Romantic Rides
Unfortunately, during lockdown, I developed acute symptoms of that most British of ailments; ‘the-fear-of-being-seen-to-be-not-doing-the-right-thing’. My internet aided self-diagnosis was based on a number of factors including the loss of personal taste and opinion, the development of a mild ‘tutt’ in the roof of my mouth during close pavement encounters, an unhealthy addiction to rolling news reports and a paralysing anxiety to stay indoors. An unfortunate side effect of catching this disease known to spread like wild-fire through the middle classes was that I racked the bike and began a very short-lived experiment in running; perhaps more accurately - jogging. This running/jogging/walking lark quickly became a necessary evil to stave off the beer and crisp kgs and prevent WFH frustrations boiling over into potentially costly and violent interventions with office IT equipment. Very soon, however, I began to miss the open road, the freedom of a long weekend ride and being able to plot a line on a map and satisfy said line via petrol station junk food and time on the pedals. Like many people during this time I was quite amazed by what I didn’t realise I missed until it was taken away. Riding to geographically insignificant places for an awful night’s sleep is definitely high on that list, somewhere between ‘going to work’ and the Dolphin’s late-night disco on Bethnal Green road.
In the end I found the antidote for this audax yearning, lockdown paralysis involved spending hours and hours a day researching routes and planning prospective rides that like everything in 2020 might or might not happen. Pretty soon the time spent fussing over the condition of local bridleways began to spiral into the obsessive and before long I’d set aside a long string of weekends post lockdown to fulfil some of those idly drawn lines on maps in a bid to salvage summer.
The first long ride out was to follow roads east to Essex, then Suffolk, to the sea; Constable country. The clouds towered overhead in heavy brushstrokes of threatening greys tinged with the iridescence of pale blue and yellow. Small settlements with Saxon names flashed past in blurs of wattle, daub and thatch. Flint towers of ancient abbeys punctuated overgrown hedgerows in the otherwise flat landscape of fields that drifted into the horizons haze in shades of scorched yellows and vibrant green. The time out of London paying little heed to anything other than the settings I was passing through was bliss, the long-awaited taste of tonic for the soul.
The following weekend, kitted with bivvy essentials of strong coffee and porridge I pressed on further into Norfolk and the northern coastline of East Anglia. Here large skies seemed to dominate the canvas in even greater proportions as land seeped out to sea through intricate and complex rivulets of salt marsh and sand. The blurred boundary of our island state ebbed and swelled with the passing tide and given the current debate of identity and race was on mind as I pedalled it seemed to offer a much more favourable metaphor for our countries border than the white cliff mentality of recent politics. As darkness fell, a sharp sea breeze whipped through the tall grasses and I sought shelter within the desolate beachscape I was now riding through. The night was spent shuffling uncomfortably as the wind lapped at the thin shell of my bivvy and I woke several times as the full moon shook off wisps of clouds to illuminate my exposed camp in the dunes. The following morning, I made breakfast from the shelter of a bird lookout to a soundtrack of early curlew calls and gull cries that swirled overhead in the mornings bluster. I crawled along the rest of the coastline before heading south once again for a painfully windy return to reality.
I have always been drawn to the romantic ideal that the humble bicycle is an immensely powerful tool of personal liberation and social mobility. In his book ‘Lost Lanes North’ Jack Thurston talks of the Clarion bicycle clubs of the north that ‘combined a quaint, homespun, English form of socialism with a love of fellowship and the outdoor life’. Indeed, my own fate is woven into this historic fabric, my thrifty northern Grandparents met in one such club escaping the brick and gritstone chimney strewn skyline of Industrial Yorkshire by bike for the wilderness of the Pennines and Lakes. This unquenchable thirst for the outdoors was instilled into my father who with my mum based our own upbringing in amongst the moors, becks, valleys and fells of rural north. I, however, had different plans and left this idyllic setting to pay far too much rent for far too little real estate on a busy road in Hackney. Now without access to the trainlines that ensured I got my prescribed dose of Cumbrian air I was left to watch my relatives roam (relatively) free from the screen of our whats app group as I lived out my lofty metropolitan dreams from an 8 square metre office/kitchen with my new colleague/wife to be. I began to realise just how important those places, vistas and feelings of the fells were to satisfying internal stirrings.
Coleridge, Wordsworth and their romantic band of opium fuelled nature lovers knew of this importance. They were a big part of my locally biased curriculum growing up. At art school years later, I would often quote from the likes of Ruskin as somehow, they positioned my own world within the art world in which I was striving to belong. Truth be told however I never fully understood quite how one man could be moved to such outpourings of emotions on stumbling across a bunch of Daffodils until I spent this past fifteen weeks trapped in a second floor flat on a busy thoroughfare for siren blaring emergency vehicles.
The following week I planned to ride back to these homelands from London via my brother’s new digs in the Yorkshire Dales. I had ridden home once before, that time I was too eager to explore unridden roads in the Peak District that I paid little attention to the contour lines and burnt my last match somewhere near Buxton, cracking at the sight of the fifth 20% gradient sign I’d seen that morning. In a bid to claw back some time on a promised ETA I took a direct A road style approach through a rainy Manchester and Preston and arrived home not quite in the right frame of mind for a packed weekend of social engagements. This time would be different, I was extremely motivated, had luckily garnered some endurance fitness over the past weeks forays and I’d somehow built this venture up in my mind with the same romantic ideals of personal liberation and free spirit of those early Clarion clubs. This would be a ceremonial ride drawing a significant line under personal lockdown angst. Of course, 2020 has taught us that expectations and realities don’t always see eye to eye, something that I remembered not far out of London as I sat donning emergency layers of waterproofs and insulation that had optimistically been packed far out of ease. The riding was carefree though and inner smiles grew as regimented arable plains slowly transitioned to the rambling dry walled outlines of northern sheep farms. After some 15 hours or so on the pedals I finally called it a day on sight of a rather grand stone bus shelter built by the parish of Otley.
It took the full pack of crepes to get going the next day but the roads were empty and the peace of cycling in those dawn hours is enough motivation to resist the snooze setting. Cycling through Ilkley and Skipton and along the Leeds-Liverpool canal, once the throbbing artery of the industrial revolution, now the sleepy gravel route to escape the A59 put me into a reflective state of mind. The Victorian grandeur of Skipton’s civic monuments and mills framed the rolling hills of the Pennines behind and as I climbed out of Gargrave on the empty and moody moor road to Settle I thought back to my grandparents escaping the bustle and smoke, flat caps for helmets and a slice of stand pie and freedom in the hills. I thought back further still to Wordsworth and his ‘romantic’ reaction to the industrial age. Having taken the freedom of outdoor life for granted for most of my life, lockdown was a lesson in just how much I need these two-wheeled escapades to keep the scales tipped in the right direction. It is no surprise that the recent lockdown has brought with it a spike in bike sales as people strive for those emotions of personal liberation that have been amiss now for far too long.
Given the thread of cycling’s own history is intertwined with the continuing clamour for political, social and economic reform in these lands I can only hope that this upward trend in cycling brings with it a new wave of appreciation for the outdoors, fellowship and freedom accessed by more. With a bit of luck, perhaps the politics of progressive change will be afoot once more.
