Wearing matching tops, falling down stairs and picking up Bishops

Last summer I did a Coast to Coast bike ride with some other people, and it went quite well.

We didn't follow one of the routes devised by those nice people at Sustrans.  Instead we made up our own, and it started at Walney Island and finished in Saltburn.  The whole thing was the Chief's idea, but me having ridden a bike quite a lot I soon got involved in the planning and before I knew it I had agreed to be the map man, riding in front and looking for the way.  Before we went, I did a risk assessment, and I decided that there was some, but even sitting at home in a bungalow wrapped in bubble wrap and wearing no socks carries some risk, so I decided to go for it anyway.

It didn't run entirely smoothly, but thankfully none of the mishaps ended up being terminal.  I organised a bike bus to get us over to Barrow on the Thursday night, and they sent a bus which couldn't get up hills, so it took almost as long to get to Barrow as if we rode there.

As we sat around in the pub in Barrow having curry and beer the night before the ride, I looked around at the 14 of us, many of whom don't ride bikes, and I felt very, very afraid.  I looked at Ruth and Suzanne and Graeme, and they looked at me, and then we looked at the others and I thought, this is going to be a disaster.

But it wasn't.  I did a few practice laps of Walney / Barrow before we set off because I didn't want to start the ride by taking a wrong turn into Tesco car park.  This paid off as I took us the right way, and before long we were on the coast road out of Barrow with a massive tailwind going along at 16 mph.  And I looked behind me and we were all in matching tops and it was like being in a team again, like I used to be at school, and it was great, and also worringly easy.  I'd spent months telling everyone how hard and slow cycle touring can be, but this wasn't either of those things..

The beauty of designing your own route is that you can go in a straight line if you want to, and the lack of zig zagging and the use of A and B roads instead of tiny little minor roads with massive hedges on both sides meant that we made it to our lunch stop at Cark in good time.  The sun was out and we had beer and sausage sandwiches, and it all seemed a bit too easy.  Then after lunch we went through a lovely flat bit and we could see hills but we didn't have to go up any, and the only bad bit of the whole day was getting into Kendal, as it has a one way system that doesn't work, as well as lots of roadworks.  Oh, except for Adam falling in a ditch and Clay crashing into a wall, but they were only small blunders and not full-on You've Been Framers. 

So Friday night we sat around outside the Youth Hostel having a few drinks and congratulating ourselves and then we went out for yet more curry.  After the curry I went in to watch Brazil get knocked out of the World Cup by Holland and all was right with the world, until I got a phone call to say that Graeme had been hospitalised.

He had been trying to slide down a banister which sounds fairly innocuous until you saw the banister and the concrete staircase next to it.  I've seen bobsleigh runs which look less scary.  Anyway, he did a few commando rolls down the concrete stairs and managed not to kill himself but only just.  He had an ankle like the end of Misery and a wrist to match.

So off he went to Lancaster to the hospital and the next morning over breakfast I was just saying how lucky he was not falling on his head, and just as I was saying it, Jen fell on her head.  The sound of a small thin person falling over was surprisingly loud.  I suppose when we pass out and we no longer have any muscular control, all we are is just a big bag of water, so it was quite reasonable to make a big bang.  Off she went to the hospital and hopped into the bed that Graeme had just hopped out of.

Some people seemed to be wavering at this point about going on, as things were turning into a slasher movie.  I just wanted to get out of Kendal before any more of us got picked off by someone in a Scream mask.  This was harder than it sounds because the one way system is more of a closed loop that goes round in round in circles with no exits, but eventually we did manage to get out of there.    

I even found a short cut which trimmed 3 miles off the route, but unfortunately the short cut took us up a massive hill.  There were more hills after that, and it was all taking longer than the day before so lunch had to be sandwiches and pop sitting on the floor in the car park in Sedbergh as there wasn't time for lazing around at the pub.  After that, the route became more undulating and there was a lovely stretch through Dentdale to Dent followed by a long and steep climb through and past the Dent Head Viaduct where Frances was waiting to cheer us on at the top. This was followed by a fantastic 7 mile descent into Hawes. I started off at the front on this but was overtaken by almost everyone on the way down.  Most people achieved personal best fastest times ever. I didn't, mostly because I kept the brakes on out of sheer terror.

I was flagging by Askrigg but Ruth bought me some Sprite and a pie with lots of pastry but no filling from the very friendly local shop for local people and we pressed on to Leyburn.  Once in Leyburn we checked in to our dreamy B&B (Eastfield Lodge) which had a magic shower and in only 4 minutes I felt full of life again. Kendal Youth Hostel it was not.

As a group we met up at the Golden Lion in the evening (staff and food were both great,  I had Pork Medallions) and we discussed subjects many and varied including Derek Nimmo as Mr Spock and the statue like goalkeeping of Peter Shilton. As a special magical bonus Argentina got knocked out of the World Cup, and we got to see Maradona looking fat and bemused on the sidelines, instead of out-jumping Shilton for once.

Day 3 got off to a bad start, as I couldn't find Ruth in our B&B and this held up the start.  The wind was horrendous, but thankfully behind us, and off we went again.  After Bedale I started to relax because from there I knew the way and I didn't need the map anymore.

We passed quite close to home, but didn't go there and in Stokesley we picked up a Bishop and he beat us all up some hills in casual clothing and when we got to the top of the Moors we could see the sea, and it was a beautiful sight because the sun had come out, and once I could see the sea, I knew we'd make it, and we did and I felt quite emotional at the end, because I'd found the way from Sea to Sea, and all the hospitalisations that had happened weren't because of me.

It was lovely group to ride with because nobody moaned about anything, and this was helped no end by taking a big happy Welshman along with us, who just kept marvelling at the scenery.

And apart from the hospitalisations, we were lucky.  Because we never had to ride into the wind or in the rain at all.  We had to ride up hills and some of them were big, and it was still an achievement to do it.  But it did help our morale that conditions were favourable, because I have been on cycle tours that descend into farcical river bed bike-dragging in torrential rain and this was not it.

As some famous golfer once said though, the more I practice, the luckier I get, and we deserved our bit of luck, because it was the most overprepared and well-supported Coast to Coast ride in history.  We had not only driven the route in advance, but we had spares for the spares and backup for the backup and even a spare bike, which was just as well, since John Munro turned up on a rustbucket with an orange chain and some sort of soft cheese for tyres.

We had Bob following us round in a giant van full of water and innertubes and we couldn't really go wrong, and we didn't.  And I got to be in another team photo wearing matching tops.  Which hadn't happened to me since I was at school.

Here it is:

We also managed to raise about £3600 for the Great North Air Ambulance as a result of the ride which was a great effort by everyone.

We did have to call a couple of land ambulances out during the ride, so our account wasn't entirely in credit with the ambulance people, but you can't have everything. 

On the left are the ones that finished in Saltburn.  John Munro had to go home early and a couple of the others were in the hospital.

Socrates is dead and Oranges aren't what they used to be

Socrates is dead.  And so is the World Cup.

The 2022 World Cup is going to be played in fridges in the desert and the Dutch have started kicking people

I’m fond of saying that things aren’t what they used to be.  Well, the World Cup isn’t for a start.  The only thing that was like the 70s about the 2010 final was that it reminded me of Carl Douglas and his kung fu fighting.  Van Bommel and De Jong should have been running around in white pyjamas.  I wonder what Rep and Rensenbrink and Willy van der Kerkhof made of it all. 

The first World Cup I ever saw was in 1978, from Argentina. Some of the games were on very late at night and I sneakily watched them in my bedroom on a small black and white TV, with the volume on low so my mum couldn't hear.

This was in the days when I’d only ever seen about 3 football matches live on TV. A couple of England Internationals and the 1978 FA Cup Final when Roger Osbourne wore himself out from kicking the ball into the net and had to be carried off.

But thankfully the two games I remember best from 78 were on in the early evening and I got to watch them downstairs in colour.  They both involved the men in orange, although you didn‘t get the full effect of the orange, because they were playing teams in dark blue so they had to play in white with orange shorts.  No matter though.

They lost 3-2 to Scotland, courtesy of 'that goal' by Archie Gemmill and in the second round they beat Italy 2-1, in a game where the ultra-defensive Italians tried and failed to sit on a 1-0 lead.  In a tournament packed with long-range goals, the two by Ernie Brandts and Arie Haan which defeated the Italians are the two I remember the most. 

Arie Haan would shoot from anywhere.  And Johnny Rep wasn’t bad either.  In fact it was him who finally killed the Scots off with the second goal in the 3-2 defeat.  That was from miles out aswell.

Before the 78 final my primary school became divided into two camps, marching round the playground, either chanting ‘Argentina’ or ‘Those guys in orange.  We’re not really sure if it they’re called Holland or the Netherlands‘.  I was of course in the Orange camp.  Ever since I've always thought there was something special about the men in Orange. Their notion of 'total football' has a beauty about it which is worlds away from the blood and thunder of English football (although I enjoy that too). 

Maybe its just because I’m getting older, but every World Cup since 78 seems to have been worse than the one before and amongst other things, there seems to have been a decline in the art of kicking the ball into the net from a long way off.  Almost every goal in 78 was nearly from the halfway line.  In 1982 we still had Socrates and Eder whacking them in from distance.  In 86 we had Vasily Rats and Belanov.  Italy 90 was a bit of a blip but in USA 94 we had Hagi and Stoichkov who could could still kick the ball where they wanted it to go.  These days most shots seem to end up in the crowd or at the corner flag.

You know, winning isn’t everything.  Most of the teams I’ve seen in the World Cup that have captured the imagination have been knocked out by other teams that were more boring.  The Dutch deserved to win in 78, Socrates and his boys from Brazil were the only Brazil team I’ve ever really got behind, and they got knocked out in 82 by boring Italy.  They managed to lose a game by trying to win it when they only needed a draw.   In 86 the Danes and Belgians were fantastic, but as usual with small nations playing attacking football they lost too. 

In the fantastic book Brilliant Orange, David Winner took us on a wonderful journey through all things Dutch: landscape, art, politics, culture, architecture, and he illustrated brilliantly how a nation's character shapes its football.

You can't always judge a book by its cover, but with this one you can. It is both Brilliant and Orange. 

I’m only glad it was written before the 2010 final.  Otherwise the title would have had to be changed to ‘How the Dutch used to be Brilliant and Orange, but now they’re into Kung Fu Instead’.