Before the age of eleven I cycled a lot with my Dad. Mum was unimpressed. “How far are you taking that boy?” He’d answer: “Never more than 11km.” It wasn’t really a lie. In later years retracing the routes I can confirm we had not been further than 11km in a straight line from home in those first two years. The actual distances travelled were more like 50km and in our last years together it got to around 100.
Dad loved cycling. In the late 1960’s he toured Europe. Leaving no diaries or photos he got as far as Austria at least – as my mum reported when they drove to Halstadt lake for her to swim. He knew where the best cafes and ice cream shops were in remote towns and villages along the way as “he’d been there before on his bicycle.”
Most of our destinations were vague features on the map. I marched on gravel around ruined manor houses, ran around earthworks he called Devils Dyke (actually a disused railway line). We never found where Diamond End was despite searching dozens of times. Some mysteries were never solved. It was real adventure.
There were mishaps. Our lunch box once detached from the rack and was deliberately run over by a malicious driver. On a hot day wearing only shorts I fell into a bed of stinging nettles. Another time I crashed and smashed my knee open. He told me it would seize solid if I stopped pedalling – I triumphantly made it home without stopping. On our last adventure together in 1985 he got run over. That brought home the reality that the road – like the sea – is deadly as well as having a certain romance to it.
We make our own mythology. I’m a road warrior. I’ve blundered into the back end of riots, acted as bodyguard for runners on long distance routes through rough towns, been security for a film crew in London at night and rescued a few crash victims sprawled in the road with the debris of their machines around them. I cycled around Tokyo in rush hour, scared off train muggers and threatened pickpockets in busy foreign cities. I’ve slept rough under bushes, in rail or coach stations, on boat decks, on tarmac under a parked car. I slept fully clothed and booted in a drug hostel, climbed out of a moving truck window to secure a load and guarded a coach from a commando like stowaway who had caused the driver all sorts of problems. I fought the terrain too: Cycling my 64km of the London to Paris triathlon relay I pushed the big gear up the hills in memory of a lost friend and wondered if my Dad had pedalled the same road out of Boulogne as well. I felt sure he had.
I mostly travel alone, sometimes with friends, occasionally with idiots. Each option has downsides and benefits. The narrator from the Monkey TV series dispensed wisdom between the violence: “It is better to travel alone than with a fool – but what might two fools do?”
Next week I’m travelling with two road warriors to Denmark by car, plane, on foot, coach and maybe a train too. There will laughter, adventure and some fighting – the results of which I shall tell on my return.
See you down the road.
