Category Archives: Cycling
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
