Category Archives: Cycling
Dreams Postponed – the Bike Trip is Off
Farewell and Welcome World, and all too soon, Welcome Home balloons at Wychcroft
Ah well. It was worth the planning and the effort. But in the event, I’m not going to do the Great-2012-Bike-Trip-Of-A-Lifetime to Moscow and Hanoi.
So instead of images from the road to Moscow and then from Beijing to Hanoi, let me illustrate this blog entry first (left) with the lovely balloons from Meg and Jeff that first saw me off and then, rather too soon, welcomed me home, followed below (gallery at the end of the blog) by pictures from a most restorative 10 days just concluded on our lovely canal boat the Molly May.
Why the final decision not to go ahead, even with a bit of a delay?
I’ll spare you the boring health details, but as I had finally to acknowledge on a slow, slow potter with Sue around the canals north of Warwick, my arthritic neck and nerves are in no state to allow me to cycle 5000 miles – and sadly, for the moment anyway, probably not even 50 (although I might give a short ride a go in the coming weeks).
Molly May at dusk with the woodburner pumping out the smoke and the heat
Day Two and Eating off a Plane
Eating of a crashed Cessna's wing.
I know I said I wouldn’t post every day, but tonight, sitting in a warm pub in Old Warden, Bedfordshire, home of the world-renowned Shuttleworth collection of vintage aeroplanes which I’ll visit tomorrow, I couldn’t resist this one, of dinner this evening on a wing and a perhaps even a prayer.
I’m preparing to camp tonight, in a car park opposite the entrance to said collection, where this afternoon I found this Cessna, rather than worse for wear. But an ideal and stable base for my first outing with my new Primus stove.
Instant noodles. Worked a treat, and perfect after a fabulous day’s riding from Judy and Julia and Jeremy near Banbury, a rich and warming 60 miles due East into much less of a headwind than I’d expected. Read the rest of this entry
Up and Away
And yes, Raven thanks to her Rohloff hub has VERY low gears
So, the journey begins.
Forty miles north-east from Cirencester to friends near Banbury, and neither wind nor rain, nor even hills proved as challenging as I persuaded myself to expect.
Averaging just eight miles an hour, progress across Europe will be slow – heading for Cambridge tomorrow, then Harwich, Hook of Holland, Munster, Bielefeld, Hanover, Magdeburg and Berlin, and on to Moscow via the Baltic (details anon).
But good news is that I have probably already negotiated the biggest hills between Cirencester and Russia, along the old Fosse Way Roman road out of the Cotswolds. Read the rest of this entry
Forecast of 45mph headwinds – why am I doing this?
Best first on three wheels
With departure set for the day after tomorrow, just 36 hours away, I was amused trawling old photos to find this first recorded evidence of my passion for spoked wheels.
Early experiments with wheels - ca 1951
I guess I’m under a year on the left, and about three on the trike on right. The photos will have been taken in the summers of 1951 and 1953 respectively in the garden of the tiny farmhouse at Duckshole (wonderful name) just outside Holt in North Norfolk from which we moved in 1953.
Not sure why I look so glum, as little brother Hugh, 18 months younger, tests his own smaller-wheeled hobby horse in the background.
But nearly 60 years ago, neither of us will have been bothered (elegant segue coming here into the purpose of today’s post) by the winds the Met Office is predicting for the rest of this week down here in the other agricultural end of England in the Cotswolds.
Today, Monday, was gorgeous – ridiculously and global warmingly so like the past fortnight – but just in time for my planned departure 40 miles up the Fosse Way North-East to old friend Judy in Banbury, we’re warned to expect viciously cold headwinds on Wednesday from that precise direction, gusting to a truly horrible 45mph.
I’m not trying to break any records with this bike trip, and need to nurse sore necks and knees anyway, so perhaps I should delay departure until the winds abate? Read the rest of this entry
One week left, Raven packed – and ready to star in The Standard
MB and Raven loaded up a week before departure
So, Raven is readied, panniers, tent and bags test-mounted and photographs taken for an article on the pending adventure scheduled for next Thursday’s local Standard newspaper in the Cotswolds. Fame at last…
Below right is how my study looked with everything piled up in one great heap before being packed. (Note that Myshkin, aka Wussum the cat, is not coming with me – he’s trying here to find his way to his food bowl near the French windows, and miffed.)
Left, what it all looked like a few hours later. A lovely experience again to feel Raven loaded beneath me, with her low-low centre of gravity and so solid on the road.
Wussum seeking his bowl, buried behind the pile
Twenty-five kilos of bike, and the same again in luggage. That’s not light at all, so progress from next Wednesday will be slow and plodding.
If you’re curious about what I’ve packed into those bags, feel free to browse through my Take on Big Bike Trip list, compiled over the last decade of distance solo cycling (especially Budapest retour four years ago) and of tandeming with Sue. It’s posted here knowing how useful I have found similar lists compiled by other long-distancers in the past.
Fundraising progress (£1500 and rising!) and the elasticity of time
Audi at the helm. Where she has always liked to be...
Two weeks today, and I’m off. Blimey.
Moscow, Beijing and beyond beckon, and nerves both emotionally and physically seem to be charging up, as I bid farewell to my very-nearly-85-year-old Mum (on the right at Braunston last weekend having a go at the tiller of our narrowboat the Molly May), and both greet and also very shortly thereafter wave goodbye to daughter Katharine, briefly over in the UK from her new New Zealand home with her partner Mela.
Self and Mater aboard Molly May
To these two, we meet again in September – an aeon, an awful lot of kilometres, but also just a tiny skip away.
And to Mum – hang on in there. It’s the longest we’ll not have seen each other since my correspondent days in the 80s, but six months will be gone in a flash.
So, suddenly it’s all very serious, prompting me to note just how curiously time stretches, elongates, contracts at times like this, as affairs are tidied up, relationships packaged ready for departure, as body and muscles and, again, nerves, are stretched and exercised ready for 60-80 miles a day, and I get used to the idea of a long separation from partner, friends, choirs, family… Read the rest of this entry
26 days to go: Client endings & sobering reminder why maybe best to have quit journalism
The Client's Chair
With a rapidly closing 26 days to go until I pedal into the sunrise (going East, after all), three things to muse about in this weekend’s blog:
- The ending (at least for now) of the work of therapy during this coming week with some 20 brave individuals who’ve sat in that green chair in the CCPE’s 4th floor room 41 near Paddington for months and sometimes years, sharing profound personal journeys;
- A reminder from my old journalist friend Graham Earnshaw, now in Shanghai, of why perhaps it was a good thing for all concerned that I quit the work of the correspondent in 1992; and
- Chook alert (read on…)
First, the all-of-a-sudden winding down of psychotherapy at a time of my rather than my clients’ choosing is proving an extraordinary, and in some ways surprisingly rewarding experience, for many of those I work with as well as for me.
One month to go, and thanks for generous donations…
One month tomorrow, Wednesday April 4th, the journey begins – reminding me of setting off four years ago this month on my so far longest, 4000-mile, round trip to Budapest, and of the nervous thrill of the first day’s journey across (picture l.) Salisbury Plain with its unexploded bombs.
“Danger – do not leave the road. Do not touch anything. It may explode and kill you.”
That’s pretty sobering and clear, but more on that below.
Time here at the top of this post (curious how blogs end up writing themselves in orders one really hadn’t expected) for the first of what I hope will be many expressions of warmest thanks to wonderful friends and colleagues who, as I write, have already donated an amazing £868.75, including Gift Aid tax relief, to the good causes for which I’m encouraging sponsorship of my ride.
That’s brilliant and humbling, awesome even (as my daughter Kat would say), and some of you have been quite astonishingly generous in the size of your contribution.
The Rory Peck Trust, the EMDR’s UK-based Humanitarian Assistance Programme, and sotte voce to one side (taking 20% of donations against 40% each for the other two, and by the way we have two brilliant concerts coming up tonight and next Saturday) my chamber choir Cantores are all already most grateful.
So, with two weeks’ worth of work with clients still to go, a blog post to write (later) on what winding down with clients in this way is like, and with organisational ducks increasingly in a row, so far – with waterproof-glove-protected fingers crossed – so good. More precisely:
Read the rest of this entry
Raven – a Thorn bicycle made for the longest of distances
Raven atop Minchinhampton Common
Cycling over to Stroud for my penultimate psychotherapy supervision session before heading off on (change of date) Wednesday April 4 prompted thoughts about a) the (at least temporary) ending of therapy for so many of my clients at once, and at a time not of their choosing, and b) the bike I’ll be using to cycle to Moscow, and then, with luck and a following wind, down through China.
I’ll post separately and later on the challenges of bringing therapy to an end as elegantly and supportively as possible – and finding just how powerfully and positively almost all the wonderful and brave people I work with are rising to that challenge of sorting stuff while there’s time.
But here, may I introduce the object with which I am to have an even closer relationship for the months of April to August, going by the name of Raven – my extremely sturdy black steel steed, veteran of 4000 miles to Budapest and back and of 500 miles into Scotland a couple of years ago, and my all-time favourite bicycle. Read the rest of this entry
Cycle Trip Preparations – 2 months to go
The View from Cirencester Park
With less than eight weeks to go until I set off on April 3 from the front door of our Wychcroft home in Cirencester (Sue, as a writer of books on the Old Ways, wanted to call our new home Witchcraft, but that really was a step too far), it’s time to start blogging more regularly on the preparations.
Not that there are many followers yet, but I’m hoping that might improve (and thanks to you personally, dear friend or colleague, for being here right now), since one of the aspects of the bike ride first to Moscow and then down through China that I’m most looking forward to is this blog.
You might think that entirely predictable for a former hack with 30 years of foreign reporting and editing experience.
But in fact, for this ex-journo to enjoy the prospect of writing is something of a first. Or rather, a second, given that blogging, to my great surprise, was one of the most enjoyable parts of my last long bike trip to Budapest and back in 2008. Read the rest of this entry
Looking Forward and Back
Having begun seriously to spread the word about the bike trip, including newsletters to EMDR colleagues and the Cantores Choir mailing list, I guess I need to start registering how the preparations for my own journey starting early April are coming along.
Curious how looking back helps with the looking forward.
As I peruse Google Maps for the exact route to Moscow, and remember I’ve forgotten to do my morning stretches, and adjust my spokes to stop Raven’s front wheel binding on the brake block, I’ve been scanning in hundreds of old photos from my/our late father’s family albums.
Curiously, he never showed them to us when he was still alive, so considering all the psychotherapy of the past 20 years exploring and healing (largely) parental legacy, it’s been quite a journey into the past. Read the rest of this entry
Guinness is not always good for you…
Not Always Good for You
The last moments seen right of nervous good health back at the end of July…
I’ve been waiting to post these thoughts for four months as my left arm and hand’s ulnar nerve has begun, at last, to heal from a very nasty uncharacteristically (honest) alcohol-related, zero miles-per-hour crash in Dublin at the end of July.
The great Round-the-World cycle tour probably won’t happen as a result, and aged just over 60 with what MRI scans and X-rays inform me is a not-unusual-for-the-age arthritic neck, I’ve learned more than ever I would have wished to about how nerves can get damaged and then slowly – VERY slowly – begin to heal .
It should have been, after all, a very safe Cirencester Church Choir’s summer trip to Dublin, singing the weekend services at St Patrick’s Cathedral. So how did it happen? Read the rest of this entry
Tandeming through the Berlin Wall, anno 1978
As Europe remembers the opening of the Berlin Wall 20 years ago this week, I can’t resist posting a picture of what it used to be like in the old days – as Jutta and I cycled through Checkpoint Charlie on a tandem.
I was working for Reuters at the time, and we lived in East Berlin, crossing the Wall pretty much daily between West and East, me on my reporting assignments and Jutta attending her teacher training at the Free University.
As we pedalled up, the East German border guards (who we actually knew quite well) were friendly but flummoxed.
“Herr Gott nochmal,” they said, “Good grief! If we let you through on a tandem today, we’ll have to let people through on horses tomorrow.”
I never did see a horse go through Checkpoint Charlie. Read the rest of this entry
Glasgow Therapists' Conference Wakes Up to Climate Change
Beginning seriously to speak in public about my own firm conclusion that climate change catastrophe is now inevitable, and relatively soon (10 years? 15? Certainly no more than 25), is a bit like Coming Out. Read the rest of this entry
Home At Last… Older and Nicer Perhaps?
So – home at last.
This final blog needed to wait a few days since, as computers do, my mainframe took one look at me after three months away, 10kg the lighter and as fit as I’ve ever been, allowed me briefly to copy all my pictures off the camera on to the hard drive, deleting them from the memory card as I did, then crashed.
Never mind. Our friendly computer repair man here in Cirencester has sorted it out, and all is now back in action, and I can access my final frames.
It’s good to be back after 4170 miles, driving carefully as instructed left, and enjoying our gorgeous Wychcroft home (see below), and the warmest of welcomes from an at first understandably nervous Sue. I was too, but within minutes, it was almost as if I’d never been away, but positively so.
What have I learned? A lot. Much of which I’ve already, really, written about. It’s been serious fun keeping the blog, and it’s been so good to see so many old and newer friends along the way, connecting and reconnecting across Europe.
My good friend and colleague at the BBC, veteran and brilliant Radio 4 Documentaries Producer Simon Elmes, asked me before I set off at Easter if I’d be interested in doing a radio programme about my Euro-journey, pegged to next year’s 20th annniversary of the fall of Communism and our continent’s reunification. Jonathan Marks has also wondered whether there’s a programme in here.But blogging and the internet made it anything but a lonely experience – something which perhaps, as a creature very much in need of constant connection, I had most feared.
My little PDA and the Blackberry deal with O2 worked brilliantly and relatively inexpensively, considering how much I emailed and the roaming calls I took. I was even able to keep up a little bit of psychotherapeutic continuity with clients old and new, and now look forward to taking that up again rather more formally, and from a normal phone/in a normal consulting room.
Who’s been reading this? I’m not entirely sure, but as I said in an earlier blog, you know who you are. Sue, see below, wasn’t among them – but hey, she’s had other exciting things to do. It wasn’t about reaching huge numbers of folk. A blog more for me, really, than for you. I do know, though, that my daily readers included my very lovely daughter Katharine. Who has just got a First Class Honours degree in Drama at Exeter University. Whoop! whoop! as she would say.
So, finally, a photo of Sue, Raven, me and Wychcroft in the background. Hens and cats missing, but they too were delightfully welcoming.
Journey over. For the time being. Iberian peninsula next year? Perhaps Beijing-Katmandu? Sue has even said she might come with me and we could do that on the tandem.
But first, in August, a week on the BBC Club narrow boat in Northern Wales, then three weeks tandeming with Sue up the Loire valley in France, chateau-after-chateau. Hoping for less rain and less wind than I had cycling the upper reaches of said river in April.
With the warmest of wishes. If you’ve read this, that means you really did read the blog. Thanks.
Mark
