told me that backpedalling on a turbo is an excellent way of redressing this bias, but that’s not something I’m about to do.

The second day / Dunkirk → Gent

The next day, I feel good. The weather is drizzly but the sun comes out at midday. I bollock it along the sea roads, get lost because I’ve no map, and trace a line toward Ostend because that makes the most sense. When I get there, I realise there’s an ace network of canal paths and back-roads to help you get.. well, anywhere in Belgium. I haphazardly find my way to Brugges at 2pm, and eat bread and houmous on the drunkards’ benches, under a Napoleonic canopy, watching the assembled hordes of Italian, American and Chinese tourists be guided around the - admittedly beautiful - streets. Because my bags (a couple of 13l bags front and back, and a stuff sack under my saddle) are SO well-packed, I can barely carry anything extra in them. This means any and all food must be consumed on the spot. This means I eat every last spot of houmous. With a spoon. The Italians eye my with horror, My beard is a righteous ginger, tahini and chickpea flavoured wind-breaker. Indeed, I could perhaps store spare food here. I chuckle as I strap my shoes back on, and head along the Gent-Brugges canal. Now THAT is the way to travel.

This is the bike touring dream; long, straight and perfect asphalt, the canal cuts across 40k of Belgian farmland and occasional towns. I fly. There’s a wind coming out of the North East, which makes my life supreme (although I will of course be cursing it all the way back later in the week) and I get lost only once.

How? Because I WAS STUPID AND I LEFT THE CANAL PATH.

Why? BECAUSE IT SEEMED TOO EASY.

But why is easy a problem? IT ISN’T. BUT IT IS.

That’s the paradigm shift I deal with every day. If something is easy, then I shouldn’t be doing it. I know, I know; what a dipshit I am. When I started using the word velonaut to describe my adventures, that was always a reference to the early aviators, or the pioneers of Jules Verne, of Chuck Yeagerness, of the Mercury projects. Tom Wolfe, submariners, polarnauts et al. Jam-packed with self-righteousness and hubris, the Mallorian concept of doing a thing because it is there. Or Kennedy’s doing a thing because it is hard. Why climb Ventoux? Why ride to the Pyrenees? Why ride a fixed all winter? Why tour on a fixed? Why no carbon? Why does your knee hurt? Why not eat in a cafe or a restaurant? Why not take a hotel or a gites? Why the romance of motion, of tents and a can of Jupiler on a patch of grass? When will this stop?

All good questions.

But anyways, I got lost, got found, called HC from a backwater bus stop (below) and she navigated me to a social enterprise campsite nearby. The camp was run by a non-profit, started by socialists and communists who’d fought in the Belgian resistance during the second world war, and now professed a message of peace and equality in all things. It was one of my all-time favourite campings. And it was less than a tenner. The Belgian hardcase asked where my fancy gears were when looking at the Rig. One gear, I said. Old style, he said. He grunted approval and told me about the history of communism in Belgium, told me Duvel “isn’t a strong beer” and then walked by later on, as I was pished-up and lost in a stupor watching massive campsite spiders prey on the mosquitoes they’d caught. I was leathered. I’d had two bottles.

The third day / Gent → Brussels

More canals. More bridges. More sheep.

More farm roads. A hideous set of spaghetti-coiled A-roads, overpasses, gyratories and weird airport roads. I came upon Brussels from the North after about 80k of riding. It wasn’t necessarily hard work, but constant; hills became a bit more frequent, and the airport near which my destination lay never seemed to come any closer. All of a sudden, by the use of the sun, some immense triangulation of my position, and about ten wrong roads, I was outside the house where I’d be staying. It lay some 210k from where I’d left the day before, along a cobbled road near a military base. A strange, quiet part of a big city, with the only punctuation to the peace coming from intermittent jet engines. It’s where HC’s brother is living this summer. He and his wife greet me, squeeze me, feed me, leave me alone to start the rehabilitation process toward smelling nice. Merino wool wears the salty medals of effort, cycle shorts can only maintain about 130k before smelling like a dog farm. I got in a shower and eeked with the cold on my legs, the warm on my sunburned neck, and the satisfaction one can only feel when they got to where they’re heading. That’s what I think I mean by the nautics of the velo.

[thevelonaut]

Mind-yips.

Stupid head, stupid steroid-cream not working hard enough in the saddle places, stupid fear. I got all up inside my own head this morning. I rode the reverse of Friday’s bingle, which is to say exactly the same route. I have done this ever since my youth, and I’ve been doing criss-crosses of Ashdown all summer long. This week, I didn’t have the heart (or the bike) for Ashdown, so stuck to the Weald. I’m on the fixed thinking, this time next week I’ll be caning it to Dover to catch a boat. THEN I start thinking, shitballs, is this a good idea?

A fixed tour, I mean. I say to myself, almost yearly, that I’ll do a short-tour on the fix gear, and that it’ll be right spif. I’ve got 28s on the Neo-Weapon, officially my widest tyre width since childhood. They’re alright, eh. It was slippy as all christ this morning, having bounced it down overnight and left slug spuzz all over the place; I stupidly uni-braked it down Tandridge Lane, which is a monster bobsled run at the best of times. One disc brake is plenty, stops the skids, but on some of those hairpins near the bottom I was a bit tentative. Some dudes overhead were creaming down the off-road trails on kids’ bikes. Kudos to them, but they’re rocking tyres wider than my most shit-eatingest grin.

So to Dover is hilly. I wonder, carrying luggage across the Weald, will that be just too much? When you get to Dunkirk it’s pancake-flat and the Belgians built all their cycle routes alongside canals. It’ll be pretty friendly terrain up to Bruges and Ghent and to the sweet arabian delights of Bruxelles. I will be living on frites, baklava, cherry beers and smugness for two lovely days. OR will I be eternally cursing my decision to rock a bike-pack rig on a fixie and having only gone for a 65″ gear? Am I going to spin the fuck out, or be churning across the downs into a grim melt of panic and indecisiveness? I have a week to make a choice - nay, I have six days - and I wonder, as ever, would I have been even remotely bothered by this three or four years ago?

I sold the Weapon Mk I. to a nice lady from the forum. She wrote a text to me on Monday and said she’d “taken the weapon out on a 120km bikepacking weekend”, making me think that I should put on a skirt and ride like a girl, which is to say, like a fucking superhero. Why am I fretting like some old donkey? Does it matter? Course it doesn’t. If something breaks, it gets fixed; that goes for me, too. Imagine the glory of riding past those Belgian hard-stuff legend-spinners and puncheurs.. I’ll be all like, yo. They’ll be all like, piss off.

[thevelonaut]

Full motorway emptiness.

Summer’s here. Summer is actually in the fullest of summerness. Summer is so much here that it’s almost gone. Yesterday, out on the Neo-Weapon (a crock-sham wonderbar 853 39x16 fixed wep with a Nitto front rack carrying thin air and theoretical dreams) I hammered a sixty mile loop around Hever and that. It’s sunny, though it’s interspersed with clouds. It’s warm not too warm. I whizz back over the M25 (which is never less than 55 minutes from home, I realise, and often bang-on an hour..) and there is the massive queue, the roof boxes, the sun-seekers and holiday-makers. I always take joyous glee at passing a motorway and seeing it backed-up; this was no different. But something special is in the air: the summer vacation begins.

That means no more negotiating arsehole school traffic in the mornings. Six weeks of freedom, as I peel out of London (or into work), setting inter-urban PBs and not colliding with phone-check Year 9 wankers. They’ve all pissed off to Spain, or Greece, or even just Derbyshire. Why do they all leave on the same day? That always seems daft.

I’m not on vacation yet. And the summer hits tipping point. See, I’ve been in summer mode since April 11th. It was hot enough for shorts then. Seems like now, everyone’s in summer mode; I’m preparing for winter (ie; Scotland in early-August). Next weekend, a fixed 3-dayer to Brussels (and hopefully 3 days back, though I might aim for 2 monster days..). I expect rain and wind. Right now everything seems about right; BBs not too creaky, brakes sharp, wheels true.

[thevelonaut]

Hang on. I’m coming back to this. It’s been almost two fucking years since I badgered the shit out of this. Did you think I’d not been out on my bike? DID YOU ACTUALLY? You bellend, how very dare you... as if I would not.

I’ve done more riding than ever. I am fit as a goddam fiddle, sinewy all to fuck in the shins and the vein-popping calves. I gots three bikes, one fixed, one retro, one swish-fuck. I gurn out churn climbs for breakfast and dinner, this year I whippered the Hell of the Ashdown (which it turns out is a big piece of piss) and even whelped out a 200k audax in April, which, as it turned out, was not a piece of piss, but wasn’t a fuck-pile of hell-sqwawk either. I now visit the Ashdown every Saturday, for a 75 or 80 mile weekender-bender. I’ve rarely missed a midweek churn, and I spin the fuck out of a geario to work. One sad thing; no longer do I ride the Weapon to work. The chainset cracked on a roundabout, iced up to hell, near Arthur’s Seat, back in January. I abandoned it soon after. Not in Edinburgh, I just tired of it, and sold the frame to a nice girl who roasts coffee for a living. I bought a secondhand Equilibrium frameset from some whip-skinzo dude who works in Rapha; when I went to get it, they put me on a Wall Of 2017 Hopes + Dreams. I said I’ll do a 200k and come back.

I never did, reader. Reader, are you still there? Is this still an inner monologue? I got so much to say.. well, not so much. It’s still just “I went out on a ride and wrote my own auto-wheeled-biography” type shit. But that’s the ballgame. Cycling’s now all disc-brakes, fucking gumwalls and neon jerseys. It’s a wankfest as much as ever. And I, dear people, still operate at the ice-shit coal face of pain and incredulity. I am back. And here’s why: I remembered the password for Tumblr. ABOUT TIME. Sorry about the swearing. I’ll calm down. I wrote this after a glass of pepsi max.

[thevelonaut]

Farthest South.

Reader: you, like me, are probably delusional. When I got back into cycling proper six years ago (by which I mean not settling for the ordinariness of commuting but in fact going on hurty beamers) I set myself an unconscious list of things to do. I did go to Ventoux, which was probably the motivation for getting roadie again in the first place. I did a just-turned-30-crisis-ride to Tourmalet. I did the end-to-end. I hooned the fixed gear over the mighty Trough more times than I can now count, I went back to Ventoux for shits and faster giggles. I’m now into a stewardship of normality, purveying with comfort and regularity what once seemed outstanding, or extraordinary.

So I try to find things to do that rekindle that old feeling. Of going too far, or to new places. I said to HC this morning, when asked “where will you go today?”, that I didn’t really know and it doesn’t really matter; I know my Southern roads. For a long time, the northern tips of the Ashdown forest have been my Farthest South but, last week, that all changed. I had long planned to ride down to Brighton to see my friend Elinor, and did so; Brighton is 54 simple enough miles away - enough to hurt a little, but nothing that can’t be done rather easily before lunch. I’ve never cycled to Brighton before - I’ve always seen it as something not on my list; I cycled to Portsmouth once, and that was perfectly nice riding. Easy really. It’s just a ride. But coming back.. well, that’s the thing.

Because, delusions in full force, a Farthest South can only be deemed so if one returns. Otherwise, well, it’s a one-way ticket. So, to channel Scott et al, the mythology of the trip would only truly count if I came back again. A simple century, really, but I’m not much in the habit of 100-milers. I’ve done only two in my knowledge. 70s, plenty. 80s, a few. A couple of 90-mile days. 100s. Not so much. I sat in the cafe with Elinor, catching up, smiling at her baby son, but in the back of my mind I was calculating calories, observing the wind and consciously twitching my leg muscles. Convinced, I climbed back up the Beacon (it really is a beautiful hike, that climb), stopped atop the chalky downs for a banana and a wee (I’d have to stop several times per hour for this purpose, as I was worryingly dehydrating) and then gurned toward Haywards Heath.

I burned out in a small village called Ardingly. I did a massive piss that took about two minutes, into the gutter of a closed Royal Legion Club. I ate 100g of peanuts, 100g of jelly babies and drank 500ml of coke. I breathed, wiped my brow, which was also pissing water, and then kept on keeping on. Should I quit, I thought, as I approached East Grinstead in the rain... take a train? I knew, though, that I would not be permitted.. Southern Trains don’t allow bikes after 4pm and it was almost five. I could wait till six, then catch one. But I knew that if I did then this would always be a failure.. an 80-mile ride that would forever be an attempt and not an achievement. Its curse would debilitate me. I could not quit. I found some power, passed my previous farthest South, sighted Lingfield, the rain abated and somehow, I could move. I cruised across the flats toward the Ridge, and dropped onto the bottom of Tandridge Hill, a hill so dark and stinky that I might avoid it on even a good day. And I thought “FAAAAACK IT” because, y’know, I’m writing a freaking MYTH here in STONE on my own hard-as-nails ballsack, sat in this saddle for 6 lonely hours. Dropped into a 39 x 28 and just let it happen. It happened. I was soon over Woldingham and onto the A23 home. Fast as shit, that last 18 miles.

And that was that. Mackerel pasta, stretches, some DIY, and a sleep-the-long-sleep. So, as a great man said: “What’s next?”.

[thevelonaut]

Open water.

I went to the sea. I’ve just lately been to the sea a lot. I even went in it once or twice. I went past a bunch of lochs I’d never heard of; I went alongside rivers and brooks with funny names, so far upstream that it seemed impossible that they’d ever amount to much; I swam in a clunie.

This started with four days’ ride in Scotland. I tried, like I have done before, to recreate an alchemic reaction; last year’s jaunt North was relatively immediate and underplanned; as such I enjoyed it more than I knew, and mythologised it within minutes of arriving back in London. Time goes by, and as all randonneurs know, the power of experience intensifies. Come this year, I left my plans fairly unmade.. I tested my fitness in June and early July, found it wanting, sprung the rear cassette up to a 11-28t to give me some movement in the mountains, and took a ride to Euston.

In Glasgow, it had just rained. I headed out of the city Northwards, because I hadn’t done that before; what I’d always imagined to be a tough line of hills in the Campsie fells weren’t so tough; what lay North of that were the Trossachs, and they were tough. But tough, even for a first day burst of false power.

I took tougher roads; Duke’s Pass joins a short list of truly wonderful roads in the UK, a clamber over a pass and into a fast valley around the tip of Loch Katrine; it’s only seven or so miles long, but it somehow represents everything that makes road cycling so holy. It led me to Comrie; a shortish ride of 70 miles, the final 15 being alongside a stretched-out loch.

The following day, I found myself at the Spittal O’ Glenshee, and the high higher highest of passes; Cairnwell. It’s Britain’s highest pass, at 670m. Pretty spectacular, but it isn’t somewhere I’d necessarily go to again. Barren, weird, lonely.

It drops into Braemar, a weird little wedge of a tourist town. I arrived at 2pm, and I’d done the best part of 80 miles with a bollock-load of climbing, and yet somehow felt like I hadn’t done enough. If I hadn’t already booked a hostel there, I might have pressed to Tomintoul. But I didn’t.. I instead took a cold swim in a cold river in lovely sunshine, then proceeded to shiver for two hours.

It rained overnight. Come the third day, I was into the home straight to the North Sea; some 75 miles from Braemar to Fordyce. I went past the Queen’s gaff and aimed at Lecht; the SECOND-highest pass in the UK, I think. I didn’t have the legs, or the motivation. One of my faults is that I cycle like I’m a badass when I have to get someplace.. but once a decision comes my way, I tend to opt for the easier path. I didn’t need to crest the Lecht, so I thought better of it.

I did get pretty high though. And wet. And a little cold. But never miserable.

The roads along Deeside saw the rain persist; going toward Banffshire, I could see sunlight, but it was moving East as quickly as I was. Some fifty miles in, no longer in the belief that I’d get to my friends’ cottage in a one-r, I abandoned hope.. until the sight of an Asda in Huntly restored it completely and then some.

I think I might have shouted “FUCK IT”, the only words I’d said that day that weren’t “goodbye” to the Youth Hostel bloke or “Jesus” everytime the view opened up. Shakespearean dialogue, this. But ASDA. Who doesn’t love Asda cafés? Why wouldn’t I stop for egg on toast?

The cappucino was just the right side of shite. The scrambled eggs were ambrosia. The toast immense but insufficient. The Ribena exactly as Ribena is. The whole experience was immaculate. It was 18 miles to Fordyce. As a youthful 17 year-old, 18 miles was a ride. Since I started to irregularly bike tour, a sign for 18 miles is akin to a 5-minute jog to the corner shop. It is nothing. It’s still a bit hurty, and sometimes you enter into a battle of wills with gravity, especially when you feel like you’ve done seventeen miles and that extra mile takes about an hour. But you get there.

For novelty I came into Fordyce from the east; last year I’d dropped in from a forest to the west. Let me tell you this; west is better. That said, I saw the sea, got excited, nearly crashed into a tractor, whizzed up to the gate of my friends’ place and gave everyone a cuddle. Then had a massive piss and a carton of leftover cous cous. Then coffee. Then another piss. Then went into the sea and froze my tits off and called it a holiday.

Three days later I rode to Aviemore in apocalyptic rain; 65 miles of fucking grimness. Everything got wet except the contents of my Carradice. Incredible. My hands were black for days afterwards because the dye from my gloves ran. My shoes were still wet after an eight-hour train back to London. I read all of Three Men in a Boat and ate cashew nuts like it was Christmas. I rode home from Euston and arrived at midnight. I ate muesli and resisted the temptation to clean my bike there and then. It had developed a creak. Imagine how sick I felt.

[thevelonaut]

[thevelonaut]

Lassoop.

I come back. I come back from a hoon of pain, a 62-mile lassoop around the Ashdown fringes, that magisterial old forest, having climbed the copses and valleys. It was tough as boots and I sit here eating chilli-flavoured chocolate.

I come back from home, a couple of weeks back. The usual: a fixed hoon across the Trough, around the skirts of Beacon Fell, on a cloudy glorious day.

I come back to this blog. Other business seems to have gotten stuck fast in the ways of leisurely writing. A new job, a new home, and all the hours that each seem to leech from a person; good, excellent months in pursuit of all things, and I certainly managed to get a good amount of riding in. Not enough, but when did I ever?

Every time I head out these days, it seems to be behind, or against, a mass of cyclists engaged on some sportive or other. Six weeks ago, I rode the LVIS audax in Bristol and, so bad was the wind, that rarely did Ed or I partner up with other riders. 200 were due to start on a wet Sunday morning in March. Only seven had passed through the penultimate control at 3pm. That’s the kind of riding I like.

Riders number extraordinarily, the commutes to Elephant and Castle seem ever populous, and the aggression and speeds of the cyclists seems to increase to dangerous levels. HC’s brother brought us a mantra box from India. It soothes the mind so filled with noise and life from all places. It quiets fears and anger. I should use it more.

Four weeks ago, I sat on a tree trunk near Westerham after I’d stopped for a wee. I could hear a woodpecker along a trail. I wanted to head down the trail and find adventures not on the road. I bought a mountain bike, and then sent it back almost immediately; it was dented and anyway, I was mistaken. What I then did was pick up an 853 cross-tourer, which now looks sketchily like a project. The trails come next, now the roads are exhausted.

I come back, mainly because I’m ready to explore again.

[thevelonaut]

Cold. Comfort. Form.

Right now my bike's sat out in the hallway. I should/will/might clean it off in a second. This week's been a bit of a hoon week. I mashed out a Boxing Day spinzo, a hilly freakout on Sunday and, just today, yet another bingo dingo on the Downs. I've been doing summer miles. In between the Holidays. It's cold, really cold, and the ground's all mush and frozen organic spudge. I've been exclusively on the Weapon, and the climbing's been tough. I nearly barfed on my double-thick socks at the top of Ide Hill on Sunday. I nearly threw my spanner at a close-passing car. I nearly had a nap at the top of Star Hill this morning.

I've been rinsing the GT85 trying to keep everything slooshy and speed-o. I've been using a lot of Vanish to wash the crud out of the backs of jerseys and coats. And drinking water without letting it come anywhere near my teeth. And trying not to let my right leg cramp up all the time. And I've been wondering about building a cut-price gravelly bike. Or an offroad machine. Or just what riding in the summer will feel like when it comes around again.

[thevelonaut]

The only way is Wye.

I've been hammering out a lot of silly miles recently. Rarely more than a spin between places, six or so miles at a time. I have been perfecting the new THIRD commute route, a way of avoiding hills Herne and Denmark, and though I do love a hill, the traffic has recently been roary, the nights and mornings dark, and the world a threat. The back streets to Elephant have been a treat.

The past two months have been dippy in form. I've not really had my heart in the weekend rides, even though I've been out at least once a week on a decent-sized ride. Just not quite interested in the big bad rides, usually opting for 40ish mile beamers. It might be a little offshoot of stress, it might be tiredness, it might mean a tiny bit of boredom. Sometimes I've felt a little afraid of my own lack of leg, and sometimes of the fixed wheel. Despite that, my averages are always well into the seventeens, if not eighteens (on occasion) and I battered out a plus-1000m elevation ride or two. That's not exactly weak. A few weeks ago, Costa Westerham were trialling their Christmas treats and I ate a lot of stolen stollen. I ate so much I was almost sick marzipan on Botley Hill.

It's Christmas Eve. I have been on errands in Central London, and have enjoyed whipping The Weapon between doofus pedestrians and lumbering angry buses. I swooshed down empty Whitehall, one of the fastest, flattest roads in London, and had the mighty tailwind that had so opposed me on the way in. Last weekend, I spent a few days in Hereford and then Preston. So of course, despite the inconvenience, I took The Weapon on Christmas manoeuvres.. I rode up to Paddington last Thursday, and then to the college where I used to work in Hereford, up a tidy hill. Easy enough. I think I walked the bike everywhere else subsequently, being as I spent most of my time with footfolk. But not on Saturday. On Saturday I took The Weapon to Hay.

I used to teach out in Hereford for a few years. During my first Spring and Summer there, an exceptionally dry spell in 2011, I took the then-newly built Red Bike out on evening adventures. Together, we took out along the river, in either direction, and along the lower slopes of the big hills. I'd returned to a geared road bike, then, partly because I'd CRACKED the old forks on the fixed, and partly because I knew the Shire would not be friendly toward the single gear. In truth, a ride to Hay is not the hilliest ride in the world, but they are rollers; the roads never settle, and one is constantly in battle with gravity. I beamed it out into a wall of driz, turned left at Kington, screamed down some nameless hill of terror and across the wooden bridge at Whitney. Offa, and many other Kings, would've watched valleys and meadows like this for signs of the angry tribal Welsh. The Western end of England is an ancient floodplain.. everything from Chepstow northwards presents a tremendous, changing landscape. Huge woodlands and open plains, and at the crease of all this land, the fluent and fast Wye. It's a terrifying river, almost like one of the great African coils of water, and watching it move, from on high, is as if to see the water shape and manipulate the land in order to beat a path to the sea. And up high I went. So exhausted at Hay, I needed a toasted teacake and espresso, and no time to dally. So tired were my legs, I even did some stretches. I leapt on the bike and hoisted up into the hills east of Hay; I was quickly lost, and phones are not much use up there. I asked a country lady the way to somewhere that wasn't here, and wasn't Hay. She pointed at a road that looked like a cyclocross track. I took it, held a firm line, and gunned it the 20-odd miles home to Hereford.

I made a sandwich of eggs, more eggs, and some eggs on top. I made it with mustard and mayonnaise, I made it with butter and coffee blacker than the void at the centre of my exhausted heart. I ate it in three bites, ate two yoghurts, a pear, a bit of my friend's daughter's chocolate santa (which was, for her at least, being carefully rationed) and then I cleaned the bike.

I tried later to buy a cornetto in town. In the broadest of Shire accent I was told "Not now, love. Come back in the Summer."

So I will.

[thevelonaut]

Trough times.

Despite only ever visiting the Bowland Fells on average twice a year, they feel ever-so familiar. They look just right in any kind of weather, and seem to me to be most alive on a miserable day. They never inspire a happiness in particular, they instead tend to feel dark and grey, filled with the kind of foreboding associations that centuries of witchcraft in this belt of Lancashire have led to. 

I briefly visited home this weekend. The weather on Friday night was wet and faintly cold. The forecast for Saturday morning was inconclusive. When I woke, it was wet, but not raining. Clouds were making way for light the colour of butter, but the air was autumnal chill and the ground was scattered with debris. Classic kind of Lancastrian weather. Though a circuit around the Trough is less hilly than a usual spin around Kent would be, I think it feels invariably harder. This can also be down to teenage associations, and not only those witchy stories. The Trough was my first 'big' circuit. The first ride I ever did on a regularish basis that exceeded 45 miles, and came with a climbing section that lasted more than five minutes. It has marks of isolation, and the sense of being away from settlements and other human beings persists at the peak. Although I've never taken the longer, and undoubtedly much tougher Bowland circuit that would include Stocks Reservoir, this was always just about enough of a sense of being lost in my own country.

This feeling still exists, but it is a trace of older fears that, like the adaptation of wildlife to vestigial threats, is no longer necessary. The instincts to be safe, be careful and wish for luck in the mechanical systems are there, but the danger is non-too threatening. I am only ten miles from Lancaster, Garstang, only a couple from Dunsop Bridge and Whitewell. These are outposts in the territory that, should I need to walk, I could reach with little difficulty. I still like to think that I'm in the outback, in the forests and by the rivers of faraway places, however.

You stop and have a strong black coffee in a village hall near Dunsop. You wander in, and there is a cadre of cyclists eating eggs. They are filthy from the puddles, wide eyed, and so thoroughly from East Lancashire that their accents could butter bread. They nod in assent, allow you to pass and order a coffee. You take it outside on a damp bench and stare up at the fells, adding extra sugar with every hot gulp. And then away, through the leaf-mulch and dew-grass, away to the good side of Longridge Fell and home in just under three hours. 

I'd taken the Weapon instead of Huey. I'm keeping Huey indoors on anything other than a dry day, this winter. I want to protect that bike for another summer's use before I let the weather at him. So, on the fixed, with some hoofy climbs, 52 warm-cold miles and not a shift in gear. It felt like the kind of day that prefixes the Long Autumn, and the Cold Winter, which all seems so close now. Today really was the change in season.

[thevelonaut]

Time flies like a banana. Fruit flies like an arrow.

I'm not sure where I've been. I last wrote upon my return from Scotland, which was, I think, a wham of awesome into my until-then work-aggressive life. Perhaps the interim can best be explained thus: I went into a different kind of work-aggression, no less valid, but formed around creating and collecting work and forming it into a small but nicely-formed retrospective. I guess, only now, I realise I should've put this on Tumblr sooner, just in case someone saw it. Anyway, the title, upon which I settled about a year ago, is one of those mantras I like to keep for teaching and general things. It simulataneously describes how I live, how I look back, and how I look forward. 

Nothing, really, did go wrong. Small matters of here and there, but nothing that utterly froze me. I think that might describe my summer of cycling too. I experienced the BOUNCE of a post-tour - several rides of utter, effortless perfection. HC and I went to France on a 10-day holiday and no cycling was involved, which I have decided is not the best thing to do. In the past, I have enjoyed a brief interlope sans bicyclette, but this time around I felt like I missed it more than usual. I saw one-too-many roadies heading out into the beyond, one-too-many incredible, anonymous mountain passes, and realised it's going to make perfect sense to escape again to the South of France and relish the pain train.

When I took a ride, upon returning to London, the legs stumbled and weren't quite sure of the sensibility. Legs have brains, when you cycle a lot; they respond independently, like a small club of indifference. It took a couple of weeks to return to anything like comfort, and then a couple of weeks since to feel like it's not a chore. The weather has been, until very recently, warm and dry. Shorts and short sleeves still dominate, although last Sunday's ride may well indicate that those days are numbered. I am taking the Weapon and its 42-15 chain of power to the Fells in Lancashire this weekend; I am visiting family for a short hop and see no reason why I shouldn't deploy the weapon for some short, October-leaf-mulch lack of traction in the darkened, glorious Bowland. Hell, maybe I'll get up early and make it proper epic. I doubt it though.. the fixed wheel is exhausting at the moment, perhaps I am barely recovered from the mentally exhausting depression that follows hanging an exhibition. Two months of constant working and thinking, ten or so months before that of gradual build-up; you realise something's just been there for a long time and then it's gone.

SO, the Autumn comes. The leaves are well and truly departing the tree branches, as are the birds. I have decided to reduce the 2-big-rides-a-week schedule down to a single weekend beamer, with commutes making up the shortfall. Swimming, as ever, takes the bulk of the cardio, and the legs stay alive and strong through weekly rest-cycles and hurty Sundays. It's worked many times in the past. Let's see, shall we?

[thevelonaut]

Tumblin Dice.

Life-replenishing, then. People come back from things all the time and say "well, that was life changing" but, no, they generally aren't. That's not to diminish them or belittle. HC and I often query why it is that we have such ridiculous fun on our camping extravaganzas and day-trips, but the answer is because it's a course-deviation. It's life, and it's fed by all the usual ingredients of life, but it's a bit different. It's all the right notes, as Eric Morecambe said, but not necessarily in the right order. You soon go back to playing things like they're meant to be in the songbook, but that crazy time is always fondly remembered. Going off-grid. Resetting some of the spirit.

I come back from Scotland somewhat anew, but have settled, almost without incident, into the regularity of the summer. Not being at college is a great relief, at least for the time being, and illustration work tends to dip a little in August. I have an exhibition at the end of September and am readying myself for that phenomenal ballache. Thus I am back at my desk, Tumblin' when I should be drawing, looking at weather forecasts when I should be on Photoshop. I am up, at 8am, cramming a deadline that I have until the end of tomorrow to finish, so I can get out for a few hours this afternoon on Huey. Huey's freaking immense. We have bonded over the fells, the byways and highways of Central Scotland. Hellfire, it was the best.

I took about forty self-portraits, something about it became exciting. Each time the scenery just pure knocked-me-out, I wapped out the Blackberry and selfied the shot. My beard was incredibly dense, red and filled with salts, my hair got that blond sunkist all over, my eyes creased and got older and I wore my newish Vulpine grandad shirt which, I conclude, is the best jersey I've ever owned.. it's built for a light tour. I really can't recommend them enough, actually. I rode about 300 miles over four days, though not in a row. A day and a bit to get from Glasgow to Glencoe, two days of walking and wild swims with HC and her family, thence across Fort William and Spean Bridge to Aviemore, and unto the sea to visit my glorious friends near Banff. A seventy-mile hooner up the A roads and danger highways situated me in Inverness for a sleeper home. Crushed, tired, exhilirated. Perfect bike riding weather, not a single day of rain. Not cloud, not even a real headwind. Tidy breezes, long ascents, long steady drops, Scotland offers up a kind of experience I think unmatched by anything else in the UK. Alright, so I love the Lakes, but they're tough and hurty, and the road never lets you settle. Also, they're relatively small. I love home, those Lancastrian fells, but they are destitute, over-grazed and under-forested (yes BOWLAND, I mean YOU) and like old friends who, a couple of beers in, you realise you've run out of things about which to reminisce.

Lomond's stretch of the A82 is filthy fast, lots of straggly race cars and late night logging trucks. I left Glasgow at 5pm, obviously a dangerous idea, but by 7pm I was closing down on Crianlarich in the long sunset, almost in tears at the joy of it. Similarly, the '82 to Glencoe is a murder road (quite honestly, three road accidents occurred whilst we were in the Great Glen) but the drivers, especially the big rigs and coaches, are respectful. They wait to overtake, which is unheard of elsewhere.. perhaps the sheer glut of LEJOGers keeps them cautious. Or the abundance of Dutch, French and Belgian tourists out to see the best mountains in the universe. The road was, so far, a familiar sight - I'd seen them with Pete and Omar, and remembered with joy that turn into the Glen, when it opens up and the air hits you in a new way, like new air, and not the recycled stuff you get everyplace else. It wasn't until I headed out of Spean Bridge, up onto the Loch Laggan road, that I was in new territory. For a couple of hours, I was in Bavaria, the Pyrenees, in prehistoric places, warm roads and ice on the tops. Long blue waters, long ancient dams, dirty tarmac and occasional camper vans.

I stayed a night in weird, joyless Aviemore, its view of the Cairngorms being its primary joy, especially when viewed from the top of a century-old railway bridge. The ride from there along the Spey was grand, though like all exceptional bike tours, the sheer unadulterated and uncensored pleasure of beauty begins to take its toll; things which would normally be the best thing you'd seen that day are a little less amazing. It's a brilliant thing, to be in sumptuous, glorious landscape and say "this isn't quite as good as yesterday". That's the worst criticism I can muster.

I spent two nights in Fordyce, at my friends' cottage. We caught crabs and swam in the sea, visited ancient harbours and ate chips on the seafront. I rode with my friend Alan to Spey Bay on my way to Inverness, and detoured via Culloden so's I could see the field, and the excellently Harry-Potteresque viaduct.

I came back to London with the oval-shaped tan marks on the backs of my hands, glove shadows, tour medals. 300 miles of hardy riding in my legs, double what I'd normally get done in a usual week, 13,000ft of hills and valley and, best of all, tired-strength. Should I ever consider the Marmotte, or Etape, then I know I should ride at least a couple of hundred miles to the start line, then rest a day or two. Tours, and the act of riding tougher distances with heavier loads than your own self, act as incredible resistance training. I rode out on Sunday for a 52-miler and aced it, a big tractor average and lots of springy climbing. I could have gone 20 more miles at 18 or 19mph and not felt it. That, for me, is strong indeed. Best of all, I have a tan, or as much of a tan as a Pictish Northerner can have. I look sorta like I can hold my own. And I feel a hundred times better than I did two weeks ago. My life hasn't changed but it sure is good.

[thevelonaut]

A tour approaches.

Ah, not that one. The tour I talk of is a smaller one, less of an ordeal, though I am feeling a good deal of trepidation. For the first time in four or five years, I am coming into the summer on a recovery trail, battered and bothered by sinusitis, colds, virus(es) and a lack of form or fitness. To others, I still swim, cycle and bounce with aplomb, but in myself I know I am not at strength. And doesn't that frustrate.

Huey has had a good six or so weeks of Yeagering. His first real test came in a Cotswolds-Hereford-Cotswolds weekend, about a month ago. Two 100k rides with an oversized Carradice in a small rack. Nothing went badly (except, as before, my ability to gurn up and over the dales with customary comfort) and I took it easy enough. Tour riding is to be treated as non-Sundaylike as possible - don't overcook it. Over the next hill or pass, across the next valley, through the next copse, is more of the same. Repeated, unknown roads and trials. The miles fall according to road signs - the sense of being a set amount of miles away from the final destination occupies the mind. Touring is point-to-point riding, and that makes it different, harder and easier, somehow.

So Huey is a little pock-marked - a couple of nicks to the paint, scuffs to the rim, a chip on the chainset and some wear on the bar tape and gum hoods. He's looking like he's been places. The chain's a bit rougher, though not much. I had him out for 50 miles in rain on Thursday, and he went splendid. The bike is alright, I have no doubts - I put together a good one this time. So on Thursday, I'll ride up to Euston and board a train for Glasgow. It's going to be raining when we arrive in the late afternoon. We'll ride 50 miles north and sleep at Crianlarich, and then the following day across the glorious big country until we reach Glencoe. That's stage 1. I have decided to try and rest up this week, nothing big, nothing exhausting. I am going to carb-up, sleep long, and get ready for seven days of Scotland. We'll do alright.