I went into Letchworth this morning and picked up the SV with its electrics still unsorted. I got it home glumly, put it under wraps and left it there, then legged it for the station. Somehow, I just didn’t feel like riding into work. (Now what stinking pit did that mood emerge from? I was clearly in a disturbed state of mind.)
I missed my train and had to wait half-an-hour on the platform for the next one. It was miserably wet and cold so I sat there huddled up in my Dainese jacket (I was wearing it for comfort’s sake as well as warmth) and started to fantasise what my next bike might be and where I might go on my next biking trip. A Bennelli Tornado emerged as my current fantasy bike, Kazakhstan as my most recent fantasy destination.
I’ve never ridden the Bennelli, (I keep meaning to get a test ride. I know a dealer near here who would let me have one.) but that doesn’t stop me fantasising about how it would feel. It's a triple like the Daytona, so I imagine it has the same kind of delivery, but it has more power. If it handles the way it looks then hook me up to an orgasmatron and throw me to the honeybears. (Sorry, early morning reveries!)
I’ve never been to Kazakhstan either, but I’ve read enough to have a yen for seeing it. I’ve wanted to visit the Central Asian steppe for a long time (and just about everywhere else in the world, too, of course.) Kazakhstan has a very weird, remote feel about it. It is the land of Cossack and Sarmatian horsemen. There is a theory that the legend of King Arthur originated there. For centuries it was the bloody playground of Sythians, Huns and Mongols, of Genghis Kahn, and Tamburlaine. And it's the original site of the Golden Horde. Pretty wild stuff!
Did you know (here it comes…):
- Kazakhstan is the sixth largest country in the world. Apart from the mountains to the south it is rolling grassland from border to border. The steppe is so vast and so uniform, I’m told that riding through it can drive you nuts in a very short space of time. Must see!
- In Kazakh the name of the old capital, Almaty, means "appleness." That's because all the world’s cultivated apples originate from Kazakhstan. Almaty is situated up against the Tien Shan Mountains, on the borders of a giant apple forest. Can you imagine the smell in the autumn when the apples start to ferment? I bet you can get rat-arsed in Almaty just by breathing.
- Astana, the new capital, has been recently built as a modern showcase city, with stunning architecture. The only problem is, it’s slap bang in the middle of - nowhere. There are loads of unsubstantiated stories as to why the government moved the capital to this remote spot, but one fact sticks out. Almaty is located a bit too close to the Chinese border for comfort. Kazakhstan is profoundly under-populated: China is overflowing with Chinese. Kazakhstan is brimming with unexploited oil deposits: China is fast running out of fossil fuels. And then there's the potential for a land grab: Chinese history books lay claim to a large area of Kazakhstan (as they do to large bits of almost every other country in the region.) It makes sense to move - I would!
- Norman Foster, the architect, has designed and is now building a 500 ft high transparent ‘tent’ just outside the city. The material it is made of will concentrate sunlight so that the inhabitants of Astana can swim and play golf in the ‘open air’ right through the winter when temperatures fall to -40 degrees.
- Despite the freezing continental weather system, Astana is on the same latitude as London. Scary.
- Kazakhstan has 46 recognised religions which all seem to rub along together nicely. Let’s hope they never get an attack of political correctness.
Here, take a look at the giant tent.
Now this is real fantasy stuff! Not much like 'Borat' I'm thinking.
After I’d done the Bennelli fantasy and the Kazakhstan fantasy, I started to cast around for something else to think about. Railway stations are remarkable for their total lack of visual interest. Hitchin station is a perfect example of this phenomenon (especially when you've been sitting on the bloody thing, on and off, for over fifty years.) I tried to imagine how it would have looked when Victoria was still on the throne.
(I got hooked on reading Victorian local newspapers some years ago. Don’t ever get the idea that Victorian journalists are dull or unimaginative. They wrote very graphically and they are also some of the funniest writers I’ve ever read.)
It was as I was mulling over this fact that I remembered a local news item from the 1890s (or it might have been just after the turn of the century, I don’t recall.) It starts here at Hitchin station.
Late one night, just over a hundred years ago when most of the regular station staff at Hitchin had gone home to bed, a special shift of men came on duty. It was a dark night and some of them had walked five or more miles over the fields from Kimpton and Whitwell and the other outlying villages to get to work. Groups of sleepy-eyed boys and men had also gathered in small groups around the station. Everyone, according to the local rag, was in a state of great excitement. At a little before two o’clock, a long line of wagons and carriages drawn by two struggling steam engines came over the rise at Benslow Bridge. The train laboured into the station’s chalk cutting and pulled to a halt directly opposite where I was then sitting. There was a banging and shouting, huge doors in the side of wagons were flung open and suddenly the whole iconic razzmatazz of lawless America poured out into the station forecourt.
Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show had come to town.
Before I read that newspaper article, I had no idea that Bill Cody or his show had ever toured England, let alone stopped to do several performances here in sleepy ol’ Hitchin. It all seemed very unlikely somehow. In my childhood Hitchin belonged to one corner of the universe, the Wild West belonged to another, and specifically to Saturday Night matinees down at the Regal Cinema in Bancroft. Neverthless, by all accounts this strange conjunction appears to have occurred. I tried to imaigine it: Hitchin railway station streaming with American frontiersmen and injuns - and trick cyclists too. (Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show had trick cyclists - kind of disturbs the image somehow.)
The wagons and animals trundled off the trucks and made their way one-and-half miles across town to Butts Close, a large grassy open space, where medieval English bowmen had practiced their archery on a Sunday afternoon, and where, only a few years before Joseph Arch, the union activist, had made a famous speech to the newly organised farm labourers of the area, not exactly changing the face of labour history, but doing his damndest.
Apparently the shows were a total sell out. The train companies put on special cheap services to bring the crowds into town.
Unfortunately, just as I was just getting into the idea of Sitting Bull riding up past my front door admiring my Daytona, my train arrived looking like every other unremarkable First Capital Connect train I had ever seen – looking, in fact, very much like I was on my way to work.
All this daydreaming is just displacement activity for my bikeless state. Maybe, my refusal to ride this morning was me just punishing the SV for giving me a hard time. Deep stuff, eh!
Oh, OK, what's the deal with the bikes…? Well, I'm too peed off to think about that one now. Tomorrow perhaps.
)
Nothing like that. 
. Two-in-one can get you down - you know! Just a little. They say the second Christmas is often the worst. Yep, I can confirm that!
