Mmmmmmm! Two wheels, good!
Here in the magic triangle of Hertfordshire/Bedfordshire/Cambridgeshire in the southern heartland of the UK, we have been having a run of lovely, mild spring days (never mind the fact that we are in the middle of winter.) Last Sunday was one of the best of them - if there was ever a day made for biking then it was last Sunday.
Some days just lever you out of bed whether you're ready or not. Last Sunday was such a day. I fairly spraing out from under the duvet, got out the SV and caned it over to Stevenage to see if any of the club had turned up for a ride out. There were four guys there. Not a huge number, but who’s counting? By the time I arrived (late as usual) they had already decided to ride out to Harrold Odell Park in Bedfordshire; an excellent idea except that no-one knew the way exactly - which explained why, just as I turned up, I saw Geoff nipping off back home on his ’busa to get his GPS thingy.
I have nothing against GPS thingys except that (if an atheist may say so) they are the spawn of the devil. I prefer the time-honoured, low-cost method of navigating known to our forefathers: a map slipped under a transparent tank bag cover. I’m not sure I will ever accept a machine that talks to you. But it's not just that. I prefer my own logic, even if I don’t always end up where I mean to – maybe that's,
because I don’t always end up where I mean to.
As it turned out, my prejudices were more than confirmed when Geoff’s evil gizmo thing managed to get us to Harrold Park by the only truly boring route through this otherwise attractive part of the country. And not only boring: it was and slow, and snagged with road-works. But here’s the thing, nobody cared much. It was a lovely day and it was just great to be out on the bikes.
The Harrold Odell Park café is set among a small spinney of trees. It is in a large wood cabin raised up on stilts and overlooking a lake. It’s a lovely setting. This morning it was occupied by the usual collection of fresh-faced families, mad-looking twitchers and elderly walkers in green wellies. The elders are a breed apart: lean, mean and with an excess of attitude that would make a mountain bear think twice before an attack. The twitchers were easy to spot with their sensible outdoor barbour jackets and that knowing, far-away look. The expensive binoculars which normally dangled from their scrawny necks (I should talk!) were laid in front of them on the table and fingered constantly.
The Harrold Odell Café is an upbeat, feel-good kind of place with friendly staff, and food you know you can trust. There’s something comforting about a place where you can sit and look at gorgeous cakes and mountainous gateaux all fluffed up under glass domes. Everything about the place is designed to put you in a happy mood. I sat, drooling over the pastries, listening to the conversations going on around me and to the sound of people’s boots clumping across the scrubbed board floor. In the Harrold Odell, you can completely relax. Sitting there it seems absurd to imagine that there could possibly be anything wrong with the world.
After a prolonged breakfast, we discussed which way we would ride back. Geoff agreed to switch off his GPS system and suddenly, it seemed, everyone had remembered a route back home. We rode back though Lavendon and Turvey, attractive Bedfordshire villages with well-kept sandstone cottages strung out along winding roads. It was a lovely ride: fast and smooth and controlled. Everyone seemed to be on top form. The bare shrubs and skeleton trees in the hedgerows looked incongrous against the backdrop of a blue sky and a bright spring-like sun.
I’ve explored a lot of the back roads around here in recent years. There is some good riding to be had, the countryside is attractive, and the Bedfordshire villages are interesting - for their names, if nothing else: on the way home we passed signs to ‘Cold Brayfield’, ‘Newton Blossomville’ and ‘Clifton Reynes’. I’ve always liked British place names but it is only recently, after reading the occasional comment on this blog, that I've come to realise just how very eccentric they can sometimes sound to outsiders. I grew up surrounded by places called ‘Biggleswade’, ‘Abingdon Pigotts’, ‘Hare Street’, ‘Saffron Walden’, ‘Wendens Ambo,’ ‘Burnt Pelham’ and ‘Cockayne Hatley’. I guess you just come to take such names for granted.
I split off from the other guys north of Hitchin, rode back along my favourite fast back road and got into the house at about 2.30. I settled down, made myself some lunch and started to wonder what I should do with the rest of the day. Then it occurred to me. It was such great weather - why didn’t I get the bike out and go for a ride?
So that’s what I did.
I got kitted back up and took a back route into Cambridge. Luvverly! There are some great twisties and fast straights out this way - if you know were to find them. That’s one of the advantages of being a local lad rather than a wanderer. What you lack in variety of experience you make up for in depth of knowledge. You can choose the best. I got into Cambridge, walked through some of the colleges, and then spent a blissful couple of hours rummaging around the town’s many book and record shops. I didn’t buy a lot, but got dozens of ideas for the next time I get overcome with consumer mania.
At about six o'clock, I rode back home in the dark, overtaking like a nutter (not a stupid, reckless nutter, just a happy one). That evening, my spirits were in free fall, my anxieties disengaged; I felt light as a feather. Foot and wrist and eye moved in perfect harmony with no interference from that complicated, over-elaborate thing between my eyes that I call ‘me’. Such times are priceless.
What is it about overtaking? What makes it so enjoyable? I'm not just talking now about the buzz of aggression (
)you get when you attack a column of slow-moving traffic on a fast road - satisfying as that can be. I'm thinking more of those times when you cut loose and overtake for the pure joy of it (
). The sensation you get on those occasions is something lighter, happier and much more complete. My career as a serial overtaker that evening rose to new heights.
On a fast ride, my body is usually ready to oblige me with heady shots of adrenaline. Those tiny drops of hormonal ambrosia swill around in your bloodstream, hitting receptors, focussing your senses, and then hang about for ages after the stimulus has passed. I know that because it usually takes me several hours to come down to earth again after I get off the bike. I suspect, though, that there is a particularly pure variety of hormone that our glands reserve for special occasions - like the occasion of my riding home that Sunday evening full of the joys of spring. At times like that, the sensation is magnificent.
And that's how I knew, after Sunday, that the winter’s blue meanies had finally packed their bags and hurried off to drown themselves in some other poor bastrd’s misery, leaving me feeling lighter and happier than I’d been for ages. Gone was my month-long, oh-so-tedious motorcycle malaise - that feeling of, “Oh god! do I really have to get on the bike again,” which grabbed me (uncomfortably) by the goolies when the SV started having electrical problems and had hung on ever since.
Suddenly my bum felt like it had been built to slide into the saddle of a motorcycle once again. Bike and rider had re-bonded and become one: metal and flesh; flesh and metal. Riding was once more a sharing of power and control out there in the boundless experience of changing weather. In moments like that there is nothing simpler, nothing more satisfying. Yesssss! I thought, I'd got over 'the hump'; I was back to enjoying the SV again. And the SV seemed to be enjoying me too, ‘cos not once did its electrics give me the wink that week-end, nor have they caused me any bother in the days since.
‘The hump’ had been threatening to land on me for months. I felt it hovering around the edge of my thoughts all through the wet days of autumn. It dulled my mind and dragged my energy down in the mud, but still I managed to fend it off – just. By the middle of December, though, it had taken hold. I had a lousy time in the run-up to Christmas. All the hassle the two bikes were giving me ate away at my resilience. And then I had my own personal destiny to deal with. (I have no idea what that means now but that’s how it felt at the time as I tried to grapple with it.) On the surface, I was looking forward to Christmas – as I always did, but secretly (so secretly, I hardly knew it myself) I was just pretending. In reality, I was dreading the whole bloody awfulness of it all.
On Christmas Eve I paid my cultural dues like every other good citizen of an advanced consumer economy and spent the afternoon shoving my way from shop to shop, anxiously searching for last-minute gifts. Enthusiasm and anxiety took charge and cattle-prodded me into a purchasing frenzy. By three o’clock that afternoon my budget plans were in shreds. I was out of control - like everybody else. ‘Christmas,’ I’m convinced, is one of the greatest marketing ploys ever invented – a product of the board room, not the stable yard. The religious significance of Christmas was already ‘post-Christian’ even before it had got underway.
You only have to look at people’s faces to see that Christmas is not a celebration but a time of crisis. By Christmas Eve features have begun to crumple, eyes have taken on an anxious and unfocussed look, and faces have acquired a pallor that has nothing to do with lack of sunlight. Then there are the statistics: road accident and breakdown rates go up at Christmas time, more people get depressed, the suicide rate peaks, domestic arguments flare, family members fall out with one another, and everyone ends up feeling like dodo.
OK, that’s the gloomy version. Take it as the expression of a negative mood. I love Christmas, but even so, you can't say it ain't so.
I felt like dodo on Christmas morning, and I didn’t know why. Lying in bed staring at the ceiling, I tried to make up my mind whether to risk riding down to Brighton to spend the day with M and her partner or curl myself up under the duvet like a solitary hedgehog and sleep the holiday out. Being undecided is bloodly uncomfortable and I don't do it well, so to deal with it, I started to think about something else - about ‘an incident’ I’d witnessed the previous morning.
Every year, my employer expects us to go into the office for three hours on Christmas Eve. It's a pain, but there it is. At nine o'colck I found myself crossing the station forecourt on my way to catch a train when a small hand-written sign caught my attention. It said, effectively, that the railway company was doing some engineering work on the line and there was a bus replacement service operating. I groaned as I read it. Christmas f***ing Eve!
The busses to Stevenage were scheduled to run every 15 minutes. I’d just missed one, of course; it had been timetabled to leave five minutes before the train it was due to replace. (Heigh Ho!) The next bus didn’t come; no-one seems to know why, yet no-one was surprised. I asked a geezer in a National Rail Tabard who was standing around with a two-way radio pressed to his ear, but he seemed as clueless as everybody else.
The next bus to come was, of course, already full by the time it got to us. Finally, already an hour late for work, I watched a half-empty single-decker turn the corner into the forecourt. As people started to board, the bus driver and the National Rail geezer began to argue. A passenger wanted to stow a large case in the outside locker and neither the driver not the National Rail guy could agree who should help him. The argument rapidly degenerated into raised voices, finger jabbing and accusations. In the end the bus driver gave way, got off the bus in a sulk, grabbed the passenger’s case and started to make towards the locker door.
At that moment a large woman, about the same shape and solidity as a bag of cement, pushed herself in front of him. “Don’t you do that” she boomed, all aquiver with indignation. “That’s his job, not yours.” Everybody groaned. The woman looked as though she was going to argue her point till the Arctic Terns came back in the spring, and probably would have done had not a passenger quietly suggested that she should let the guy get on with it, ‘Otherwise we’re all going to be here till doomsday,’ she hissed.
And that’s when it happened! I didn’t see the start of it but, suddenly, the whole pack of commuters standing round the bus stop were arguing with one another. Then somebody got pushed and it turned into a brawl. Wow! Tee hee! I’ve never seen anything like it. The British, middle-class commuter, it has to be said, is not very good at a punch-up, so it was a hesitant and awkward affair. And it didn’t last long.
It all came to a rapid halt when someone tried to land one on the driver (not very enthusiastically) and failed. By now thoroughly p1ssed of, the driver stared around at people for a second, and then stalked off in the direction of the car-park. That was the last we saw of him. Everyone watched as his back disappeared across the cutting, then instantly calmed down. There was nothing left for people to do but get back to the job of minding their own business and waiting stoically for the next bus to arrive. It was almost as though nothing had happened.
Christmas! It could only have happened at Christmas when everyone shifts sideways into a parallel universe. It’s true, isn’t it? Christmas is the weirdest time when ordinary reality fragments, boundaries evaporate and people get into the strangest states of mind even without the help of alcohol or too much nutmeg in the Christmas pud.
The memory of this event cheered me up slightly and gave me enough energy and focus to make a decision. I decided to risk riding the SV down to Brighton, dodgy electrics or not. After all, the possibility of being stranded by the side of the road for an hour or so was nothing compared to the risks involved in spending Christmas Day with M, her partner and their parents. If I was willing to accept the odds on that, then I might as well get kitted up and go.
M’s parents were old family friends - old, divorced family friends, that is. And this Christmas they would be occupying the same room together for the first time in ten years. I love them both dearly and yet… (I think that all adds up to some fairly allowable misgivings, don't you?) I didn’t know M’s partner’s family at all but had been advised that they were ‘interesting’. Well, that sounded like it could be... fun?
It was p1ssing down that morning, but there was no ice or frost, so there was nothing to scare the living daylights out of me. I had good waterproofs, and it was motorway riding almost all the way. My only anxieties were whether the bike’s electrics would hold up, and whether, in my present mood, I would be able to sit around in a confined space being sociable for a whole afternoon and evening.
I’ve come to believe that the bike’s dodgy electrics are reacting to damp. I can’t prove it, and it doesn’t even make a lot of sense given everything else I know about the problem, but the SV’s circuits have never cut out on me whenever I've kept the bike under cover or in the dry. As a predictor of electrical failure, letting the bike get damp has been 100% reliable – so far. Riding down to Brighton in the rain might therefore not sound like the smartest thing to do. But what the hell! What could be worse: a damp couple of hours waiting for the rescue service, or spending Christmas day at home on my own? And in any case, I’m a great believer that everything will turn out OK in the end, even if it doesn’t - go to plan, that is.
Getting down to Brighton went almost according to plan. The one little glitch came as I hit the M25. I was hardly up the slip road when I ran into the rear end of an almighty tail back. Judging by the number of police vehicles, fire engines and ambulances screaming up and down the hard shoulder there must have been a sodding great pile-up of an accident somewhere up ahead. I began to filter between the lanes of near-stationary traffic to get to the front. But at the next junction the police were diverting traffic off the motorway and onto some tiny back roads where everything crawled along miserably and where there was no longer and decent chance of an overtake.
After twenty minutes of stop-start riding, with an aching wrist and with my patience almost at an end, I started squeezing past a few cars to try to get ahead. It was a pointless gesture in the grand scheme of things but I had to do something to keep my mind off the exasperation boiling away in my belly and the rain which begun to trickle sadistically down the back of my neck. I kept up this spasmodic attempt at filtering until a sudden, bad-tempered impulse drove me out of the traffic and onto a tiny, gravelley lane that turned a corner and then plunged instantly into deep, woodland. Where was I? I had no idea - in the middle of a lot of trees. All I could do was put my trust in luck and follow my nose. The plan, if you could call it that, was to find my way back onto the M25 on the other side of the accident.
Whether it was luck or a nose for directions, that guided me through the next fifteen minutes, I don’t know, but suddenly, I was back on an almost empty M25, well ahead of the bottleneck. I spent the next twenty miles congratulating myself and making some extremely good progress. After that, it was straight down to Brighton where I found M’s flat without much of a problem. Thanks to the waterproofs I wore over my leathers, I arrived damp but not drenched and in pretty good shape. My new gloves, I noted, were not waterproof and, given the state of the wretched things on the ends of my wrists, neither were my hands.
Coming home was a lot more scary. The evening skies were cloudless and by the time I left M’s flat, the temperature was falling fast. There were signs that the roads had already begun to ice over. I was about 100 miles from home.
Right!
Coming out of Brighton and for about fifty miles afterwards, I kept my speed down to about 55 mph. My back wheel slithered about on corners and wobbled over truck ruts. I came close to a spill on one off-set roundabout on the way back up to the M20. By that time things were starting to look very dodgy to me indeed. Bathed in the unearthly glow of neon streetlights, the wet tarmac had taken on the appearance of a skating rink.
Once on the M25, the road surface improved a little - enough to enable me to relax my concentration just a little. But that only gave me time to start fantasising about what would happen if the electrics suddenly cut out while I was riding a patch of ice. This was not a useful thought. It pushed up my anxiety levels. Before long I was as tense as I had been before: my arms and legs went rigid, my jaw tightened and my grip on the bars became solid - the last thing I needed, right then.
But the idea wouldn’t go away; I kept on thinking, 'what if'. Images of the bike sliding down the road on the ice, kept going through my mind. So I had to talk myself through it. “I'm committed,” I told myself. "There is nothing but tarmac, ice and freezing fog between me and my cosy little Hertfordshire home - or, now, between me and M’s place." If I was going to ride it out, there was no point in thinking about it. It was a matter of getting on with it and taking it easy.
I began to let part of my attention drift to spots in the palms of my hands, then into the centre of my feet. Most stress-reduction techniques I know are too complicated for use when riding a bike. They take too much attention away from the road. But because this one relies on a physical rather than a mental focus, it doesn’t disturb the concentration.
It is simple and powerful. It sometimes takes a little time to kick in, but it always works.
As I felt myself relaxing again, I began to wonder if the motorways were really as icy as I had been imagining. I hadn’t had a slide or sensed a serious lack of grip for over half-an-hour now. Was it just me? Whenever the road surface changed from black to brown, I noticed myself riding faster, more confidently. Wet black tarmac always looks slippery at night; the brown stuff less so. Was it just a perception, I wondered?
Gradually, it came to me that my body had retained a muscle memory of the spill I'd had on the Daytona just before Christmas. The sensation of it was still there after all this time, hovering round my awareness, just outside full consciousness. I let the sensation grow until it became clear in my mind. And with that, came a release; the muscles in my neck and arm where I'd bruised them loosened up so suddenly it took me by surprise. I've played with this sort of thing for thirty years, but I've rarely had an experience as dramatic as that. The mind is an amazing thing.
More relaxed now, I began to put on a little more speed, sending all my attention down through the bike, feeling for tyre slip. Gradually, my confidence began to return and I started riding at a more reasonable rate. I was glad of that, because I wanted to get home as soon as I could. By the time I'd reached the turn-off to Rickmansworth, the bitterly chill wind had begun to penetrate my layers of clothing and was now biting into my bones. One kind of tension was beginning now to be replaced by another: one that was immediate and real and less easy to do anything about.
Even though the tarmac wasn’t as icy here as I had at first imagined, that didn’t mean the tyres had a good grip on the road. I felt how light the bike seemed whenever the wind buffeted it from side to side, or when the road dipped down into a valley and I hit patches of freezing fog. By the time I reached the A1(M) I was stiffening up radically and every muscle and joint had begun to ache. It was hard work keeping focussed on the road. It was hard work, too, not letting my mind drift off into thoughts of central heating and chicken stew.
Nearly home now, one very persistent thought kept going through my head. It was this: in all of my two-and-a-half-hour journey through busy traffic, I hadn't seen another bike – not a single one.
What conclusion, I thought, should I draw from this?
By the time I got into the house, I was not just stiff and achey but my stomach had tied itself into a ferocious knot. I felt sick from the tension and the cold. I sat down in front of the fire and then stayed there without moving for at least half-an-hour before I could even think about getting up or, as hungry as I was, getting myself something to eat.
While I sat there I thought about the day: the SV's electrics had behaved themselves; the engine had run well. With the new front forks she was handling even better than before. The ride home had been painful but challenging - raw but enlivening. I began to laugh.
What is this stuff? I was satisfied. In my mind it had been a good day.
Sometimes I think I’ve got it really bad.
. I hadn't made the mental adjustment: this wasn't the SV. The Daytona's a totally different bike in every way. The seating position is more radical. Her girth is more noticeable between your legs. She's a real old-style racing bike.
.)