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@Wrongcog
Life keeps dealing little challenges out to me at the moment and last week they all got a bit too accumulative for my liking. Basically I was having a crisis of finance and sanity, the studio has been suffering too. Not good. I had planned to be in Suffolk doing a bit of work for my parents but long story short another job has come up and so I had to cancel. That doesn't start until Monday though so I snapped, phoned my folks and said "fuck it I'm coming anyway". I chucked my bike in the back of the car and fled London.
On the way back I was mulling my options. I needed a ride more than anything. If I hadn't got out on two wheels this weekend there could have been murders. When I'm at my wits end I often find them again on a quiet lane with the swish of tyres for company. "I'll go for some serious miles" I thought, "really punish myself - lose myself to exhaustion and geography". Then my thoughts turned to a guy who knows those Suffolk lanes better than anyone I've met. A guy who taught me at primary school in the 80s. He used to teach in old tatty cycling jerseys. Pete is a hippy. A kind and angry activist. Someone I've looked up to since I was 8 years old. He's a guru and he rides bicycles. So I phoned him up. "I ride slow" he said, "pick me up at 2 tomorrow".
By 1 yesterday I was climbing the walls so I got out and looped the lanes near Pete's house for an hour. I slotted in 20 miles and arrived on the dot of 2 at the gate of 'Mellow Yellow' to find Pete beaming, on his carbon steed and ready to ride. No small talk - off we went. Pete set a social pace and we took advantage of the quiet roads to cruise along next to each other shooting shit about his days as a club rider, the lapse in health which kept him off the bike for eight years, his recouperation and his love for all things velo. He's the absolute opposite of a bike snob. He just loves bikes utterly. We talked local history, politics, family, art and he led me around lanes I'd never seen in 15 years of living there as a kid. He showed me the old church he'd been married in and the house he rented for a pound a week. We stopped in an old tea shop for cake with the crappiest lock known to mankind preventing the interference of the criminal underclass of Woolpit. With the wind at our backs as we rounded for home I felt like I might have just reclaimed a bit of self somewhere near the A14 between Bury and Stowmarket.
On return to HQ we had a good sniff around Pete's garage, making up reasons why it should be entirely justifiable for him to keep that steel winter bike even though the old Rourke hanging from the ceiling would surely surpass it on completion. I glanced at the sky, bid Pete farewell and spun my legs like hell for the remaining four miles to my parent's place, racing the rain.
Strava report: slow as fuck. Calories burned: not enough to justify that date cake. Max speed: irrelevant. Conclusion: one of the best rides ever.