One night in Turin vs One night in Kiev

I watched England play Italy the other night.

It was the quarter final so as usual they got knocked out on penalties.

I had been quite satisfied earlier in the tournament with their effort and with their attempts to be the best team in the tournament at throwing themselves headlong in the way of the ball to stop it going near the net.  Kicking it in the general direction of a colleague they weren't too good at, but the full length blocking dive, they'd got that off to a tee.

But I was very disappointed in their efforts against Italy.  They were out on their feet from the start of the second half onwards, Rooney looking like he was running in concrete wellies and a lot of the others looking like they were running through treacle.  How come England are always so bloody tired these days?  These are young fit lads!

Anyway, I was pretty much over it before I'd even gone over and switched the telly off.  I don't know if it's just because I'm older, but I don't get upset when England lose anymore.  I just shrug and move on.  Losing to Italy this week or Germany in 2010 just doesn't hurt anymore, not like in 1986 and 1990.  In those days I felt depressed for days afterwards.  It's well documented that I always tend to blame Shilton for these defeats rather than Maradona or the Germans and that may be a bit unfair, because after the Italy game this week I watched a documentary called 'One night in Turin' about England's run to the semi final at the 1990 World Cup and in it Shilton did quite a few good saves, and he also won 125 more caps for England than I did, so on reflection I should probably give him a break.

There were some other things I noticed about the 1990 tournament in this documentary which I'd never noticed before.

That goal that Platt scored against Belgium in the 120th minute came after Gazza ran from his own half and got fouled just outside the Belgian penalty area.  In the 120th minute it was!  And Gazza was leaving people for dead, sprinting past them at speed, with the ball.  And there were other clips of him running with the ball late in games, and it was obvious that he was super-fit, and so were the players around him.  And somehow that made me feel doubly sad about England just folding up at half time the other night. 

Another thing I saw in the documentary from 1990 which I'd never seen before was this.  When Chris Waddle misses the deciding penalty the camera stays on him as he's walking away back to the centre circle and the Germany captain Lothar Matthaus follows him and tries to commiserate with him.  And I thought that was pretty admirable.  His team had just got through the World Cup Final and instead of going and jumping on a pile of Germans, he took the time to try and comfort one of the team he'd just beaten.  I also remember reading in Stuart Pearce's autobiography about how he had to give a urine sample after the match and he couldn't and he was waiting around for a while with a couple of the victorious German side, and instead of making a big deal of just having won, they were quiet and respectful and there was no gloating, and somehow all this gave me a new found respect for the Germans of 1990.

And it also brought back to me how I used to feel watching the England team in 1990, which was exactly half my life ago.  Watching Waddle and Beardsley and Barnes and Lineker and Butcher and Platt and Pearce and Parker and Walker and Wright and even Shilton but especially Gazza.  Running and running from the first minute to the 120th.  And not only running around like headless diving chickens, but running around with purpose and passing the ball to each other, and looking not only good enough to be in the semi final, but looking good enough to win the World Cup.

And I wondered what's gone wrong since then, and why I don't feel like that anymore.

It's not the misery that kills you, it's the comfort of the drying room

If I learned anything from this weekend's bike ride, it's that it's really worth putting the physical training in beforehand, particularly if your brain is wired like mine and it starts looking around for the exit at not even halfway.  The benefit of training is that if your mind goes AWOL, your body might just get you through.

I had a pretty dark spell between about 5 pm on Saturday and 3 am on Sunday, when I wasn't sure I could do it, or even if I still wanted to.  I was grumpy about how wet and cold I was, and how soggy my feet were and how much my eyes and neck hurt and about late we'd arrived in Arnside, and I was grumpy about how many hills there'd been between Kirkby Lonsdale and the coast.  And I was grumpy about a few other things as well.

But if I was mentally shot, my legs were fine.  The memory in my muscles of all the miles I'd done earlier in the year eventually got the signal through to my head around 3 am on Sunday that I was up to the task.  And as soon as I got back on the bike on Sunday, it was the feeling in my legs that gave me the encouragement I needed.  It may be just as well for me I don't pedal with my head.

Sometimes I think that by doing hard things, I will understand how friends of mine do even harder things, and then those things won't seem like such a big deal, but it doesn't seem to work like that.  If anything, it makes them seem even more daunting.  

For example, I only had to get through one dark period between 100 mile bike rides, which was on Saturday night, whereas Graeme on his Land's End to John O'Groats ride had to do that for 8 nights in a row.  That's 8 opportunities to do what I nearly did which was to park the bike and catch the bus to Dark Night of the Soul Town.

And he did the ride we did this weekend in 20 hours last year, without sleep, although in fairness he did say it's easier if you don't stop, and he might have a point.

That's maybe how people do longer distance rides like the longer Audaxes.  Because it's not the misery and the pain and the discomfort that kills you, it's the comfort and the being warm and dry.  I nearly went to sleep in the drying room in the youth hostel on Saturday.  I would probably have turned into a dry husk overnight, but I just wanted to be warm and dry, and stay that way.  It's not easy putting dry feet into wet shoes again knowing that they're going to be in them for another 10 to 12 hours before you can get them off again.  So, in some ways, it may be better to never take them off, until the bitter end.

Having said that, the level of discomfort involved in doing a long distance Audax just sounds like a step too far.  I've heard stories of people who have aimed for a particularly comfortable bus shelter in the middle of the night somewhere so they can catch 20 minutes sleep before carrying on, and it might just be my age, but nothing about that scenario is screaming out to me 'Come and join us!'.

Yes, the thing that worries me most about doing these really long rides, is that if my mind has a habit of bailing on me and catching the broom wagon home, what happens when the legs give up too.

I guess that wherever that were to happen, that's where you'd find me.  

Green Eggs and Ham 2 - This time it's personal

This weekend I have been mostly cycling from Coast to Coast. East to West on Saturday and West to East on Sunday. 108 miles each way. From Redcar to Arnside and back again.

Day One didn’t feel so much like a day of two halves, as a day of four quarters.

The first quarter (Redcar to Northallerton) I could feel myself doing that thing I was trying really hard not to do, which was going too fast, but even going too fast I was still mostly at the back.  Even if you’re trying not to catch them, seeing your co-riders just a little way in front does make you want to pedal faster.

Then quarter two (Northallerton to Wensley) I felt like I was going too slow.  Like a football match with too many fouls in, there were too many stoppages, and even though the A684 had been pretty unpleasant out of Northallerton, once we decided to take the back roads through Newton le Willows from Bedale to Leyburn I felt like I’d turned around and was heading back East.  I couldn’t get into any kind of rhythm, and still being at Wensley at 1.30 with the more difficult half of the day to come, made me worry about what time we’d get to Arnside.

I set off from Wensley by myself, as I really wanted to try and settle into some sort of comfortable pace without anyone else around, and this third quarter I enjoyed.  It was raining but only lightly and the Dales were beautiful and the mist over the hills and the sound of running water was quite relaxing.  Although it had been raining a lot of the day, it was quite warm so I wasn’t getting too chilly.

We stopped at the Moorcock Inn at Garsdale Head at the end of the third quarter and it was noticeably colder up there than it had been lower down.  I probably thought from there that the worst was over as I thought it was pretty much downhill to Sedbergh and Kirkby Lonsdale and then we were nearly there, but then the heavens opened.

Within a couple of minutes I was soaked from head to foot, and the two things happened that always happen to me in heavy rain.  My shoes filled up with water, and the bike computer stopped working.  When it conked out I’d done 82 miles so far.

There was so much rain water in my eyes, and they were stinging so much that I couldn’t see and I had to pull off the road, dry my face, put some warmer clothes on and wait 10 minutes for it to stop raining before I could continue.

By the time I rolled into Sedbergh, there was almost a search party forming to come and look for me.  Gary lent me some safety goggles to keep any more rain out of my sore eyes and as there was only about 25 miles to go I thought we were nearly there.  But we weren’t nearly there at all.

At Kirkby Lonsdale we stopped again to regroup and now there was only about 12 miles left, and it was 20 past 6 and I thought we’re even more nearly there now, but then the whole ride turned into a bizarre surrealistic nightmare of ups and downs and ups and downs.  We did a climb the size of the one I accidentally took us on out of Kendal two years ago, and I was neck and neck with Adam for ages, but I was cycling and he was walking and we were both averaging 3 miles an hour, and it was so not the Tour de France, and every so often he’d get back on and storm past me and I was shouting at him for overtaking me with no training, but then he’d get off and walk some more.  And this big hill wasn’t the only hill.  They seemed to be everywhere, and we must have been getting nearer to the coast but I couldn’t see it,, and this end of day one which I was waiting and hoping for, just wouldn’t seem to arrive.

And even when we got to Arnside, Arnside seemed to go on for miles before we got to the sea, and then we had to walk up a massive hill to the youth hostel.  We’d missed the chance of an evening meal in the hostel by being so late, and I was so wet and cold that I just wanted to go to bed, and it took me about 20 minutes of sitting on a chair staring into space before I could get my wet clothes off, and I had to put Ruth’s shoes on to go to the pub because mine were so wet, and they were two sizes too small, and this made me hobble, and by the time we got to the pub (The Albion), the chef had his hat and coat on and he was heading off down the road, and the landlady had to go and grab him and tell him to do some more cooking and so thankfully with seconds to spare, we got an evening meal, and I’m glad we did.

And the pub had some live music on, and although the songs all sounded the same, the nice welcome off the bar staff and the food and the music made me feel a whole lot better about Arnside, which had seemed in the rain and the dark when we arrived to be about as welcoming as the end of Full Metal Jacket.

I did entertain some fears on Saturday night that I might not be able to do Day Two.  My eyes were hurting, and I had a stiff neck and a headache, and a bit of walking around in someone else’s shoes didn’t help.  By the time we got back from the pub it was nearly 11 and I couldn’t believe we were setting off again at 9 am.

Before I went to bed I drank a bottle of energy drink and then I had another one at 3 am, and while I was drinking this second one I started to think more positively about Day Two.  This was my reasoning at 3 am.

Day One had been hard, but a lot of the hardness had come from not knowing how hard it was going to be.  The last 30 miles or so with the hills and the rain had really tested me, but Day Two I knew I’d be doing the 30 miles on unfamiliar roads first, not at the end and once we got to Dent I knew the route, and there wasn’t any unknown bits.  Also, all day on the first day my legs had felt strong, so I reasoned I could probably do the pedalling all right.  Also, Day Two we’d be getting closer to the finish and to home all the time, and also the weather forecast said it was going to be dry, and also we might have a tailwind.  And in the planning, I’d always regarded Day One as being the hardest day.  All these things I was thinking and so around 3 am I stopped thinking I couldn’t do it, and I started knowing that I could.

Unfortunately my mood was dampened somewhat when I went to get my clothes out of the drying room at 7.30 am.  Although my clothes were dry, my shoes were still like two massive hyper-absorbent sponges that seemed just as full of water as the day before.

As soon as I got back on the bike on Day Two, I felt good.  My legs didn’t feel like legs that had done 100 miles the day before, they felt like brand new legs, and as I rolled down to the hill to the pier I felt pretty positive, helped by the fact that it was almost sunny.

In the pub the night before, the route for Day Two had been altered to avoid all the ups and downs of the end of Day One, and although this meant riding on the A65 to Kirkby Lonsdale which wasn’t ideal, it was good enough.  There was a nice flat part out of Arnside along the sea front which mirrored the start of our C2C in 2010 from Walney only that time on the other side of the Estuary (or whatever it is) and feeling the wind behind me strengthened my feeling that today was going to be a lot easier than yesterday.

I forgot where the bridge was in Kirkby Lonsdale where I was supposed to meet up with everyone and so I spent about 10 minutes pointlessly riding round the town, and although this was a waste of time, it seemed like a nice town to be wasting my time in.

I stopped a man who was passing by and asked him the way to Dent, and he pointed me in the right direction for the bridge, and he seemed to think I was a bit nuts going to Dent because it’s hilly that way, and I didn’t bother to tell him I was only going to Dent on the way to Redcar, because he would probably have called me an ambulance and asked for me to be put into care in the community.

I did spend a bit of time after that moaning to Stephen and Graeme about things I hadn’t liked about Day One, but then if ever there was a cure for moaning it’s the road from Barbon to Dent.  I don’t know if that Dale has got a name, but it was beautiful.  Graeme described it as a hidden gem, and it was, and it was at that point that the frustrations of yesterday seemed to fade away, because roads like this are the reasons that any of us ride bikes  (sometimes I wonder if I even am a cyclist, but I think I probably am now, after this weekend).

We found our way to Dent and as we rode through Dentdale we were overtaken by quite a few road cyclists doing what turned out to be the White Rose Challenge (the long route), and we had a bit of fun with some of them on the big hill up to Newby Head casually chatting to them, and mentioning in passing that we were on our way to Redcar, and that that was where we’d set off from yesterday.

From the top of Newby Head we had that big descent into Hawes, although I must have misremembered it because some of it I actually had to pedal on this time, and I rode by myself on that lovely road from Hawes to Askrigg which I loved so much on our last Coast to Coast, and I loved it again.

Although I felt really strong, and I was confident of making it all the way, I was concerned that by the time we got to Askrigg for lunch it was nearly 2 and we’d only done 45 miles out of 108.  At this rate it was looking like a 9 o’clock finish.

But from there on, we picked up speed.  At Leyburn at nearly 3 pm we had another stop for food, and at this point I had the sobering thought that this was where we’d started the final day of our last Coast to Coast and so we effectively still had a full day’s ride to do starting at 3 pm.  But then the sun came out, and for the first time this weekend I took my raincoat off, and I had bare arms and a Green Eggs and Ham T-shirt on, and as my legs were still feeling strong I set off as fast as I could down the A684 first to Bedale and then to Northallerton, and I was riding with Graeme and Stephen and we were all wearing matching tops and we were laughing and feeling good.

And by 4 pm we were in Northallerton, and suddenly a 7 pm finish looked more likely.  But we were never going to get to Redcar by milling round a car park so I set off again, and buoyed by the reassurance of being almost on home soil and being able to see the Cleveland Hills, our hills, I rode some more, and finally after being a bit spread apart during the weekend, we all managed to ride together in a group, and I wondered if we’d been doing some of that Forming Storming and Norming that groups do and now we were Performing.

We stopped at Hutton Rudby and all had a drink together, and I accidentally had a drink of cider which seemed to affect me in approximately the same way that Kryptonite affects Superman as I felt a bit sluggish afterwards, but it was nice to sit round and half a laugh, with a dog barking on the roof.

And before long we were back in Redcar and there was a cheering crowd to meet us, and the Pollitts had brought champagne, and I drank some of it straight out of the bottle like they do at the end of the Grand Prix, and then someone told me that there were glasses, so I had a glass of champagne and a Snickers.

I doubt that  necking champagne straight out of the bottle and eating a Snickers at the same time is recommended in Debrett’s Guide to Etiquette, but I don’t imagine those ladies who walk round with books on their heads do many Coast to Coast bike rides either.  But we did.  Twice.

People who do challenges, when interviewed, often spout a load of crap about what they found out about themselves while doing the challenge.

Well, the only thing I found out on this trip was that all those bloody horrible rides I did to train for it, in the end paid off because they had put some stuff into my legs that made it possible for me to do the thing I'd trained for, and that's probably the point of training.  And it deserved to be called a challenge, because lots of it was challenging, and I'd like to say I remained relentlessly positive throughout, but I didn't, but it didn't matter whether I felt positive or not, because I kept pedalling anyway, until it was over, and then I stopped, and at the end I did something I've never done before, I kissed my bike, and I know it's stupid to kiss inanimate objects, but if you're going to do something difficult, it helps to have equipment that doesn't let you down, and it didn't, and I had that feeling as I was riding up to the Sea Front in Redcar like I had in the last 10 minutes of my last A Level exam, when I put my pen down and just watched the clock wind down the last few minutes, because by then I knew I’d done everything I could and there’s a satisfaction that comes at that point that’s a distant relation of the apprehension you feel at the start of something, when you know you’re probably capable of doing it, but you can’t quite be sure, because you haven’t started it yet, and so there’s no evidence.

Well, I not only started it, but I finished it too, so now I know I can do it.  People were there to see it, and there are photos too.  And in some of them I look like a lab technician who has just had an experiment go horribly wrong in his face, but there are photos all the same.

So, well done to me, and to everyone else who rode with me, and to everyone who supported us, either directly or indirectly.

Thanks to all the children for lending us their dads on Father’s Day, and to all the wives who willingly tolerate their husbands going off on these slightly nuts lycra clad adventures,  especially to Tracey for lending us Tim on his birthday.

Thanks to everyone who made donations to the charity, and finally thanks in advance to all those people who are going to have to spend sizeable chunks of their futures listening to us go on about how great we once were…when we cycled Coast to Coast in a day, and then just to prove it wasn’t a fluke, we did it again.



 for another perspective on the trip, see Graeme's ride report here

for those who enjoyed this, here is the story of our original coast to coast in 2010 which had less miles, but more accidents

I like people more than places

I was applying for a job the other day, and the application form asked me the question ‘What inspires you?’.  And after I thought about it for a while, this is what I wrote.

People inspire me.

I’ve done quite a bit of travelling in my life, and although I like to go to new places and see new things, I’m usually interested not so much in where I’m going, as in who I’m going with.

When I was 15 I went to Neuschwannstein, the fairy tale castle from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, but I can’t remember the first thing about it and I don’t have any pictures of it either.  What I do have pictures of are the people I went with (especially the girls), stood outside the castle, as I was generally more interested in them than I was in a building.

I also got to hang around Munich and the English Garden quite a bit on that trip, but I haven’t got any pictures of that either.  I do have some more pictures of girls though (I was 15, who wouldn‘t?, I tastefully decided not to photograph all the topless women I saw or the naked man who kept trying to get us to play badminton with him though, so I did operate with some semblance of decorum).

Similarly, when I went to India in January this year, although I went there partly to see the Taj Mahal (which included a 12 hour trip in a taxi there and back where someone tried to get me to pay money to look at a monkey and another man with a sword opened a car door for me at the services, and we had to fire our tour guide because we just wanted to enjoy it without words), I went there mainly to hang out with Dean (and briefly with Elsa), and while I was there I was more inspired by the people I met than the places I went to.

If I’d met Shah Jahan himself, and he’d told me all about his wife and what he loved about her, I probably would have understood the Taj Mahal more, but in the end for me, it was just a building, and not even an easy one to get to at that (and I had my polos confiscated by the Army).

On reflection that day I went to the Taj Mahal I probably should have stayed in the Hotel Ajanta all day.  I could have spent those 15 hours having a leisurely breakfast, lunch and dinner in the hotel, striving and failing to get the things I’d ordered but being brought other stuff instead, in that marvellously random way they used to feed me over there in Upsidedownland.

Sometimes I felt more like a friend or a member of the family than a paying customer at the Ajanta.  And not always in a good way. Sometimes I got the distinct impression that I was getting on their nerves asking them stuff all the time, and they wished I’d go away, and conversely I sometimes found their behaviour completely incomprehensible and sometimes I didn’t have a bloody clue what was going on.  Like I said, it was just like a family.

Also better than the Taj Mahal was the goofy waiter in the orange hoodie from the Hotel Godawari who brought me my Paneer Butter Massala, He was running around delivering dishes of food while a man was hammering a door frame and the restaurant seemed to be still being built around us.  It was so the opposite of corporate, and I really liked that about it.

I liked it more because it was such a contrast from the faux corporateness of the Big Bite in Meerut the day before, which was like Fawlty Towers, only with a much more rude man in charge.  I’m sure I’ll always remember the face of the waiter at the Big Bite who was so disinterested and surly, until we gave him a big tip that is (we were being ironic) and he suddenly turned into Mr Smiley Shakey Hands Man.

And I’ll certainly always remember the quizzical looks I saw on the faces of the local residents as Dean and I got ourselves funnelled by Google maps down the ever narrower back alleys of Delhi until we were virtually riding through people’s back gardens.

It was only when we got trapped with our fully laden bikes between a man pushing a cart full of bricks and an old lady in a chair that we realised we had our map set to walking directions rather than road directions.  Thankfully the old lady, politely and without any fuss, lifted her chair over her head to let us through, or we’d still be there now.

And that bloody rickshaw driver who tried to take us down the Spice Marrrket, and who told us ’You happy, I’m happy’ but then managed to disprove this by leaving everyone unhappy.  And the little leathery tuk tuk driver with the bad teeth who followed us round  for fucking hours near India Gate (it was like being tracked by Tommy Lee Jones US Marshall character in the Fugitive) until he got moved on by the Army.  And the other much nicer tuktuk driver who told us to catch the number 11 bus, and made sure we didn‘t forget the number by tapping us on both knees and saying one and one equals eleven (I thought it equalled two, but this is India)..

I do sometimes feel awed by buildings and other things made out of bricks and other construction materials, and although I was pretty knocked out by seeing the Berlin Wall in 1985 the reality of that divide came home to me much more powerfully two years later when I met a retired lady from Leipzig on a train who was going to meet her sister in the West.

She hadn’t seen her sister for 22 years because they were living on opposite sides of the wall when Germany was turned from one country into two.  The matter of fact way she told her story made the Wall more real to me than seeing watchtowers and guards and the Wall itself.

And I went to Venice once, but the thing I remember most isn’t the Bridge of Sighs or St Mark’s Square but running around with water pistols shooting at my friends and being shot at, and if ever there was a city suited to the use of water pistols, Venice is it.  And the lady who ran the ice cream parlour in Padua that was the first place I’d ever been that had 30 flavours of ice cream, and hanging out in the café over the road from the hotel with my friends, playing King of Boxer, where I kept getting knocked out by a little computer man called Brown Pants.  The people and the emotions I still remember, but the buildings I don’t.

The fact that people mean more to me than places is the very reason I can do a 100 mile bike ride and remember no scenery whatsoever but I can remember the cantankerous woman in the Ford Fiesta van who was driving round on a beautiful summer’s day in a car full of urinal cubes and toilet rolls, and who not only beeped at me, but stopped to make lots of negative comments about cyclists.

And I remember less about the views I saw on Saturday climbing Hartside than I do about the incredulous cyclist who was doing his best to smash up his carbon fibre bike at the café at the top by repeatedly dropping it on the floor.

And it’s probably why I like cycle touring with Ruth, rather than on my own, because it’s not what I’ve seen that counts, but who I saw it with.  Without someone to say ‘Do you remember that time that we….?’ to, I don’t think I’d want to go.

Yes, buildings are all very nice, and they’re quite useful for keeping the rain off, but in the end they’re just buildings.  And they don’t really inspire me.  But people do….

Anyway, that’s what I wrote, so that’s probably another employer I won’t hear back from……

Riding up Hartside, eating sausages and not setting children on fire

I've been to church camp before, and I've ridden up Hartside before.  The last time I did both was 4 years ago in the summer of 2008.  The ascent of Hartside went pretty well that year, but a mixture of arthritis, thin sleeping mats and hurricane strength winds left me crying in the night on the camping weekend (although the day trip to Brimham Rocks was very nice I remember).

The 2012 edition of the camping weekend turned out to be much better.  I'm on stronger drugs now, and this time it was Woody the dog who was in a bad way with his joints, so lucky me, but not so lucky for him.

Mains Farm Kirkoswald - with bikes

Ruth and I arrived at the campsite (Mains Farm at Kirkoswald) at 5 pm on Friday, and pretty much as soon as we did, it started raining.  Thankfully the Holdsworths had a gazebo, and so we sat under that for the evening, and after I'd eaten some chilli and crisps that Ruth made earlier (not the crisps), I somehow managed to find myself seated next to Rebecca Walters as she was dishing out burgers and sausages to some small people with quite small appetites, and as some of the kids couldn't eat some of the sausages because they had chillis in, I got some of the leftovers, although I didn't want to appear totally greedy, so I shared the last few with Woody the dog.  He was so knackered from walking round all day, he was lying in the rain and refusing to move, and that's exactly the sort of situation that sausages can help you out of.  Having been in a state approximating his 4 years previously, I thought it only right to send some food his way.

By Saturday morning, it had thankfully stopped raining.  Ruth and I had planned to ride up Hartside and down into Alston, and despite some tempting invitations to go walking instead, that's what we decided to do.  We did however seem to have chosen to do it the same weekend as about a quarter of a million people had decided to ride their bikes coast to coast.  There were even groups of children in hi-vis waistcoasts doing it with the help of men with walkie talkies and luggage transfers and everything.

Hartside Cafe - Full of coast to coasters

Arriving at the Hartside cafe made me realise what nice bikes Ruth and I have got.  Some of the bikes parked up there when we arrived looked like they'd been fished out of a skip, or failing that, the local canal.  I haven't seen anything like it, since I saw John Munro riding a bike with perished tyres and an orange chain on our own Coast to Coast in 2010.

But things are not always as they appear, and the bike does not make the man (or the woman or the boy or the girl).  On the way up Hartside we were overtaken by a man going hell for leather on a bike that looked worse than the one I gave to the rag and bone man a couple of years ago.  Ruth shouted to him as he powered past us with his veins nearly bulging out of his head that he was in his big ring, but on closer inspection he only had a big ring.  The bike only seemed to have about 6 gears in total and he was in his lowest already, which may have explained why he was giving it everything he had, whereas we were just sauntering up in our granny gears.

So there was him, and then at the Hartside cafe at the top of the climb there was his polar opposite, a guy on some carbon thing in replica gear with about a million gears, who looked every inch the cyclist.  Until he started speaking that was.  First of all, he didn't so much as throw his bike down, but let it fall over against a brick wall, I shielded my eyes, just in case some shattered carbon came my way.  He was talking to his mate, and he was absolutely incredulous, at the fact that it was uphill all the way to the top of what is a massive hill.  What was he expecting? To freewheel to the top of the Pennines?  I didn't have the heart to mention that Ruth and I had found the whole thing rather easy.

It's oh so easy, if you have a bike with gears

The original plan had been to go into the cafe for something to eat, but the queue was massive, and so we decided to postpone our crumble eating till we got to Alston.  As we came out, team replica carbon guy was still there, and his carbon thing was on the floor again.  We left quietly before he started jumping up and down on it.

The climb for us had been lovely.  Ruth was on good form, and we rode up together chatting, and looking at the view, and it was lovely.  The only downside was that I kind of wished that one of the many Coast to Coasters who overtook us on the climb had asked me if I was doing the Coast to Coast as well, because I wanted to say 'Yeah, I'm doing it there and back over 2 days next week, I'm just doing this for fun'  That's the kind of demoralising statement more at home on the lips of my friend Graeme, that I don't get to make very often, and I didn't get to make it this time either.

After deciding that we didn't want either to queue up behind the million people buying chips and cake at the Hartside Cafe, or to get bits of shattered carbon in our eyes when that guy finally smashed his bike in, we rolled down the hill into Alston, and I got some crumble there.  Not apple, as advertised, but rhubarb, and strawberry.  Ruth had soup.

The cafe stop in Alston was nice, but pretty much as soon as we left, we were soaked from head to foot by a very heavy shower.  I'd been pretty critical prior to the trip of Ruth's purchase of some waterproof walking boots with SPDs that she had bought before we left, with the intention of being able to combine cycling and hill walking, but these soon came into their own as my shoes completely filled with water in about 5 minutes.  It's also a sign to me that the rain is fairly heavy, when my bike computer stops working because it's full of water, which also happened.

The view from our tent - I'm already up see

The man at the campsite had estimated a Kirkoswald-Hartside-Alston-Brampton-Kirkoswald circular route to be around 32 miles whereas it turned out to be nearer 50.  As he runs a business ferrying C2Cers areound as well as running a campsite, maybe he's used to lying to cyclists to make what they're about to do seem not so bad.

After taking nearly 2 hours to do the 15 miles to Alston I was a bit worried about the time, but from there it was actually quite easy.  The nearly 20 miles we had to do on the A689 between Alston and Brampton were not only pleasantly downhill for the most part, but also pretty much traffic free.  We had intended to get a hot drink in Brampton but by the time we got there the cafes were all closed so we sat on a newly installed bench next to a skip and ate two boiled eggs each and a banana.  A passing resident of Brampton was good enough to advise us that the bench was brand new 'But it won't last 5 minutes round here, it'll soon be vandalised, you can't have anything these days' or words to that effect.  Nice and optimistic I thought, she made me look positively chirpy, and my feet were soaked.

After the boiled egg stop we followed a nice B road through Castle Carrock and Croglin back to the campsite at Kirkoswald, and arrived there about 7 pm.

Can we stop riding yet, and eat some sausages?

Because I'd spent the morning bringing Ruth cups of tea and porridge in the tent, and as my feet were still soaked, she agreed to cook the sausages we'd brought with us from home, and I was glad we'd hired a brazier for the evening, as I needed to pretty much insert my feet directly into it for the next 4 hours to avoid them freezing off.

Do you remember those old cartoon postcards  you could buy that had a little cartoon boy and girl on them and they said 'Love is....'?.  Well as I sat freezing in my camping chair waiting for my sausages, I looked across at Ruth with her rain soaked hair, and it occurred to me that although this is too big to fit on a postcard

'Love is....Watching your wife (who is looking a bit bedraggled) cook sausages on a Trangia, when there are children running everywhere trying to toast marshmallows on a brazier, and there's an arthritiic dog running round with a massive lead trailing behind him trying to entangle himself in not only the burning brazier, but the Trangia.  And the Trangia keeps setting on fire because the fat coming off the sausages is too hot, and as your wife is gamely battling on, doing her best not to set fire to children and a hungry dog, the really amazing star finder thing she's got on her phone, which I've just found, isn't half as interesting as watching toddlers with burning marshmallows on the end of sticks and a dog swerving and running haphazardly in all directions near a flaming Trangia and brazier.  And it's even more surprising they're not on fire, because there's fat shooting out in all directions out of the sausages and the burning Trangia, and there's probably some on their clothes, and I'm sitting there with an empty bowl and having had some crisps as a starter, and she's enduring all this to make sausages for me, and I think that's what love is......'  Like I said, too long for a postcard.

Some Royals who were also camping there

Just before the evening ended, and it was all dusky, and you couldn't see much anymore, Woody the dog with his arthritis and emboldened by leftovers, decided it was an opportune time to go and imitate the action of a wolf and stand on his back legs and go and bark loudly at the man who'd been dressed all weekend as a giant lizard..  It brought memories flooding back of the embarrassment that can come from owning a big stupid dog, as Rebecca had to go and retrieve her own big stupid dog, from trying to attack a grown man in lizard pyjamas.

Woody the dog - who hates lizards

'He doesn't like your costume', she explained before she realised what she was saying, and to be honest none of us did, we all thought it was weird, but the dog was only one of us stupid and honest enough to tackle the man head on.  We'd just been walking in wide arcs around his tent for two days, but Woody took a more Trinny and Susannah approach to the matter in hand.  The next morning Lizardman packed up his tent good and early and was seen to come back from the toilets in normal clothes with his costume in a bag, and I think that makes it 1-0 to Woody.

So, after a few hours of eating sausages and nearly setting my legs on fire in the brazier, and watching Woody chase a big lizard I went to bed, and for a brief few seconds I was the last one up, which I never am, and then the next morning I was the first one up, which I never am, and it was my turn with the Trangia again, and I made tea and porridge on it, and I think that's what love is too.

Team Photo - sausages have all been eaten

And as we were all gathering together for the traditional team photo at the end, I thought back on how great the whole weekend had been, and I remembered why I love going on these communal trips.  It's because of all the brilliant families who go on them too, who are not only great company, but who speak nicely to each other and to their children, and who more often than not, give me free sausages....

Things I learned on holiday in Scotland.

Some things I learned while I was away last week.

I can do camping (although it's much easier when it's not raining).  Now that we've got decent sleeping mats and a Trangia I can totally do it, although I prefer sites where I can bag a picnic table rather than have to cook on the floor.

I like being outside all day.  If you stay in B&B or a hostel it's two or so hours after waking before you're outside, but with a tent, you just open the side door and you're out there.  Sometimes the best two hours of the day were those two hours that would have been lost in other types of accommodation.

My painful and dry eyes are a lot less painful and dry when I'm outside all day.  The only time they hurt was when I was driving the car to and from the start / finish.  Even with the wind in them, the lack of looking at TV and computer screens was good for them.

I need to take asthma inhalers less when I'm outside all day.

I didn't miss TV at all.  Especially the news, soaps, gameshows and reality TV.  I don't generally watch these anyway, but I sometimes accidentally turn them on.

I missed the internet a bit, but I realised I don't need to be on it as much as I usually am when I'm at home.

I don't much like cycling uphill on a fully laden bike.  On the whole, this is too much effort.

I'm never going to do a 300k Audax.  We rode some of the first 60K of the Mull it Over route and it was bloody hilly.  There's no way I'm doing that at the start of a much longer ride.

I don't like moving on every day.  I don't like riding all day not knowing where I'll be sleeping that night.
Staying in the same place for two or more days gives me time to feel at home, and I feel much more relaxed cycling all day knowing that the tent is all set up for me to come back to.

I much prefer travelling by ferry than by train.  The bike spaces are bigger and it's easier to get away from nutters who you meet on board.

I don't like turning up at the train station with a fully laden bike, and trying to get on a train I'm not booked onto.  I much prefer it when I've booked a space.

I need to get the balance right between activity and relaxation.  Sometimes I really resent having to do stuff, like riding the bike, especially when we've got a really long way to go, but I usually enjoy sitting around not doing much.  I'm not sure if 46 hours of riding the bike in 11 days wasn't just a little bit too much.

Maybe I need to give Scotland a rest for a while now.  I've spent about 7 weeks there during the last 3 years.  I've been to Glasgow, Edinburgh, Moffat, Lanark, New Lanark, Innerleithen, Melrose, Kelso, Scott's View, I've cycled along the Tweed to Edinburgh, and from Glasgow to Inverness.  I've cycled round the Isle of Arran, and the Isle of Islay, and I've seen Jura from every angle, I've been to Iona and I've been to the Kintyre Peninsula and to Argyll and Bute, and I've been all over the Isle of Mull.  And I'm still only at the beginning.  It's not even the end of the beginning.

But if I try to see it all, it could take forever and it might drive me mad.  I already wake up in the middle of the night in my tent and I don't know if I'm going to Tayinloan or Taynuilt or Tayvallich tomorrow and I don't know if I've been to Lochgilphead or Lochearnhead or Lochgoilhead yesterday.

All I know is, I've seen some of it, and some of the some of it I've seen is pretty good.  But there's good stuff everywhere, and some of it is just over the next hill, so I might go see some of that instead for a while.

Hell is other people, said Jean-Paul Sartre, I wonder if he'd just been on a train

One thing I hate about trains is that sometimes they let nutters on.  And usually they let them book tickets to sit next to us.

Last year on the way to Glasgow in May the train operating company managed to only sell 3 first class tickets to Glasgow on the day we were travelling.  Two to Ruth and me, and one to a really loud polo crunching woman who they thoughtfully seated right next to us.  Oh, and the really loud humming she did along to her Ipod, it was nearly enough for me to stick a plastic fork up her nose.

When we were travelling back from Gretna at the end of the same trip, we managed to get sat next to a table full of daft arse lads on a stag do, boasting about their sexual exploits and knocking back about 20 beers each during the course of the one hour journey from Carlisle to Newcastle.  That's not the kind of thing you can sleep next to if you try.  Even earphones don't drown them out.

So I thought I'd seen it all, until we got on the train from Oban to Glasgow on Saturday.  I know they recently made a series about Del Boy and Rodney, the pre Only Fools and Horses years.  Well, I think I managed to get the train with a young Rab C Nesbitt and his wife on Saturday.

Ruth and I were sat in a double seat with about 4 panniers and we had plenty of room, but this guy and his wife decided they needed four chairs and a table each.  That was stunning enough, but they decided to choose two tables about half a train apart, and then shout down the train at each other in virtually unintelligible Glaswegian.

When the train stopped at Crianlarich this Einstein got off the train and ordered some bacon sandwiches, but they came with all the wrong fillings in (no tomatoes or onions), which didn't come as a huge surprise to me, as I needed a translator to understand what he was going on about, so no doubt the caterers had the same problems.

He seemed to be either so stupid or out of his skull on drugs that if he'd stuck his head out of the train window, and it had been hit by another passing train, I'm not sure he would have felt it.

And then he managed to spill coffee everywhere, and he emptied the whole train toilet of toilet paper to wipe it up, and even then it took him about an hour.  He was a walking disaster.

The really worrying thing was that at one point he seemed to be communicating on a mobile phone to a very young child and giving operating instructions over said device on how to use a toaster.  My God, I thought, if he's giving out safety information, someone's really in trouble.

But he saved the best till last.  As Ruth and I had 7 bike bags, 2 bikes and a tent between us, we thought it might be sensible to let the other passengers off the train before we tried to get all our stuff off, but the train coming to a standstill seemed to remove even the small amount of inertia he had, and after barging into me, he just stood in the aisle, like he was auditioning for Madame Tussauds.  Ruth stood behind him for ages, waiting patiently for her presence to register, but in the end I just pushed past him.  Otherwise, we could still be there now.

One of the really nice things about travelling is the nice people you meet, who give you tips and advice on cool places to go, and things to do, but then on the other hand, you sometimes strike it unlucky and have to share your personal space with people who make you want to jump straight out the train window.  That's probably why the windows don't open, and you have to hit them with a safety hammer to get out.

It's all a far cry from the British Rail adverts of old in which people's feet are melting into big comfortable slippers as they are whisked in a state of nirvana past the wonderful British countryside.

I don't suppose they would sell as many tickets, if they showed a picture of a tired cyclist and his bike being crushed against the windows of the bike compartment by a load of drunken lads and lasses on their way to get hammered in York on a Saturday lunchtime.

Ah well, better luck next time!

Scotland Part Three - Why does anyone go anywhere?

The Isle of Mull is very beautiful, and apart from being bloody hilly, is very nice to cycle on.

However, the road from Craignure to Fionnphort is often full of coaches, taking people to the Island of Iona.  And if you're going to cycle it between the hours of 10 and 5, you're going to have to spend a lot of time in passing places, waiting for coaches to pass.  

I always wonder when I go to places that get a lot of tourists.  Why do people want to go there?  And often, even if I don't understand why they do, I like to watch people, and how they behave when they get there.  If it has some meaning for them, I try to show some respect for that, even if I've no idea what they're getting out of it.

I enjoyed watching people arrive at Jami Masjid in Old Delhi.  Families who seemed full of joy at arriving at the end of their pilgrimage.  Iona seems to be a similar place of pilgrimage.

It seemed to be largely old people and people in anoraks who were on Iona.  Some of the people in anoraks were a bit scruffy, or at least it seemed that way to me  And some of the old people seemed to be literally on their last legs.  But somehow they had managed to get themselves there.  Whatever comfort or inspiration they were looking for, I hope they found it.  The old lady who could barely walk off the ferry, but who was determined to do so anyway, I hope it did her some good.

It did have a very peaceful feeling there, and the pleasure of visiting there was helped by the fact that in the time it took us to cycle the three miles from one side of the island to the other, all the clouds blew away, and it became a brilliant blue day, the sky and sea in perfect harmony.

I sat on top of a hill for a while, probably the highest spot on the island and I took some panoramic shots of the scenery all around me, and I felt a little bit powerful for a short time, and I got a bit giddy, and imagined I was the King of Iona, and I imagined that I could chin and knock out anyone who came to challenge me, including Jimmy 76 from Tobermory, who I would cantilever onto his back with the minimum of effort, as soon as he started talking.

The view from the hill was the first time that Scotland looked like it had in April, with stunning blue skies, and sandy beaches, and it reminded me of being on Islay.

Ruth went into the Abbey to look at some ancient and religious things for a while, and although I didn't, there was something about the people who had bothered to travel there to look at stuff that made me feel part of something bigger than me, and I drank some chocolate milk, and bought some batteries that worked, and we saw some dolphins (or maybe they were harbour porpoises, I'm not sure) from the ferry and we had an evening ride out to Bunessan where we had a fairly uninspiring meal at the Argyll Arms, where they charged us to use the Wi-fi and home seemed a long way away, and not an easy place to get to in two days time.  But after looking at various permutations, the train from Oban to Ardrossan seemed to be the best bet.

The next morning it was similarly blue, and Atlantic coast-like and we decided to take the scenic route back to Salen.  As usual we didn't break any land speed records though, and this wasn't helped by stopping at the charity shop at Bunessan for half an hour on the way out to log all my miles for the trip on Bikejournal, and then we stopped at the Smithy at Pennyghael for some delicious scones, and some tea from a non-spilling teapot, and it was all served by a man whose name I never asked who had been in the Army and who now lives in Pennyghael making scones and pots of tea, and we sat and chatted to him for a while and threw a ball for his dogs and watched his ducks nearly go under the wheels of a passing car, and he was a pleasure to meet.

We also stopped at the shop at Pennyghael, and saw the nice Geordie lady again, and I asked her what it was like here in the winter, and she said 'Like this, but colder', which made me wonder if I'd asked a stupid question, like when I asked the girl what to do to get into the Dark Sky Park in Galloway Forest, and she just said 'Come at night'.

We took the scenic route back to Salen, and unlike Loch Awe, it lived up to its name.  On the way up the big hill we saw a sea eagle, and when we got round the bend at the top it was one of the greatest descents ever, and the coast road had views like you wouldn't believe, and the last two days made sense of all the days of being melted and dehydrated on the way here, and I didn't think about it being the last day, I just enjoyed being there, and I was glad to see it all blue and beautiful, and I took loads of photos, but they probably don't convey the bigness of the sky and the sea.

And before long we were in Salen, and it had all been easier than we thought, and we camped again at Craignure, and got up at 6 am the next morning and caught the 6.45 ferry back to Oban, and from there we caught two trains back to Ardrossan with a walk across Glasgow in the middle of them.  And as I listened to the pipers and marching bands I remembered the last time I walked into Central Station in Glasgow, and then I had a bike in a bag, after getting back from India, and here I was again, at the end of an adventure.

It was a 4 and a half hour drive home from Ardrossan, and as we reached the outskirts of the town, we passed the blackened remains of the wind turbine that had melted earlier in the year, in the high winds.  And as we thought back over the good and bad of the last two weeks, the heatstroke, and the midgies, and the airless climbs through the hills, we remembered being here last year in May, seeing dog walkers being blown over in the wind, and people fleeing the ash cloud, and days and days of sideways rain, and we reflected that, as always in Scotland, although not everything had gone right for us these past two weeks, things could have been a whole lot worse.