One strike and I’m out
On the Wednesday and Thursday about four weeks ago my union called a two-day strike in support of pay claims for its lower-paid members. The real incomes of these workers have been falling for years and are now plummeting headlong towards the poverty line. In theory, it's a classic case for strike action but in the current economic climate and without the support of other unions I didn’t think it would do much good. It would be a gesture – nothing more.
Whatever the likely outcome, I won’t, as a matter of principle, cross a picket line, so the action gave me two glorious days of freedom in the middle of the working week. They were unpaid days of course - but freedom feels all the sweeter when it is truly free.
And so, at 6.30 on that Wednesday morning I rose a free man, staggered downstairs and spent five minutes trying to wake up by pouring cold water over myself. After that, I sat down for half an hour to recover from the trauma. Breakfast was lingered over; BBC 7 digital radio was listened to (vaguely); and the morning frittered itself away. Only when I was able to stand up without feeling the immediate need to sit back down again did I wheel the Daytona out onto the street, fire it up, and ride it the two-and-a-half miles through the morning traffic to my dealer’s workshop in the Letchworth industrial area. By the time I arrived, it must have been about 8 o’clock.
There wasn’t anything wrong with the bike (at least nothing I was aware of at that time) it just needed a new back tyre - badly. This fact was brought home to me dramatically the week before. In a sudden spell of wet weather, the rear end had started sliding all over the place, sending my adrenalin levels soaring. When I checked the tread, it was barely legal. The tyre was an ordinary road-going Bridgestone 014 (not the best tyre Bridgestone has ever made, in my opinion) and had only a couple of thousand miles wear on it. Or so I thought.
Just as I was beginning to work up a fine head of steamy indignation over it, a small detail dropped into my thoughts. (:oops:) Generally, I treat a balding tyre as an opportunity to try out a different make or type. That means I change both. Last time I didn’t: I stuck with the Bridgestones. Only the front tyre was replaced, so the back one probably had more like 6,000 miles of wear on it, not the 2,000 I had imagined. Hmm! These senior moments are getting more frequent. It’s worrying.
At 8 o’clock I was still barely compos mentis. My being up and about at such an ungodly hour carried the risk of incurring several kinds of psychological damage, of course, but I'd braved it in the innocent hope that the mechanic would get the job done straight away, leaving me with the rest of the day to go for a long motorcycle ride. A lazy trip out through the Suffolk countryside and on to the coast seemed an ideal way of spending a gift-day like this. Unfortunately, reality was not in sympathy with my expectations that morning and Simon, the mechanic told me that he had a job on the stand to finish first. He couldn’t change the tyre till… oh! about half-eleven.
So, that was that.
I left my lid and jacket with Kev, the bloke on the desk, and then walked the mile back into Letchworth town centre for second-breakfast. I like Kev. He is roughly the same age as me and is equally absent-minded. And though absent-mindedness is not normally a quality I would look for in someone I had just handed my bike keys over to, Kev’s cheerful acceptance of his dilly nature makes me feel a little less… middle-aged.
When he is not at work or riding his motorcycle, Kev does things like hopping on his bicycle and riding off somewhere like… well, how about Turkey, f'r instance! That means he is usually good for some interesting conversation. It's the kind of absent-mindedness I appreciate and would like to acquire.
On my way into town I spotted an old friend deep in discussion with a traffic warden. I was about to shout over to him, but then changed my mind. He appeared to be engaged sweet-talking the traffic warden into letting him leave his Gixxer in a lay-by at the side of a roundabout. Next to the lay-by was a large sign which read, ‘NO PARKING AT ANY TIME.’ I wasn’t particularly surprised to find him trying it on. I’ve been close friends with Ben for a long time, and this is totally in character. Frankly, he’s nuts. He never gets angry; he never accepts ‘no’ for an answer; and he never gives in. He's driven me to countless states of near-homicidal rage and frustration over the years, so my main impulse on this occasion was to feel very sorry for the traffic-warden. Ben didn’t see me and, as he appeared to be doing an impressive job of gently tearning apart the last shreds of the traffic warden’s grip on reality, I left him to it.
I bought a Carl Hiaasen novel at the local indie bookshop, found a outdoor pub table, ordered fish and chips (without the chips) and sat reading in the sun for an hour with a half-pint of cider at my elbow to keep me company. I was still wearing my boots and lower leathers, so I felt bike-ish even though I wasn’t, at that moment, anywhere near my bike. There’s something oddly particular about wearing bike gear. It shifts you sideways into a parallel universe, and gives you an identity that’s quite separate from your non-bike self (if such a thing still exists). It felt good. And sitting at a pub table for breakfast on a sunny weekday morning felt good, too. I think Carl Hiaasen is one of the funniest writers ever.
A few hours later I was back at the dealer’s in a very relaxed mood listening to Simon, giving me the mandatory ‘new tyre spiel.’
“…and ride easy for the next hundred miles, at least. Forget about chicken strips. No heroics!!!”
He grinned at me as he launched that one. Cheeky sod! Simon has known me for four years and likes to wind me up – at least, he tries. He knew perfectly well that there was little chance of me doing anything even mildly risky on the bike. Earlier that morning, I’d been moaning to him about how badly I was riding. I’d gone all squiddly again suddenly: thruppenny-bitting round corners, twitching the throttle, losing concentration. I didn’t tell him the reason for this. It's a little complicated. And a little odd.
Sometimes, after a vist to my osteopath, groups of muscles in my neck, wrists, arms, calves, and pelvis go into slow spasm, then release and then go into spasm again. This can go on day and night for several weeks. It feels very weird and while it’s happening it upsets my co-ordination and concentration – not a lot, but enough to make me want to be more than usually careful on a bike. A couple of months previously, I'd had a spill while out green-laneing. I'd winded myself badly and was now having a course of osteopathic treatment.
What is the cause of this odd reaction? I haven't a clue. I put it down to an engineering fault in my nervous system. It has no known origin and no known remedy. Over the years, I've just come to accept it. And that's all to the good since I am now way out of warranty.
The first time it happened was in the early 1970s. I’d decked my BSA and torn several muscles in my neck and shoulders. (Some things don’t change much, do they?) I started seeing an osteopath and after the fourth or fifth visit the spasming began. The osteopath was merely puzzled, but I was scared shitless – I thought my body was going crazy. Until that time my muscles had been well behaved and performed more-or-less as I expected them to. After that first occurrence I worried about it for months. But eventually I came to realise that there was a very direct and immediate cause: my osteopath; and that after a short while it would go away by itself. Since then, it always has. So it doesn't bother me any more. It just bothers my riding.
It was nearly one o’clock by the time I left the dealer’s on the Daytona - far too late to take that long lazy ride to the coast. But I wasn’t going to commit the crime of wasting a blissfully sunny afternoon doing jobs around the house. No indeed! (Though, god knows, there were plenty of them that urgently needed doing). Instead, I decided to ride out into East Anglia. There was no plan. I'd just ride and see where I ended up.
If you strike out north or east from Hitchin and stick to the minor roads, you are pretty much guaranteed a good day’s riding - most of the routes are bike-friendly and there are some which are, frankly, the dog’s bollocks. There is a whole tangled network of them. They wiggle here; they wiggle there. Tiny, rural villages dot them like dew drops on a spider’s web. I’ve ridden out this way for years and I’m still finding roads and villages that are new to me.
On the afternoon of 'freedom' Wednesday, time collected itself into pools of sunny stillness and the countryside all but fell asleep. There was hardly a breeze. Some of the villages I passed through seemed deserted. If there were people about on the streets, they moved slowly or sat on a bench and didn't move at all.
Some of the villages out here are scruffy and run-of-the-mill with unweeded pavements, neglected gardens and very ordinary looking buildings. Like Willy Loman they feel, no doubt, kinda temporary about themselves. They pay little attention to the way they look and they attract no sympathy.
Others are picture-perfect – far too perfect to be completely real. They are only too aware that the chief reason for their existence is to be admired by passers-by. Take Clare, for instance: Clare is a biggish village lost in the heart of the Suffolk countryside. It’s about as pretty as you can imagine. Its main street meanders unhurriedly between neat greens and rows of old, weathered cottages. In its half-mile length not a shrub is untended; not a blade of grass is unmown and not a single house looks unsightly or neglected. It is certain that the residents of Clare wage a subtle and clandestine campaign of terror, daily, upon the common weed.
Clare blends into the landscape as organically as the foliage that surrounds it. It might seem, to an unwary outsider, like a natural outgrowth of the land whereas, in reality, it is as artfully contrived as my old mum’s apple and blackberry crumble (She did make some wonderful puddings, my mum.)
The rural village in England is more than a place to live. It is a potent symbol whose inner meaning is deeply embedded in the national consciousness. Even dedicated townies are susceptible to the power of this image. Once the hurly burly of their active working lives begins to queiten down, they dream of retiring to a house with a garden somewhere deep in the English countryside. Many have no real intention of actually moving there, but the dream itself is somehow sustaining and the mere existence of the village fulfils an inner need.
An intense and obsessive love-affair with the idea of the village emerged in Britain as soon as it became the first nation on earth to develop a primarily urban culture. You see its power sublimated in the way many people will cultivate even the tiniest patch of city garden or lovingly tend a window box.
There is even a serious academic theory which argues that the decline of manufacturing industry in England is due to the large numbers of capitalist entrepreneurs who give up business as soon as they have made their money and retire to the countryside, there to spend their remaining days living the life of a country squire. And that's another hook for the English traditionalist - the identification of the countryside with the aristocracy whose (supposed) ideals and values are still secretly revered by many.
The English village remains a symbol of peace, tranquillity, security, relaxation, and sanity. To many people it implies an ancient and unhurried way of life rooted in the natural world. In this view, the village is an earthly version of the garden of Eden. Well, that's the myth. The reality is somewhat different. Having grown up in an English village, I can confirm that there is very little about it that is either tranquil or secure. On the contrary, it is often small-minded and full of the most bitter rivalries and in-fighting.
The farmland around Clare and in this part of East Anglia generally is well ordered and intensely cultivated. At this time of year it is past its spring best and has not yet grown into its autumn maturity when rolling fields begin to glow and the evenings capture a kind of eternity. But the hedgerows are plump and full, and on a warm day like this after a period of rain they radiate a lush, deep emerald green.
In this part of East Anglia pasture alternates regularly with arable - cows with corn. The corn was coming along nicely that Wednesday: the wheat was still a little green-looking but in some places the oats and barley were already turning a ruddy golden-brown. The barley would soon be harvested, then malted and fermented and finally brewed into the local ale, ready for serving over the pub bar.
There aren’t a lot of breweries left in Hertfordshire – or in England for that matter but a hundred and fifty years ago it was very different. Around my home town there were dozens of them. Even the church owned some of them. Older people of my grandmother’s generation used to say that there was a time when you could get drunk on the smell just coming down Hitchin Hill.
Back then, almost every ale house from Hitchin to the coast brewed its own highly distinctive (and usually undrinkable) beverage. But as ‘undrinkable’ as it was - at least, to anyone sober enough to notice or care - it wouldn’t give you cholera like the tap water. So it was drunk in huge quantities.
While I was doing some local research, I discovered that nineteenth-century farm labourers round Hitchin regularly consumed twelve pints of beer a day while out working in the fields during the summer. Twelve pints was a standard, and formed part of their agreed wages. That’s a lot of beer to knock back every day of your working life - and it didn’t stop there. At the end of the day, working men would gravitate to the pubs and ale houses where the drinking would continue. There are many accounts which tell how farm labourers and others got theselves completely rat-arsed night after night. Chances are, they wouldn’t make it all the way home by themselves and would end up lying face down in the mud. More often than not their wives would have to go out and look for them and fetch them home in a wheelbarrow.
The inexperienced local police force didn’t have much of a clue how to deal with this mass intoxication. When a local constable found a drunken labourer still on his feet after dark, he would apply a simple test. If the labourer was travelling (roughly) in the direction of his home, he would be left to stagger along as best he could. If he were going in any other direction then the constable would attempt to arrest him and take him to the lock-up for the night.
This was easier said than done, as the drunk would invariably retaliate by kicking the policeman heavily and repeatedly in the shins until he was released. Shin-kicking appears to have been an extremely successful ‘defence’ against the law in the 1850s. Some of the evidence given in the local magistrates courts at the time is hysterically funny and would make a wonderful novel.
One day (maybe when I retire) I plan to write a social history of North Hertfordshire - though not one that my history professor would ever have approved of.
Sometime in the middle of the afternoon I brought the bike to a halt in a remote lay-by at the side of a country road. I stopped because it seemed an inevitable consequence of the weather and my mood and a host of other less tangible things. The sun was hot and the air so warm and thick that it was scarcely breathable. I leaned back on the bike with my head on my pack, stuck my feet up on the fairing and watched the occasional cloud drifting across a brilliant blue sky. The occasional car flashed past (noisy bastrd!). A cool breeze blew across my face. And in five minutes I was fast asleep.
I came to very slowly and (sorry to disappoint) didn’t fall off the bike. I stretched out (as carefully as I could) and yawned – what a feeling! I can’t remember being quite so relaxed since I was a kid. As a teenager, every summer’s day had the potential to turn into a minor miracle; now as an adult, I spend far too much time looking the other way and fretting about things that, in all likelihood will never happen. Life is what goes by when you are thinking of something else. You have to savour the moment while you can.
I have no idea how long I dozed there on the Daytona, but it must have been at least an hour because when I awoke the day was already developing that lazy late afternoon light you sometimes get at this time of year. It was so pleasant that I was sorely tempted to close my eyes again and go back to sleep. I didn’t, but only because there was also a little matter of dinner to attend to. (Life is full of really difficult decisions sometimes.) Eventually, I decided that, whatever time it was, it was time to eat.
Time has always been an issue with me. I don’t wear a watch and haven’t worn one since I was a teenager. Over the years, I’ve learned to do without one. There’s a reason for this - or at least a moment when I made the crucial decision. It’s a slightly embarrassing moment but since it’s motorcycle related, I’ll spill the beans. One evening back in 1969, I went with some mates to the Regal cinema in Hitchin to see ‘
Easy Rider’. Although I now think it is a crappy film, I was a different person then and I thought it was the coolest thing I had ever seen.
Very early on in the film there is a scene where Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper unstrap their watches and throw them onto the side of the road. That’s a very potent symbol which carries all kinds of meanings. At that time, it just seemed super-cool.
When I got home that night, I went up to my bedroom, quietly took off my watch and laid it in a drawer. I never took it out again or wore it. (I have no idea what eventually happened to it.)
Now, I’ve got to admit that taking off a watch and carefully placing it in a bedside drawer doesn’t have quite the same sense of commitment that Peter and Dennis showed but if I’d chucked it away my mum would have killed me. The watch was a present. So, what was a lad to do? Besides, in those days, I still had a problem with letting go. I hadn’t ever slung my leg over a bike - and I wasn’t Peter Fonda either. It was all in the head. (Come to think of it, so was
Easy Rider.)
I liked not wearing a watch. It made me feel a bit more of a rebel and a lot cooler than Robbo (school layabout and Rugby captain). Later on, when I found out that ‘Time’, as we know it, is a nineteenth-century invention, Peter and Dennis began to seem not only cool but politically right on as well. (Though how politically right-on a couple of drug dealers might be is at least questionable.) Mechanically-Derived-Time, I discovered, was invented by Victorian businessmen to regularise factory working hours and railway timetables. It was a symbol of enslavement and I had no wish to be enslaved.
Having made that discovery, I began reading up about the history of time, in earnest. And it was then that I discovered for the first time that if you start to prise apart the seemingly obvious - if you dig down into their real history and their meaning - you always find that nothing is ever quite the way that it seems. Our ordinary minds are socially constructed things and that means they can be deconstructed, too - with fascinating results.
The first thing I read was that before 1850, towns and villages in England all kept their own local time and that everybody's local time was different to everyone else’s. I knew that this applied to social classes as well as places because I remembered that even during my childhood the Priory House clock in Hitchin kept the "King’s time" which was a few minutes behind GMT (or was it ahead? I can’t remember.) How nutty can you get!
And if you traced time back further to the Middle Ages, things got weirder still: In rural Europe, every day had twelve hours of daylight and twelve hours of night. That meant that the length of an hour expanded or contracted throughout the year according to the amount of daylight available. Now that seemed exceedingly cool. I decided that if Time was an invention, life should be perfectly manageable without having it strapped to your wrist all day long – even in the middle of the 20th century. Now, thirty-five years on and still watchless, I have to report back that it is. So why break the habit of a lifetime?
With my fidgeting muscles and a new rear tyre, there was no sense in taking risks on these narrow, twisty lanes and gravelly surfaces - no sense at all. Ha! I kept joyously barrelling into corners whenever the sightlines were good and the impulse came over me to do it - good and strong. If you ride a bike with more horse power than all the local riding stables put together, you just can’t help wanting to hear it snort a little, and feel it gallop beneath you. Time and again, good sense quietly took a pillion seat while the independent man-bike phenomenon took control.
Scared me silly, it did! (But what else would you want or expect from a sports bike?) Petrol and adrenalin – what a combination! I reckon that this was the elixir all those old alchemists spent their lives searching for – not gold, or the philosopher’s stone (Harry Potter nothwithstanding.)
In combination, petrol and adrenalin transform the way you think and feel about yourself and give you a different set of landmarks. Put it this way: off the bike I weigh just under ten-and-a-half stone - that’s 147lb for those who use a less medieval measuring system - and that has a considerable effect on the way I experience myself. Merged with the Triumph I suddenly acquire an additional 450lb or thereabouts (three times my normal weight). Bring on the petrol to provide a few G forces and slinging that combined poundage round a corner at speed significantly alters my relation to gravity and of the way I occupy space. It gives me an enhanced attachment to the physical world. Now add in a few squirts of adrenalin and I don’t only start to feel as solid as an old First World War cannon but positively explosive with it.
Despite all the fun I was having, I began to start feeling annoyed with myself. Being scared and twitchy on a sportsbike seemed self-defeating. It was getting in the way of the thrill. (Call me a junkie, why don’t you!) I was also beginning to feel annoyed with this idiotic, if temporary, muscular condition.
And that feeling was to stay with me, on and off, for several days. Rescue eventually came from an unexpected quarter - Dan Walsh’s new book,
“These are the days that must happen to you” In it he admits that, despite his career as a motorcycle journo, he has always been scared of riding.
He’s not exactly a hero of mine (I’m not nearly as bluntly aggressive or self-destructive as he is) but I do admire his very naked self-acceptance - and above all his writing skills - which are exceptional. I’ve read maybe a dozen motorcycle travel books in the last three months, most are mediocre and the best are merely interesting. Dan Walsh's new book is far superior to any of them! He may get scared when riding a bike, but his writing is always in the zone.
Suddenly, coming up to a seemingly easy corner through a tunnel of trees I had to brake hard - very hard. It suddenly hit me that the turn was going to be a lot tighter than I'd imagined. Wooooooo! That put plenty of adrenalin into the system, I can tell you! I was losing concentration again and had to give myself a talking to about taking unnecessary risks. I don’t often find it easy to rein in my impulses on a bike - especially when I'm in a moody mood, but I do want to survive. It’s a subtle balance.
Half-an-hour later I was seated at another pub table in yet one more immaculately groomed, picture-perfect village. This was Finchingfield, perched prettily up the sides of a shallow valley. There's a small river winding through the middle of it and a village pond, which is home to several families of ducks.
I’ve blogged about Finchingfield before. Its residents have had to come to terms with the fact that their village lies at the hub of a superb network of motorcycling roads and, as a result, has become the stopping off point for hoards of Sunday bikers. On a sunny Sunday afternoon its two pubs and tiny tea-rooms heave with packs of uninvited visitors in boots and leathers. Motorcylists spill out all over the road and up onto the village greens. Seeing all these guys (and a few women) slouching around this quiet village is surreal. The culture clash is extreme. Here in the Suffolk countryside the immemorial tranquility of village life is invaded weekly by the thunder of raw motorcycle energy.
But that's on Sundays. Now, mid-week, and late in the day, the village exudes an air of mild gentility. One or two elderly inhabitants are quietly tending their gardens up on the hill. There is no-one else around. Except, that is, for a young Danish couple sitting near me outside the pub. They are drinking tea and are so obviously engrossed in each other that they have hardly an active presence at all. (I guess they haven’t been together for very long.) Theirs is a little, closed bubble of intensity - a world of its own.
Finchingfield, too, is a self-created world, at pains to be a neat and tidy place, and to create the illusion that its inhabitants lead neat and tidy lives.
F*ck that! (I was trying hard not to be a cynic, but a ragged mood had taken hold of me.)
Who is kidding whom here? I don’t know anyone in the real world whose life matches up to the picture on the chocolate box. Behind the rose hedges and carefully arranged human demeanours lie the same painfully messy existences that we all know so well. Ordinary existence! It’s a minor tragedy of sorts, multiplied over and over by every one of our individual human lives. If you try to hide from that relality it will always come back to bite you. Freud’s ‘return of the repressed’ haunts the bedrooms of decently ordered communities like these. And (if you remember 1984 and have seen the “Company of Wolves”) you might like to guess what abominations creep to the earth’s surface from out of the mouth of the village well at night.
The last time I was seated here at this table with its clean tablecloth and neat place settings there was a particularly big Sunday bike meet going on. Dozens of bike exhausts were emitting a spreading cloud of iconic badness across the wide greens. It was palpable: you could smell it; you could sense it cynically butting up against the pleasantries of village life and giving them the finger.
As I watched, it sometimes seemed to me that the undisturbed life of the village was simply absorbing the fantasy of biker badness and rebellion, dispersing it and making it seem self-indulgent and ridiculous. At other times it was the energy and assertiveness of the bikes which seemed real, their noisiness mocking the pathetic myth of a quiet, contemplative life, untroubled by conflict or passion.
So, where does reality lie? Is it all image and fantasy? Is everything, ultimately subjective? Or can we really reach across to each other and find something enduring? It’s existential crisis time, folks. It's “why-am-I-here”, time. Time to cast off the anchors and sail away alone to... god knows where?
But that’s the problem, isn’t it. In the mythology, bikers are not supposed to have existential crises, only motorcycle accidents. My friend Ben (the guy giving grief to the parking attendant at the lay-by in Letchworth – remember him? - he’s never had an existential crisis in his life. I can guarantee that. His victims are no doubt still recovering from a major head-f*uck having spent time in his company - but that’s a different matter. Ben lives the myth, or the myth lives him. Me: I'm like most people. I’m a 'yin-yang' sort of person, caught permanently between the competing demands of several worlds. I'm a motorcyclist and a villager (originally, at least) so I know the reality behind both myths and that there is no truth in either, just a finger pointing towards our desires. We create our myths to direct our passions and to disguise just how ordinary (tragic but ordinary) life really is. We'd die without them.
A simple example. Back sometime in June this year, I was riding the Daytona home from work when I overtook a young guy on a bicycle just before coming up to some lights at a junction. He was wearing the full lycra kit and had over-developed calves that, in poor light, might have been mistaken for metal hawsers. I have no idea what kind of bee had got into his helmet just then but he pulled up hard beside me at the red light and launched into what I guess he took for a bollocking. Boy, was he pissed off at me. And why? Because I overtook him 100 yards before the lights, apparently and pulled ahead. I was the “Bloody motorcyclist!” It seems I had no appreciation for the needs and sensitivities of cyclists.
“Listen sonny, I’ve already ridden more miles on a bicycle than you ever will. I know what your braking distances are, and what it would take to cut you up, so don’t give me that crap.” I snarled. "Idiot!" He was probably just in a bad mood. (Serious cyclists are always in a bad mood. Have you noticed that? I'm sure you develop a special kind of anti-endorphin if you push yourself to hard on a bicycle.) He chose the wrong moment because I was in a foul mood too.
In a more reflective moment, I realised he was just doing what we all do. To him, I was the “motorcyclist.” Period. (And, at that moment, probably in mine too, to be honest.) It did't occur to him wonder whether I might ride a bicycle as well. And I'm sure it didn't occur to him that I might have a job and a family, paid monthly bills, had weekends off, got sick, liked squash, been in a bad mood etc, etc, etc. One of the most persistent of human tragedies is that we have to reduce everything to simple categories: to think at all we have to think in stereotypes, images, symbols, metaphors, myths. Words themselves are symbols and myths. It takes more vigilance than most of us possess to stop us becoming victims of that need one way or another.
And why am I going on about this? Somehow deep down in my psyche this is really all about losing Di. Don’t ask me for details; I just know it is. I'm only now emerging back into the sunlight after her death and beginning to pick up the threads of an old life again.
For the first time in four years I can sense a way forward. There is a kind of lightness in my thoughts. I no longer feel weighted down by the past. But, curiously, that emergence is making more aware of the place from which I've recently come. ("The bigger the front, the bigger the back.") It has also opened up all the complex fissures in my experience, like I have to sort out these things all over again when I thought I'd laid them to rest years ago. Life doesn't progress, it just goes round and round.
As I sat, mulling over my existential crisis yet again on that sunny Wednesday afternoon in Finchingfield, I imagined I could smell the exhaust fumes of a Sunday meet. That raised me back up into present reality. It's a good rule: when in doubt, just get on your f*cking bike and ride!
It was a relief, to get back onto the open country roads where I could open the throttle or throw the bike into a few more corners. Half an hour later I discovered a whole series of flip flops. They were hysterical, but annoyingly I will probably not be able to find them again: I was riding without a map or a plan and at that moment had no idea where I was. It was a relief, but it didn't restore me to the good mood with which I had started the day.
If the East Anglian landscape had seemed comfortable and familiar earlier, it didn’t any more. Earlier, riding down between tall hedgerows with splashes of sunlight flying through the branches had put a smile and my face. Now, it was filling me with something like rage. Suddenly I was feeling like Ishmael - wanting to board ship out of Nantucket and go kill me a great white whale.
It happens from time to time that I get to feel sick of these twisty, tricky little roads and yearn for something bigger, less cluttered and less civilised. Sometimes, when I feel like this, I take a weekend out and ride north, where real mountains with jagged or broken rock-faces begin to erupt out of the pasture land. I am grateful for broken things because they don't give a damn. They are the very opposite of the careful human labour from which we painstakingly construct our lives. I sometimes get thoroughly sick and tired of being careful.
I dream sometimes of a rough mountain road, going nowhere but up, with me just climbing it forever. It's desperate and exhilirating. The dream never has an end or a resolution. It just goes on and on.
When I get to feel like this I head for the mountains or the sea. They are the only remedies for this kind of acute tension. (There are other, more fundamental remedies of course, but they are not so available right now. For the time being they will have to be sublimated into the landscape.)
(Anyone ever read any H Rider Haggard by the way? - "She", "Alan Quartermain", "The Return of She", "King Solomon's Mines", "The People of the Mist")? Haggard knew all about sublimation. He sublimated all his feelings, turned out a shedload of fascinating and badly written novels, and ended up making a fortune. Now, why didn't I think of that?
When I get it really bad, like now, the north of England just isn't enough, and my thoughts turn south instead where there are real mountains (not just the UK's little 3,000 foot peaks): Australia and South America sound particularly enticing. The next real-life holiday in the Himalayas is coming up soon (I leave on September 2nd). I think that should sort me out for a bit. Or maybe not...! We shall see.
). 
