And I Would Bike One Hundred Miles

I just started writing a post, then realised I disagreed with what I'd written. I deleted it and started again. I was writing about my frustration with my lack of ability as a songwriter, but then I found that I actually quite like the songs I've written recently, so instead I'm going to write about cycling.

I'm not a regular cyclist. I cycle in bursts. To be fair, when I have somewhere to go and the situation allows it, I will quite often cycle there, but often I have nowhere to go and, when I do, the situation doesn't allow it. For instance, I live about five miles from where I currently work, but for some reason the office is always hot regardless of the weather (it's not a big mystery, I presume it's something to do with insulation); this, coupled with the lugging-boxes-up-and-down-stairs nature of my job, means that I'm usually pretty sweaty at work and need to be pretty liberal with the Lynx Dry to prevent that stereotypical physics student smell. You may not have realised that a stereotypical physics student would smell bad, since this stereotype is often perpetuated through television comedy shows which have no means of transmitting smells, but I assure you from experience that those students who fulfil the thick-glasses, dungeons-and-dragons-T-shirt, pale-skinned, greasy-haired visible part of the stereotype also tend to smell pretty bad, and in some cases really bad. Like, you have to move if they sit next to you. I'm not claiming never to have been a bit lax with showers whilst at university (and I confess to owning and wearing a deeply nerdy Lemmings 2 T-shirt), but these guys are in a different league. Sorry, I digressed a bit - my point was that cycling to work would make me smell bad, especially since, while five miles might not sound much, it's almost all hills.

However, like I said, when I can make a trip by bike, I do try to. Last month, I cycled from home (Hook Norton in north Oxfordshire) to London to see my mate, and it wasn't the first time I'd done it. The journey should have been about eighty-something miles, but I'm pretty sure my ridiculous navigation pushed it over the hundred barrier, at least on the way back (which, you'd have thought, would be a navigationally easier trip since I'd already done it once). I set off around 6am, which is very disciplined for someone as lazy as me. Since the law had ruled out the M40, I set off towards Bicester and the...well, I was going to type the road name here but I can't be bothered to look it up. Possibly the A431, or A341, or something like that. Either way, it soon became a fairly hairy dual carriageway. Cars were zooming past me at seventy-plus miles per hour, and only the little painted bicycles directing me to safety at the slip-roads told me I wasn't doing something horrendously illegal and dumb. Well, they told me I wasn't doing anything illegal, at least.
After many hours of deceptively fast progress, due in part to the navigational simplicity of following a big road with large green-and-yellow signs to London, I crossed the M25 (by means of a flyover (or something, I can't remember), rather than looking both ways and pegging it). To me, as someone who had stupidly and against all advice packed only a road atlas of Britain in which London was confined to one very squiggly-looking page, this meant I was practically at my mate's house. Indeed, when I rang him in his lunch hour (this was a weekday and although I didn't have a job at the time, he did) at 2pm to tell him I had gone past Watford and was near Barnet, he sounded surprised and reminded me that he wouldn't be back from work until after five. Of course, he was assuming I had some sort of pre-planned route through the city, or perhaps an A to Z of London, or at least the intention of buying one. But I had none of these things; all I had was the vague notion that I should head for the Thames because my mate lived somewhere on the other side of it.
Now, let me set the scene in case you're not familiar with England - London is fucking huge. And dense. And busy. It quickly became apparent that an occasional Cotswold cyclist such as myself believing I could negotiate central London just because it was legally possible was something akin to my pet cat attempting to take down a wildebeest because it had seen a lion do it on the telly. There are buses, taxis, pedestrians, weird traffic lights and, most scary of all, an expectation that I wasn't used to that I should not just stop to look at the map when I felt like it (not that the few square inches of green spaghetti that represented central London on my atlas were being of much assistance anyway). Unfortunately, my own stubbornness chose this point in the journey to kick in, and I decided that it couldn't be that hard to find the Thames. In fact, once I'd realised that every bus stop had a map that featured the river and that going downhill was clearly a sensible thing to do when searching for water, I found it pretty quickly. Unfortunately, this was after about two hours of arseing (arsing?) about in a very large city. Still, the up side (upside?) was that I timed my arrival to perfection, with my mate only overtaking me on the bus about five minutes from his house. Admittedly, as he overtook me he noticed with some concern that I was going what he termed 'the wrong way', but it can't have been that wrong or I wouldn't have found his house.
It's late now. This story doesn't really have an ending, I just wanted to describe my lack of common sense in a cycling context. If it did have an ending, I suppose it was a happy one, in that I spent a lovely couple of days in the company of my friend before safely journeying back to see my family, including my wonderful Aunt, Uncle and cousin on our canal boat, which was moored at such a place that it knocked a good hour off my journey home. In fact, that's a very happy ending. The moral of the story is therefore that cycling is good.

By the way, before this post was about cycling, it started with a moan about how I couldn't write good titles, but I quite like this one.