Together Through The Flood Barely a week before we cycled through, the region was hit by more than a year’s worth of rainfall in just 24 hours. At least 17 dead. Homes, farms and villages wrecked over an area of 730 square km.

And a warm welcome from the back of a 2005 Ford Transit called Beryl, doing 110kph into the Aosta Valley, an hour shy of Chamonix and our beds for the night (👋RK🙏).

Beryl

I left home on 10 July, eleven weeks ago, to ride Thighs of Steel 2023.

This was the sixth time we’ve cycled to Athens and the second year we got there all the way from Glasgow.

It’s a bloody long trip: in fact, I’m pretty sure that it’s Europe’s longest fundraising bike ride.

It took our freewheeling community of 101 cyclists eight weeks of hard sweat to ride the full distance.

I was there at the beginning, rolling down from Glasgow Youth Hostel under drizzle skies, and I was there at the end in Athens, calves burning, asphalt melting, song shouting, up Mount Lycabettus, the steepest of all finish lines.

It feels mad weird to be unravelling our tyre tracks in only six days of diesel-powered vanlife.

Our community (including a fair few of you👋) has now raised over £90,000 for grassroots solidarity projects that support people on the move.

Sorry Not Sorry

I can’t promise that I won’t shut up about this fundraising for a few weeks because it’s important to me to ensure this ride makes the biggest possible contribution to the grassroots solidarity movement.

It takes about eight months of hard work to prepare and launch Thighs of Steel. It’s another three months of work to, not only cycle across the continent, but facilitate the experience and ensure a safe environment for more than 100 participants.

We don’t do all that just for the jollies.

We do it to support grassroots solidarity initiatives, starved of cash in a hostile environment for people on the move.

Since 2016, Thighs of Steel cyclists have raised about £740,000 for projects like the Khora Collective’s social kitchen, Hakoura Organic cooperative farm and the Chamomile housing project for displaced people with mental health challenges.

If you believe in free movement, or even free-er movement for people having a rough time, you can share and donate here.🙏

The Flood

The final week of the ride brought together sixteen mostly-strangers to cycle 600km down the east coast of Greece from Thessaloniki to Athens.

That was the plan, anyway.

This was a week with some breathtaking highs — sunsets over Mount Olympus, sea swims and watermelons every day, hot springs and mineral mud baths, beach camps, olive groves and a spooky abandoned hotel resort frequented at all hours by teenage canoodlers.

But our little bike ride was, of course, dominated by the devastating floods left after Storm Daniel passed through central Greece.

Barely a week before we cycled through, the region was hit by more than a year’s worth of rainfall in just 24 hours.

At least 17 dead. Homes, farms and villages wrecked over an area of 730 square km.

Thessaly floods. You can just about see where the reservoir used to be. Everything else was once fields, vineyards, homes — there’s even an airport under there somewhere. Before Storm Daniel, this region provided 15 percent of Greece’s domestic agricultural produce.

It will take five years for the bread basket of Greece to recover its soil fertility. Assuming no further catastrophe.

And that’s a big assumption.

Finding A Way

We reached the floodlands on Day 3 of the ride. After an open discussion, one group of cyclists formed an advance party to find out whether our planned route was even remotely feasible.

From our beach camp, we climbed 20km up and over a mountain to gather more information (and a bag of frozen spinach) from the nearest town, Kalamaki.

The local supermarket owner encouraged us to try the old road that ran alongside the reservoir that had once drained the fertile plain. The reservoir had burst its banks and now the water stretched beyond the horizon.

The end of the road

At the end of the road, we found only a police blockade and had no choice but to cycle straight back over the same hill in the heat of the day with flies swarming our faces.

It wasn’t the most fun I’ve ever had on a bicycle, but finding perspective was easy. A fly swarm sandwich is no hardship at all compared to the massive rescue and cleanup operation happening in the fields and villages below.

Former vineyards, former livelihoods

While we climbed back over the mountain, the rest of the cyclists pioneered a rocky off road route along a ribbon of coastline, which blessedly and eventually joined asphalt roads that, we were told, would circumnavigate the floodwaters.

Thank you to the people of Kamari for welcoming us in that night and letting us camp on their beautiful beach, now littered with storm debris, flotsam and jetsam swept down from the hills.

Almost cut off from the rest of the country, supplies of fresh food were at a premium in the coastal settlements. The crates stacked up on the back of a single pickup truck was all they’d seen for several days.

We were lucky. Our resourceful cyclists rustled up a dal dinner from the dry stores we’d brought with us from Glasgow — plus that long-defrosted bag of spinach.

Here & Now

Gazing out over the inland sea was a sobering reminder that climate disasters — massive and accelerating drivers of displacement — are here and now.

Globally, more than 20 million people are forced to flee their homes every year due to climate catastrophes.

Here and now.

Here and now, the kindness shown to us by the people of Thessaly was humbling. Their lands and in many cases their homes and livelihoods were underwater, yet everyone we met was open and supportive.

People helped us navigate off-road between devastated vineyards and orchards, find safe places to camp at night, and opened their shops, bakeries and cafes to we travellers.

These acts of generosity made a huge difference to us and helped us complete our quest.

The devastation we witnessed made each of us feel powerless in the face of inexorable nature.

The support we received from the local people made us feel strongly that anyone, any one of us, still has the power to make a difference.

We can still ride. We can still fundraise.

We can still tell the story of solidarity with people whose lives have been turned upside down by increasingly frequent disasters like the recent cyclone that struck Bulgaria, Greece, Turkey and Libya.

Even when we’re up against unstoppable forces, we are not powerless. Small acts of solidarity are signficant.

So Thank You

Thank you to all the cyclists who made this final week, with all its highs and hardships, a supportive and joyful space.

The Thessaloniki-Athens cycling crew. Somewhere in the background: Athens.

Thank you to all our hosts and the dozens or hundreds of humans who supported us along the way, from the octogenarian neighbourhood watch in Thessaloniki who helped us lift a car out of the way so we could get out of our parking space, to the team at Vicious Cycles Athens who once again welcomed us with cold drinks and spray bike tattoos.

We’ve now raised over £90,000 for grassroots refugee solidarity projects through our charity partner, MASS Action.

2,908 people have already donated to the main page, anything from £5 and up. A fiver might not seem like much, but it could be a hot meal with friends for someone who might not have much of either during a difficult time in a hostile environment.

Thank YOU for all your donations and your sharing of our stories. This kind of fundraising, so important for organisations working on the ground, only works because of our shared networks.

Thank you for caring. Thank you to every person reading this.

We reserve our deepest gratitude for the people leading the real work, putting in a shift at projects that open up dignified and sustainable spaces for migrants and asylum seekers.

100 percent of your donation (more if you Gift Aid) will be redistributed by MASS Action to grassroots solidarity projects across the UK and Europe.

Every pound you donate makes the world a richer place. 🙏This is happening, right now. Bring your friends.

A Midpoint 738km and 8,672m of climbing from Kotor to Thessaloniki in six and a half days

And a warm welcome from Thessaloniki, named contemporaneously for the sister of Alexander the Great of Macedon, an etymology that hints at the long human history for culture and conflict at this crossroads of the world.

But (in the words of The Tim Traveller) we’re not here to discuss any of that.

Or maybe we are, but not until after showing you a map that does absolutely nothing to hint at how hard and beautiful the last week has been: cycling 738km across (what felt like) a dozen mountain ranges through Montenegro, Albania, Macedonia and Greece.

738km and 8,672m of climbing from Kotor to Thessaloniki in six and a half days

There will be some of you who will now be expecting a 6,000 word story about cycling hundreds of miles clean across the Balkan Peninsula, from the Adriatic to the Ionian.

Sadly, I shall have to disappoint you, for tomorrow at dawn I don once more my padded shorts and prescription sunnies and take to the saddle.

For tomorrow we ride to Athens.

This is but a snatched midpoint.

For some ridiculous reason, after four weeks of crewing Thighs of Steel from Glasgow to Milan, I decided to cycle the whole of the last two weeks: a lucky thirteen days riding from Dubrovnik to Athens, via Thessaloniki.

No wonder the ride began with some pretty heavy anxiety.

The night before we left Dubrovnik I found myself eyes wide open until past three in the morning. Breakfast was at five.

I couldn’t. I shouldn’t. It wouldn’t have been safe so sleep deprived on those hectic roads out of the city.

So I cancelled my alarm and caught a few hours’ kip.

I spent the morning in the support van, back as an auxiliary core team member, helping fetch and carry crates as we packed up the weekend.

Fast driving, slow borders, and finally I joined the ride further down the road in Kotor.

I spent the rest of the day sweeping and scratching up the infamous Kotor Serpentine — twenty-five or more switchbacks offering views grander and ever-grander, south, north, south, north, for a thousand metres of elevation and a place in the heavens with a sunset never beat.

The point of this whole ride is to raise funds for refugee solidarity projects across Europe.

You can donate with love and gratitude here.

You’d be joining 2,726 other supporters who, collectively, have donated £86,257 so far this ride.

Thank you.

And that’s where I’ll leave this update. I’m sorry I couldn’t be more profound.

Not A Miracle The extraordinary ordinary, or: how lucky we are when we work hard together on something worthwhile

A warm welcome from the walled city of Lucca, a sacred grove of luminous space in Tuscany, Italy.

Eight hundred years ago, a beloved domestic servant of Lucca was buried.

Three centuries later, her body (definitely not her body) was exhumed, discovered miraculously undecomposed, and put on display for veneration.

A hundred years more and the dead woman was canonised by the Catholic Church as Saint Zita, patron of maids and lost keys.

Today, for three Euros, you can visit her ‘incorrupted’ shrivelled body in its glass case on top of an altar in the Basilica di San Frediano.

If that’s your sort of thing.

But I didn’t come to Lucca to ogle cadavers; I came here to lie in the shade, eat pizza by weight, and find perspective on the last five weeks.

Perspective: Lucca, Tuscany

Since I last wrote — a glance at the stranger side of my cycle-tour packing list — the forty-four cyclists of the first four weeks of Thighs of Steel have successfully ridden all 2,384km of road between Glasgow and Milan.

That’s a heck of a long way.

The vast distances, the never-ending hills, the sleepless nights and the heavy summer rain stretched many cyclists well past what they once thought their physical and mental limits.

Summer cycling in Versailles, Île de France

More significantly, we have now collectively raised over £70,000 for grassroots refugee and migrant solidarity projects.

Last year, the whole ride raised £114,632. It was a record total for one of our summer mega group rides and I genuinely thought it couldn’t be beat.

This year, with four weeks more to ride before Athens, we are £1,000 ahead of where we were this time last year.

The ride is not a race and our fundraising is not a competition, but I have been gratifyingly dumbstruck, once again, by the generosity and support shown by thousands of ordinary citizens for a cause unpopular with both politicians and the press.

Thank you to everyone who has already donated. Your money is already being used to keep the doors open at the Khora Collective in Athens.

Khora is an association that runs a community centre across three buildings in Kypseli and Exarcheia, and provides services to anyone that needs them.

We value solidarity, autonomy, community, and the right of everyone to access the basic means to live in our city.

Khora includes a social kitchen, asylum support centre, a free shop for clothes and toiletries and a maker space with a focus on arts and crafts as therapeutic practice for women and LGBTQIA+ migrants and asylum seekers.

In the days before Thighs of Steel left Glasgow, we heard that one of Khora’s major funders had run into financial difficulties and been forced at short notice to withdraw their €60,000 grant.

Khora costs €8,000 per month to run. They had enough in the bank to stay open until August. Then: nothing.

Luckily, at this point, MASS Action, the charity for whom Thighs of Steel fundraise, were able to step in and grant out €32,000 from this year’s ride donations.

That’s enough to keep Khora running until the end of the year.

I say ‘luckily’; it’s not luck.

It’s what happens when a load of people get together to do something they believe in, and when they stay focused on the purpose of why they do that something.

I’m talking about the cyclists, Thighs of Steel organisers, MASS Action volunteers, and of course the thousands of people who donate.

Cormet de Roselend: a warm-up of a climb to 1,968m in the French Alps

Saint Zita, a humble house maid, was known in life for doing ordinary things extraordinarily well — such a rare quality that she’s been credited with a hundred and fifty miracles.

This summer, Thighs of Steel cyclists are doing ordinary things.

We’re all just spinning wheels, sharing stories and inviting our friends to donate in solidarity with people on the move across Europe.

Nothing of what we do is a miracle, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t think we do our ordinary things extraordinarily well.

If you would like to donate and join the 2,225 people already supporting this cause, then please do.

If you’re a UK taxpayer, then you can also choose to add Gift Aid and the government will automagically slap an extra 25 percent to your donation. That’s money they can’t spend on building prison boats.

DONATE HERE

Finishing Week 4 at the Duomo Cathedral in Milan, Italy

Enter The Packing Room Five items that wouldn’t make it onto most touring cyclists’ packing lists (let alone into their blessed packing room)

The reason I’m not writing to you until now is that I’ve spent the day hammering through the zillions of pettifogging tasks that cram the hours before a lengthy departure from home.

Tasks like these:

Kudos to DRL’s Points Productivity Planner for keeping me on track. This is working document, so keep your spelling spots to yourself. Mainfest indeed.

As you may or may not have gathered, on Monday I leave for Glasgow, for four days’ final preparation before meeting the first cohort of sadists cyclists taking on the first week of our two-month, 5,400km bike ride to Athens.

I should be back home sometime in September or October.

It’s not a vanishingly long time, but it is certainly something of a disappearance.

And so this morning began with me randomly chucking things into what I like to think of as my ‘packing room’.

I think every adventurer needs a packing room: a place to dump the first practical stirrings of an adventure before it either (a) fizzles out and is forgotten or (b) slams you in the oh-fuck face of last minute dread.

(I also think that every human being is an adventurer in a choose-their-own domain.)

Here’s what my packing room currently looks like:

And I thought it could be a nice idea to take you through five items that wouldn’t make it onto most touring cyclists’ packing lists (let alone into their blessed packing room).

1. A Flag

This flag was hand-stitched many years ago — 2018, I think — for the third edition of Thighs of Steel, which rode from London to Athens, through Slovenia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria.

Ljubljana to Sofia — 1,400km riding, 14,000m climbing and 78 hours of saddle bum — was my first thighs ride and I was mightily proud that they entrusted me with the carrying of the flag.

I still am.

That’s me on the left after two weeks of cycling Ljubljana to Sofia, 2018

2. Seven Debit Cards & 500 Albanian Leke

This photo represents the stomach-popping logistical and administrative rough and tumble that we all go through, both before and during the ride, to grease the wheels of summer so that they spin as smoothly as could reasonably be demanded.

I mean: have you ever tried to acquire seven debit cards that are free to use in Europe for a non-profit that isn’t a charity and doesn’t have money to burn?

Thank goodness for Equals Money.

This entry could just as easily have been a photo of our Public Liability certificate, representing the last two months of nerve-clenching horror as ‘a costly claim in the events industry’ totally ham-slapped our ‘risk profile’.

The good news is that I’m spending my final Friday evening at home writing these words to you, so we must be more or less ready to ride.

SHUDDUP DON’T JINX IT, DAVE!

3. A Very Specific Book

Lights In The Distance by Daniel Trilling

I wrote about this excellent book a few weeks ago, so I won’t say any more.

The purpose of Thighs of Steel is to raise funds in solidarity with refugees, migrants, asylum seekers and people on the move across Europe.

We help grassroots organisations keep doing everything they do.

We share a dream of a borderless world once again, with free movement for all.

You can add your heft to the hew by donating here. Thank you.

4. Defence For The Defenceless

It’s summer and we’re cycling through Scotland.

After my experiences a month ago in Northumberland, it’s time to up my anti-midge game.

Smidge is a classic, but now I’ve added a citronella candle and a frankly awesome midge head net to my battlements — both bought from Totally Herbie of Scotland.

Their website might be from the nineties, but they mean business. And so now do I.

5. Dougal The Bugle

I bought Dougal from a Hastings junk shop on the first leg of my second ride around Britain back in 2020 so that I could have a part to play (literally) in the mock-funeral of a friend of a friend.

(It was something he’d always wanted to do: my friend played his spirit guide, a badger.)

Tragically, I recently found out that this friend of a friend has now passed away for real, which adds an appropriate sense of gravitas to the sounding of my most unusual touring accessory.

Some love it, some hate it (especially when it wakes them up at 5am for another expletive-sodden ride up a mountain), and none can ignore it.

Mercifully, every once in a while, someone comes on the ride who can actually play the blasted thing.

At those moments, atop a ravaging hill climb in Wales or at a sundown lakeside in the Italian Alps, Dougal the Bugle will sing a sweet tune that I like to imagine wefts its way into outer space, into the resonating space between atoms where the stardust lives.

This one’s for you, Jimi.

Round Britain Twice: Graham Eating Chips And Gravy It’s then that I realise who we are: two men, strangers, telling each other how we fall apart. And how we might put ourselves back together again

It’s not every day that you meet a motorcycling electrician called Graham eating chips and gravy in the sunshine at a village tearoom in Northumberland.

In fact, I’d say that it’s only ever happened to me once in my whole entire life.

Just once. Last Sunday.

I was about 470km into my 560km ride from Liverpool to Newcastle and had just decided that it was time for lunch. Again.

Because, you see, If I’ve got any Northumbrian cycle touring advice for you it’s this: whenever you see a tearoom, it’s time for lunch. Again.

Quick Detour Regarding Bloody Bush Road (Unsurfaced)

Northumberland is the least densely populated county in England, with only 62 inhabitants per square kilometre.

This is an incredibly misleading statistic.

Across a 36 kilometre stretch of my route, on the terrifyingly named Bloody Bush Road through the high pine forests of Kershope, Newcastleton and Kielder, there were precisely zero inhabitants per square kilometre.

This means I went five hours of riding and sixteen hours overnight without refilling my water bottles.

Parched. Slightly panicked.

It was only at the very end of the rocky gravel track that I found a sign warning me against the route I’d just taken — READ THIS BEFORE RIDING —

This route is 20km through remote forest areas on unsurfaced tracks and narrow paths.

This route includes steep climbs and crosses exposed open hills and fells. It is therefore better suited to proficient cyclists with higher levels of fitness, stamina and good off-road riding skills. Quality off-road bikes are considered to be essential.

No water, no food, no phone reception and no houses except a couple of eerily abandoned rental cottages: this was not the place to hurt one’s self.

About halfway through my unwitting 20km off-road stint, rolling downhill on the gravel, my unsuitable road tyres skidded.

As the heavy bike slid out from underneath me — threatening to crush my leg under the weight of all my camping gear — my instincts took over.

Without knowing how, my left foot hopped onto the falling cross bar and I leapt over the moving handlebars, miraculously landing in a running stumble, on both feet.

I got away with it this time.

My dusty dry throat was finally lubricated at The Forks, a clutch of forest cottages, thankfully occupied (and each with a wolf-head door knocker), before rushing to the civilised and fully stocked activity centres of Kielder Water.

Lesson learned: population density matters.

Back To Graham Eating Chips And Gravy

So that’s why, only half an hour after tea and scones at the Tower Knowe cafe on Kielder Water, I rolled to a stop outside Falstone village tearoom.

And that’s where, for the first time in my whole entire life, I met a motorcycling electrician called Graham eating chips and gravy in the sunshine.

Quick Detour For Some Miserable Setup

I left to come on this bike ride two days late.

I was originally booked to get the train up to Liverpool on the Monday, but I decided to delay for a couple of days.

Helping to organise Thighs of Steel — an eight week fundraising bike ride with over a hundred participants across eleven countries — is a rat’s nest of responsibility.

Many aspects of facilitating the organisation of the ride are totally within my control: choosing dates and routes, finding ride leaders, paying staff, planning routes, recruiting riders and, of course, fundraising.

But some aspects are wildly out of my — or anyone’s — control. For the past six weeks, I’ve been wrestling with such a task.

And here it was again, that task, demanding more time from me and, if not forcing, then at least prising two days’ holiday from my short break.

Actually, this sacrifice of two days was actually pretty good going for me. In 2022, I would’ve cancelled the whole holiday.

Last year, I felt as much responsibility for the organisation of Thighs and the stress I held manifested itself as a dumpy lethargy and a claggy brain fog.

In my fatigue, I made the mistake of cancelling any extracurricular activities and staying at home, hoping to rest and recovery in the quiet hours when I wasn’t working.

I even took two courses of antibiotics, before realising that my symptoms were ‘just’ stress, far beyond the reach of pharmaceutical treatment.

I learned that, in the responsibility of a stressful situation, my mind and body tend to hunker down, shutting off function in the hope that, by hiding away in stillness, the danger or threat will pass by safely.

While this avoidant strategy might have worked for me in the past, it’s exactly ZERO percent fun and, in most grownup cases, leaves the problem worse than before.

What helps are precisely the things that, last year, I cancelled: seeing friends, playing games, going dancing and, of course, riding my bike for days at a time.

Anyway: turns out that Graham, the motorcycling electrician eating chips and gravy in the sunshine, goes through the same damn thing.

Graham Eating Chips And Gravy

Graham, a man with spectacles and the lived-in look of late middle age, arrived in his leathers and backed his motorcycle into the small parking lot beside the tearoom’s outdoor toilets.

He ordered chips and gravy and a coffee for afters — ‘I’m in no rush here.’

We sat outside, on high stools, with our plates resting on a waist-high sandstone wall, looking out over the shaded village green.

Graham had come up from Sunderland, a trip he often makes on a weekend. He likes to get to the tearoom before twelve, in time for their to-die-for breakfast.

He’s far too late today, which is why turns down their offer of a bacon barm — I can make that at home, like — and settles for chips and gravy.

Graham tells me that he’s an electrician, working for himself, but through an agency, mostly industrial.

I’m not sure what I imagine an electrician doing all day (I know it can’t only be lightbulbs and 3A plugs), but it’s nothing like what Graham does.

He’ll spend weeks wiring up identical units on an industrial site, ticking off the cabling on a schematic works sheet.

None of his work will connected to power until long after he’s gone, so he has to get it right, maybe not first time, but reliably, every time.

A lot of other electricians say they don’t have the patience for it, they get bored, but Graham likes it. It suits his methodical mind and that means he’s never short of work.

Graham felt he had to get out on his bike today: he’s got a job starting tomorrow, a job he already regrets taking.

He holds up thumb and forefinger, about a chip’s width apart: ‘Summer’s only this long up here.’

‘The agency said it’s a two month job, but that doesn’t mean anything. Could be two days, two weeks — two years,’ he says.

‘They said I could have a week off after a month, but that’s…’ He looks over at me, a little desperately. ‘I don’t want to put a time limit on it, you know?’

‘That’s My Sign I Need To Get Away’

Graham is out on his bike for the same reason I’m on mine: it’s his way of getting back into his body, opening up and letting go.

He’s learned to heed the warning signs and take to two wheels before things get worse.

A couple of years back, after his mother died, Graham was on a six-month job on the coast near Edinburgh.

As the months rolled on, he started getting a thick knot of pain in the centre of his chest.

Nothing he did shifted the pain until, one day, he jacked in the job and went for a long motorcycle ride in a loop along the green border and up through Dumfries and Galloway.

‘I was on the road, coming out of Ayr, when I noticed it,’ Graham tells me. ‘The pain in my chest was gone. Completely gone.’

It’s then that I realise who we are: two men, strangers, telling each other how we fall apart. And how we might put ourselves back together again.

‘When I feel that in my chest,’ Grama says, ‘that’s my sign I need to get away.’

It’s the same for me: when I feel that heavy veil falling across my brain.

We shook hands, Graham and I, and swapped names.

‘Good luck with the stress,’ he said, as I took the steps down to my bike.

‘It’ll be straight back when I hit that hill,’ I said.

‘And then you’ll get rid of it again.’

Mind IS Body

That’s been my motto the last few weeks. It’s one I’d like to wear through the summer.

The brain is all very good, but it’s only a tiny part of how we think.

And the poor thing is terribly self-obsessed.

The brain has such an inflated belief in its powers that it thinks (ha) it can sort everything out on its own — and frequently overheats in the attempt.

But when I remember that brains only work well when the whole body is moving, then my mind flows again.

Instead of trying to brute force my way through life on brain alone, I should remember instead to feel my way through the world with all-body senses.

A long bike tour works, but so too does a regular morning run or evening stretch time.

The older I get, the more I learn and the more responsibility I take, the more important it becomes, not simply to get out of my head, but to get into my body.

Some Maps

Round Britain So Far… 2020-2023. Built using Jonathan O’Keeffe’s Strava Multiple Ride Mapper
Last week’s ride: 558km from Liverpool to Newcastle. Map built using GPX Studio
Extra geek points: all 5339m of last week’s hill climbing. Built using GPX Studio

Round Britain Twice: From Egremont Castle The faded card leaves me thousands of miles richer and, daily it seems, on the edge of new life.

And welcome to Egremont Castle, in the shade of the ruined keep, where Amber has freaked herself out playing hide and seek and started first crying for her mama, before shifting up through the gears of shouting, yelling, screaming and now finally shrieking.

Amber’s mum walks up the steps towards me, wearing big shades and a tired smile: ‘Who said playing hide and seek in the castle was a good idea?’

Anyway, before I left Bournemouth to pick up the latest leg of my second ride around Britain, I was surprisingly emotional about my new debit card.

The old one, you see, has been with me since June 2018.

There aren’t many possessions in our lives that are so clearly timestamped and with so clear an expiry date and I took the cutting up of this old workhorse as an opportunity for a bittersweet taste of nostalgia.

This card has served me well, joining the team when I was rootless, directionless, empty, and there at my side as I found confidence and purpose in my writing and my outdoor work, both instructing and with Thighs of Steel.

The faded card leaves me thousands of miles richer and, daily it seems, on the edge of new life.

It feels stupid to be saying this, but thank you old 4543. You done well. I’m excited to see how your successor fares.

Liverpool to Newcastle: The First Three Days

Today’s story is going to be heinously short and primarily photographic. As I mentioned, I’m in the middle of a bike ride, stage seven of my second ride around Britain.

I have too many thoughts that will turn into stories, but perhaps not today, not when I am dictating this into my malfunctioning phone in the late afternoon sunshine on a castle park bench.

Today started gently, with a roll down to Lake Windermere and a glorious, bare bottomed soak in the fresh water.

I then spent an hour and twenty quid in Joey’s, a plant-based cafe at Wray Castle on the north end of the lake. Essential fuel for the climbs, the steep steep climbs, of Wrynose and Hardknott.

So steep, it was, that I watched one Belgian number plate sliding backwards down a 30% incline, engine squealing.

‘You have lots of luggage,’ the Belgian said through wound window as I passed. ‘Lots of luggage and lots of courage.’

Yesterday started early and finished late.

This had little to do with the illuminating distractions of Blackpool and Morecambe, and more to do with:

  1. An inauspicious tide at Fleetwood, which made for a 14km detour around the estuary.
  2. A series of failed camp spots, which resulted in an extraordinarily steep, unscheduled, hill climb as I came into the Lake District, and then a fairly unsatisfactory pitch on the slopes of a denuded Forestry Commission ‘forest’, cocooned in a cloud of ferocious midges.

Dinner was served at 10:00 p.m, a hasty repast of Co-op olive bread and vegan coleslaw.

Between yesterday’s beginnings and yesterday’s endings, I delighted in new discoveries: especially Silverdale, a no-reason-to-visit-it-unless-you’re-visiting-it outcrop of land to the west of the M6.

It’s exactly the sort of why-not place that I want to see more of on this second round of Britain.

And Wednesday? Who can remember that far back?

Suffice it to say that I still think Liverpool is an ace city, with a canalside run through Bootle that gently escorts the traveller into nature’s soft embrace.

I really enjoyed Crosby dunes until I came across a cycle path sign buried up to the hilt in six foot of shifting sand.

I wonder how many hapless round Britainers have met with such granulated fate underfoot?

Anyway. Sorry I can’t be more coherent in my storytelling this week.

It’s time to make myself scarce.

A couple of polite young lads just asked if I minded them flying a drone up here, and, besides, I must seek camp.

Writing In Public: Memory & Desire However inconvenient the distortions of memory and desire may be for psychoanalysts, they are good things for the writers of bicycling memoirs

While discussing the relationship between my favourite Heraclitus quote and cycling around Britain for the second time, a two-time acquaintance suggested I read a short article by psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion.

The four pages of Notes on memory and desire (1967) are clearly written for the psychoanalyst, but are fertile ground for anyone hoping to write a bicycling memoir.

‘Memory,’ Bion declares, ‘is always misleading as a record of fact.’

He’s not wrong: despite being consistently underestimated, our memories are naturally, even occasionally tragically, fallible.

Meanwhile, opines Bion: ‘Desires distort judgement by selection and suppression of material to be judged.’

Again, horribly accurate: the halo effect being just one of a panoply of cognitive biases where our desires corrupt our conclusions.

Memory & Desire = Bad Bad?

Bion is pretty damning about the effect of memory and desire on the workings of psychoanalysis:

Memory and Desire exercise and intensify those aspects of the mind that derive from sensuous experience.

However inconvenient the distortions of memory and desire may be for psychoanalysts, they are good things for the writers of bicycling memoirs.

Cycling around the coast of Britain is indeed a sensuous experience and anything that intensifies that experience can only help the sensationalist storyteller.

Stories would be pretty dull if the writer’s fallible memory didn’t trim the facts, nor desire distort, select and suppress.

However: where Bion gets interesting is in his discussion of the ride itself, especially for those of us who repeatedly cover the same ground.

Staying Present = Improv?

Bion uses the metaphor of the psychoanalytic session, but I’m pretty sure he was talking about cycling around Britain twice when he wrote:

Every session bike ride attended by the psychoanalyst bicyclist must have no history and no future.

What is ‘known’ about the patient Britain is of no further consequence: it is either false or irrelevant. […] The only point of importance in any session bike ride is the unknown. Nothing must be allowed to distract from intuiting that. […]

The psychoanalyst bicyclist should aim at achieving a state of mind so that at every session ride he feels he has not seen the patient Britain before. If he feels he has, he is treating riding the wrong patient ride.

Staying present is not only the work of the psychoanalyst, but also the bicycling memoirist and, of course, our old friend Heraclitus:

No man can step into the same river twice, for it is not the same river and he is not the same man.

Every landscape, every town, every human and beastly interaction is happening for the first time, every time, and the ride is an embedded, embodied improvisation: ‘Yes, and…’

Improv, like a good bike ride, only works when you’re open, creative, responsive and curious — four ways of saying the same thing — to what’s inside you, what’s around you, and to your partners and props on the stage.


SIDE BAR: Keith Johnstone, RIP

Keith Johnstone, who taught so many actors, directors and comedians the games of improvisation, died last week.

There are people who prefer to say ‘Yes’, and there are people who prefer to say ‘No’. Those who say ‘Yes’ are rewarded by the adventures they have, and those who say ‘No’ are rewarded by the safety they attain.

That’s a quote from Keith Johnstone’s Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre (neat summary here by James Clear).

Impro For Storytellers, his second book, perceptibly changed my life after picking it up at random from a shelf at Oxford library in 2003. The subtitle is ‘The Art Of Making Things Happen’. It works.

There is, of course, more to improv than The Cult Of Yes, And… As Keith Johnstone points out in this 2017 interview, ‘a story that only says yes is a very limited story form […] A master improviser can do what they like’.

The point is to help your partner in the improvisation, not to try to screw them up. A lesson worth holding onto. Thanks, Keith.


Staying Present With Notes

The only difference between a good improviser and a writer is that the writer takes notes. Which Bion would have hated.

Somewhat grumpily, Bion declares that notes should be ‘confined to matters that can be recorded’, i.e. bugger all.

Instead, Bion commands us to obey his number one rule:

Do not remember past sessions bike rides. The greater the impulse to remember what has been said or done, the more the need to resist it. […]

The supposed events must not be allowed to occupy the mind. Otherwise the evolution of the session bike ride will not be observed at the only time when it can be observed — while it is taking place.

Here, from time to time, the bicycling memoirist must respectfully disagree.

Writing, on my typewriter, eyes up, following the fluency of my fingers, helps me observe and recall my experience of the world around me in more detail, not less.

Like this, from my ride diary back on 2 August 2020:

Sunny lanes. Pandora told me about how Airbnb is ruining Athens so she can’t live in the areas she used to. She also told me about Halloween Alley Cat Races.

We detoured through a prison and passed another group of cyclists.

‘What were those cyclists pointing at?’ she asked.

‘They’re turning right,’ I said.

Nothing serves noticing more than notating. And nothing serves the reader more than writers who notice.

From Desire To Curiosity

I’ll leave you with a note on how Bion’s desecration of desire pertains to the bicycling memoirist.

Bion’s second rule for psychoanalysts is this:

Desires for results, ‘cure’ or even understanding must not be allowed to proliferate.

My initial response was YES. Desire for a particular result takes us out of an experience.

I teared up reading the end of Mark Beaumont’s book about his round the world record attempt, but that was the tension release triggered by the climax of a hard-fought result. His desire for the world record overtook any sense of experience: I remember nothing of his ride and I suspect he scarcely does either.

The reason I rode around Tunisia the year after I first cycled the coast of Britain was precisely because I wanted to take it more slowly and prove to myself that I could indulge experience over ‘getting there’.

Irritatingly, Bion would seem to be correct again: desire interferes with experience.

Then I paused: is this not a cop-out?

Freed from spontaneous impulses of desire, the bicycling memoirist is also excused from courage to retreat into their shell of individual experience.

A sign pointing the way to Twatt Church. A conversation overheard. A rumour passed around of a quarry camp. The salt wash scent of the ocean. The intriguingly lengthy queue for a hot stone bakery.

Are these petty squirts of desire not also the ripe ingredients of adventure?

There is nuance to Bion’s declaration. Yes, desire for a particular result takes us out of an experience, but it must be distinguished from our healthy desire to experience more: it must be distinguished from our curiosity.

Desire is forcing our way into a house: never going to end in anything better than a cricket bat to the belly. Curiosity is gently pushing on the door and seeing whether it opens, with a smile.

~

Thanks to everyone who responded to my first Writing In Public post on Coasting. Thanks in advance if your mouse is right now hovering over the Reply button.

Special thanks to two-time acquaintance CW for introducing me to the insane ideas of Wilfred Bion and for leading me through my own memory and desire.

Leonard Cohen, Janis Joplin & Me 'She wasn’t looking for me, she was looking for Kris Kristofferson; I wasn’t looking for her, I was looking for Brigitte Bardot.'

This is a story about two songs, both written by men about women they met in New York, inside and outside the Chelsea Hotel.

(Before you switch off, I’ve also included one of the women’s side of the story. It’s hilarious.)

The Chelsea is famous for its residents and the work they created there: Dylan Thomas, Jack Kerouac, Edith Piaf, Jane Fonda, Allen Ginsburg, Patti Smith, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Jimi Hendrix — and, of course, Leonard Cohen and Janis Joplin.

Leonard Cohen Meets Janis Joplin

In the late night spring of 1968, Leonard Cohen and Janis Joplin met in the Chelsea Hotel lift, going up to the fourth floor.

Cohen gathered his courage and asked if she was looking for someone:

She said ‘Yes, I’m looking for Kris Kristofferson.’

I said, ‘Little lady, you’re in luck, I am Kris Kristofferson.’ Even though she knew that I was someone shorter than Kris Kristofferson, she never let on.

By the time the lift reached the fourth floor, the love affair was on, a tribute to courage — if only for a couple of hours.

The next day, Joplin tracked down that handsome devil Kris Kristofferson, who sweetly sang to her the song that would become her biggest hit.

It took a couple of years for Janis Joplin to record her bootshaking version of Kristofferson’s Me And Bobby McGee (Spotify | YouTube), on 1 October 1970.

Three days later, she was dead.

Shortly after, Leonard Cohen started writing a new song, which he eventually released in 1974 as Chelsea Hotel #2 (Spotify | Youtube).

Here’s how it opens:

I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel,
you were talking so brave and so sweet,
giving me head on the unmade bed,
while the limousines wait in the street.

Now, to be fair to Leonard Cohen, the story he tells is more complex than these first lines would suggest, but it’s not Cohen’s song that I want to write about.

Jeffrey Lewis Meets A Woman In Glasses

In 2001, New York antifolk songwriter Jeffrey Lewis released his first single, an extended riff on Leonard Cohen’s song, which he called The Chelsea Hotel Oral Sex Song (Spotify | Youtube).

Before you get too excited, this is not a song about oral sex. As Jeff Lewis explains:

Life doesn’t work out the way it does in old songs
That’s why we sing new ones to say what really goes on

So what really went on?

Well, if Jeff Lewis will allow me to summarise his seven minute masterpiece:

  1. Late one night, ‘tired and alone’, Jeff is walking past the Chelsea Hotel
  2. He overhears a conversation about Leonard Cohen between a woman in glasses and her two, possibly gay, friends
  3. Jeff gets ‘uncharacteristically courageous’ and interrupts the strangers
  4. Jeff and the woman in glasses chat for ‘a minute or two’ about Leonard Cohen’s song, Chelsea Hotel #2
  5. The three strangers stop to look in through a pub window
  6. Jeff says good night (though he hadn’t quite meant to)
  7. The woman in glasses mysteriously says, ‘see you later’

That’s it. That’s the entirety of the narrative action: they never saw each other again; they didn’t even swap names.

The song is three times as long as the encounter it describes.

What About The Oral Sex?

In that two minute conversation, the woman in glasses told Jeff Lewis that Leonard Cohen’s line about getting a blowjob ‘made her want to do naughty things’ and Jeff heard the ‘faint knocking of opportunity’:

Right about then I should have asked if she knew
What the Chelsea charged if we got a room for two

But he didn’t. He got shy, waved goodbye, went home and wrote this song instead.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad he did write this song — for two reasons, actually.

The first reason is, quite simply, this, the greatest rhyming couplet known to science:

If I was Leonard Cohen or some other song writing master
I’d know to first get the oral sex and then write the song after

The second reason I’m glad he wrote this song is because the narrative action of Jeff Lewis’s street encounter ends only five minutes into the song: what happens in the last two minutes transcends the self-deprecating story into a moment of connective awe for us all.

‘For The Love Of Other Folks That They Barely Knew’

In those last two minutes, Jeff Lewis turns his gaze onto the audience, as if to say, ‘Hold on, nothing happened with this woman outside the Chelsea and yet this song did happen, is happening, and, what’s more, you’re all still listening — what does that mean?’

In Jeff’s words, it means something wonderful:

That all around the world there may be folks singing tunes
For the love of other folks that they barely knew

This bit of the song usually gets a laugh because it’s so ridiculous. No one writes songs like that.

Except they do. The woman in glasses would laugh at this bit too — the laughter of giddy recognition.

And we can enjoy that same note of giddy recognition for ourselves right now, even without a gawky folksinger writing a love song for us.

Remember You Remember Me Well Too

Think of all the people you’ve ever interacted with. Go on: all of them.

Okay, okay — too much. How about just the ones who made you ‘sing’?

If you’re like me (and Jeff), they’ll fall into two camps:

  1. There’ll be people still in your life who already know that you remember them well. Your best friend who taught you self-esteem as a teenager or the mentor who modelled how to change career late in life.
  2. But there’ll also be people in your past who will never know that you remember them well. The Albanian plumber-mechanic who showed you the true meaning of hospitality, or that lost classmate in college who didn’t realise he was teaching you how to be funny.

Firstly: make a note to go and tell everyone in Camp 1 exactly what they mean to you. You can never do this too many times.

Now turn your attention to the people in Camp 2. This is where the magic happens.

Look at your list and ponder: there must be hundreds of fleeting moments in your life where a complete stranger made you sing and you will never be able to let them know.

Take a moment to acknowledge the ripples in the water, stones skipped by strangers.

Now flip it around in Jeff’s next lines:

[…] the next time you’re feeling kinda lonesome and blue
Just think that someone somewhere might be singing about you

A laugh again: fantastically unlikely. But it isn’t.

If you remember a hundreds strangers well, remember that a hundred more strangers remember you well too — they just never got the chance to tell you.

When you realise how even a brief interaction can connect and change us, that’s pure wonder. Never forget it.

The Other Side

Okay — reality check!

Songwriters like Leonard Cohen and Jeffrey Lewis are really good at turning their lives into stories: pinning the emotion that helps them process the encounter.

It’s a beautiful defence mechanism — transmuting their personal vulnerability into universal meaning.

As Jeff Lewis says, it’s much easier to write a song than it is to risk rejection.

You might think that vulnerability to rejection doesn’t apply to Leonard Cohen, but I’m not so sure.

We’ll probably never know what story Jeff Lewis’s woman in glasses would tell of their encounter, but Janis Joplin wasn’t one to stay in the shade.

This is what she made of that same one night stand with Leonard Cohen:

Sometimes you’re with someone and you’re convinced that they have something to tell you. So maybe nothing’s happening, but you keep telling yourself something’s happening — innate communication. […]

So you keep being there, pulling, giving, rapping. And then, all of a sudden about four o’clock in the morning you realise that, flat ass, this motherfucker’s just lying there. He’s not balling me.

🤣

Be Both

Leonard Cohen and Jeffrey Lewis would seem to offer two different approaches to a fleeting connection between strangers:

  • either we are courageous enough to stop and feel out the depths of the exchange
  • or we are sensitive enough to walk away and still find meaning in the moment

But it’s not a choice: we can be both.

As Jeff says:

Life doesn’t work out the way it does in old songs
That’s why we sing new ones to say what really goes on

So let’s sing a new song: a song where we enjoy both Leonard Cohen’s earthy physicality and Jeffrey Lewis’s abstract transcendence.

Let’s recognise that any connection with a stranger, in the lift, on the street, can go both ways.

We might flex our courage and take things further, but, when we don’t — and most often we won’t because we’d never get anything else done — let’s remain sensitive that the moment was meaningful.

And occasionally, occasionally, a connection that we didn’t explore, years before, can, in the most unlikeliest of plot twists, come back around a second time.

Then we are both.

I’ll leave the last word to Jeff Lewis:

So who knows if I’ll ever see her again? Maybe we’ll see
This whole time she could have been singing about me
Probably not — but it could be

~

ps: Just as I was finishing the final read-through on this piece, a woman snuck up behind me on the train and said in a loud voice, ‘Ahh, I LOVE that song.’

I turned around with a thump and realised she was talking on the phone, to someone else. But I hope that one day, by some serpentine logic of the universe, she gets to read this story, listen to the music, and say again, ‘Ahh, I LOVE that song.’

Thanks to Leonard Cohen, Janis Joplin, Jeffrey Lewis and CW for showing me how it’s done.

Writing In Public: Coasting My attempt to describe what I’d like to achieve with a book tentatively titled Coasting: Cycling Around Britain (Twice).

This is something that I actually drafted in an email to a developmental editor. It’s my attempt to describe what I’d like to achieve with a book tentatively titled Coasting: Cycling Around Britain (Twice).

At the moment, I am strolling across an open field and I could yet turn this project in any direction.

Please switch on your critical creative mind — I am quite seriously interested in your response. Cheers!

Coasting: Cycling Around Britain (Twice)

I first cycled 4,110 miles around the coast of Britain over a couple of months in 2011. I left two days after my nan’s funeral and a week after my girlfriend left me. I’d just turned 29.

It was a solitary ride, figuring out stuff like confidence and courage, with a handful of nan’s last words bouncing around my mind: ‘Do it while you can.’

I wrote a book about this journey, called Life To The Lees. You can read it, if you like. I printed a few copies, mainly as a tribute to my nan, interleaving memories of her with the narrative of the ride.

Here’s a bit from the end:

I bump up onto the pavement and let Martin come to a silent stop. I climb off and lean the bike against a gas meter. Then I just sort of stare about me, marvelling at the new person who stands here, where I stood fifty-eight days ago.

I look around for nan’s ghost, waving from the rose bushes, but there’s nothing there, not even the roses. I barely recognise the house and gardens at all. You can’t go back. The tide comes in and will erase everything. All we can bring back, when the path returns us to our beginning, is memories. Everything is the same as it was, and everything has changed.

We all walk uncertain into our shared future, each of us making the other a little more human, each of us collecting a little more of the other, until that moment when there is as much of me in you as there is of you in me. And then we realise that our only regret is regret itself: Do it while you can.

And while I can, I swear, I will.

Flicking back through Life To The Lees now, there’s a lot to love about the text, but it’s a personal story: insular, isolated, individual.

My isolation on the ride didn’t bring me into contact with much of Britain. I felt like I was cycling around Britain, but not among Britain. The book doesn’t really do what I would want a story of cycling around Britain to do: connect.

The second time I left to cycle around Britain was after lockdown restrictions lifted in summer 2020.

As you know, this journey is ongoing. I’ve been riding in stages and have now covered more than 3,100 miles, clockwise around to Liverpool in the west and anticlockwise as far as Inverness in the northeast.

Ten years older, I give far fewer fucks as a human being and that means many more entertaining and meaningful hi-jinx with the people I meet — such as that time in Hastings when I got embroiled in a fake kidnapping.

I’m also a much more experienced writer (four BBC Radio series and a bunch of other random credits) and I’ve been sharing cycling stories with the wonderful readers of this humble newsletter, as well as keeping a diary — neither of which existed back in 2011.

This makes for a much richer palette of stories from which to paint.

But I don’t want to forget 2011: it’s an integral part of today’s story and I think there’s something stupendously powerful about what we lazily call ‘doing the same thing twice’, melding stories from both 2011 and the 2020s into one book.

This dual narrative would not only offer a unique saddle-eye view of Britain either side of austerity, Brexit and a pandemic, but might also say something interesting about how a human being can flourish over the course of a decade.

While I can identify the experiences of 2011 as ‘mine’, I barely recognise the lead character. Like who is this guy, too embarrassed to stop for takeaway pizza in Southend on that first sixty-mile ride out of London?

My hamstrings are quivering and my stomach is rumbling on empty. I cycle back along Marine Drive, looking in at the neon fast food joints, predating on Sunday night drinkers, but I can’t bring myself to stop. I feel their blunt stares. I’m a stranger on an overpacked bicycle, underdressed in swimming shorts and sandals, trespassing through their town. […]

I’m shrivelled and half-starved; all my reserves of fuel are flashing red. I haven’t eaten properly since that sausage and eggs at Ben’s. I struggle with the cookies, but can’t get into the damned packet. I curse myself for not stopping in Southend for a proper feed when I had the chance. As it is, I’m too tired to even brush my teeth.

Second time round, eating at neon fast food joints where people look at me funny is my number one reason for cycling. It starts conversations and connections.

My second time round Britain is blatantly inspired by the philosopher Heraclitus ‘The Obscure’, who held that everything is forever in flux.

Heraclitus’s number one smash hit aphorism deserves its own block quote:

No man can step into the same river twice, for it is not the same river and he is not the same man.

Boom.

That means I could easily write the story with two very different narrators:

  • 2011 David feels fearful, lost and hurt, in dire need of the ride’s healing power, hoping only to survive the journey, at times desperate for it all to be over.
  • 2020s David feels lucky, open, curious, bursting to get back out into the world, thriving on the chaos of misadventure, dragging out every mile, seeking a kind of immortality in a ride that may never end.

Perhaps I could juxtapose stories from each narrator, not only to show how the river has changed, but the man too.

First time round, Hastings left zero impression. Zero. Here’s the totality of what I wrote about Hastings back in 2011. Ready?

Retirement seaside towns skip by in a summer’s breeze of tea rooms and stately homes: Eastbourne, Hastings, Rye.

That’s it. It’s not a bad sentence, but stretching for poetry to make up for emptiness of content. Did I stop in those tea rooms, did I admire those stately homes? No.

My experiences of Hastings in 2020 were more like pages ripped from a James Joyce stream-of-consciousness.

Besides the kidnapping, it’s where I bought my BBC-famous touring bugle, from a junk shop for £13. I haggled them down from £20. If I’d known then what that bugle would become later, I’d have paid £40.

I suppose I’m wrestling with how to entwine the two rides without getting bogged down.

Help me: what’s the story here?

  • Is the story about how Britain and I have changed between 2011 and 2023? In which case, the balance of the two rides should be pretty even.
  • Or is the story simply the rippping-est yarn that I can spin? In which case, 2011 will play a much smaller role.

To minimise 2011 would seem like a waste of something that makes my perspective unique. Yet, if I were to include 2011, then there is almost too much material and I risk diluting the whole for the sake of the concept.

This feels like a weird way to approach a story about a couple of bike rides. Maybe that’s a good thing, I don’t know.

But I would appreciate fresh minds working on the problem with me.

Thank you.

Make Space For Others To Shine Last summer, our 93 cyclists not only rode 5,428km from Glasgow to Athens, but also raised a record-breaking (for us) £114,632 in solidarity with grassroots refugee projects through charity MASS Action.

Summer feels like a loooong time ago, eh?

It’s dark outside and the windows are misted up with rain. Our tans have faded and even our steely thighs have turned to jelly.

As all but the freshest or most cursory reader will know, I’m one of the infamous community of cyclists that make up Thighs of Steel and every year I help organise what is almost certainly Europe’s longest charity bike ride.

Last summer, our 93 cyclists not only rode 5,428km from Glasgow to Athens, but also raised a record-breaking (for us) £114,632 in solidarity with grassroots refugee projects through charity MASS Action.

I know that many TDCN readers contributed to the pot, so thank you: £114,632, including £12k in Gift Aid, is such a significant amount of money.

It means that MASS Action have been able to give a big YES to no fewer than sixteen solidarity projects, covering pretty much every aspect of the movement for migrant social justice:

  • Community centres offer everything from nourishing meals and legal support to bus tickets and hot showers in Thessaloniki (Wave Thessaloniki), Samos (Just Action) and Athens (Khora)
  • Several projects provide accommodation or work to improve living conditions in Sheffield (ASSIST Sheffield), Glasgow (Scottish Asylum Seekers Resident Association) and Athens (Chamomile and Mazi x FORGE For Humanity)
  • The Babylon Project offers drama, storytelling, film-making and dance in the UK, while Musikarama connects people through music in Athens
  • Gatwick Detainees Welfare Group supports people during and after immigration detention
  • Hakoura Organic is an ecological cooperative farm established by refugees in the countryside northwest of Athens
  • No Evictions Network, No Borders Network and Calais Migrant Solidarity take direct action to support the rights, safety and dignity of people on the move in the UK and France
  • In Scotland, LGBT UNITY is a peer support group made up of LGBTQIA+ refugees and asylum seekers in Glasgow and Bike For Refugees runs cycling community hubs in Glasgow and Edinburgh

Phew! Hard to believe what a couple of months’ cycling can achieve.

It’s so significant that we couldn’t even display every project on one pie chart, so please hurry along to The Reason  and read more about what all that money is doing out in the world.

And — YES — this isn’t even the whole pie. There’s still £7,445.23 for MASS Action to distribute after this summer’s ride, wherever the need is greatest.

Sorry, did somebody say ‘this summer’s ride’?

Hell yeah.

Once again, we’ll be facilitating the highlight of your summer, starting in Glasgow on 14 July and finishing a continent later in Athens on 17 September.

We open for signups on Friday 17 February at 6pm — but ONLY if you’re on our special secret early access email list.

The most popular weeks sell out minutes after going live, so get on it!

Humanity is a team game. We don’t have to do it all — we can’t — but we can choose to play our part.

I’m lucky that my part, right now, is to help put on a bike ride that makes space for others to shine — not only the ninety-odd cyclists who surprise themselves with their own strength, but also the people and projects making change happen on the ground.

Everything we do in life either brings us one step closer together or pushes us further apart.

Go Team Human.

Never Dread The Road Ahead Everything I do for this bike ride is about finding the courage to connect. And it’s not just the bike ride. Cycling around Britain is a cypher for *everything* I do

Last night I went to the second ever edition of Professional Amateur Story Time, hosted by The New Forest Off Road Club.

The principle of the PAST Adventure Series is simple: three women stand up and tell stories of adventure to a rapt audience at a local bike shop.

We heard about the Adventure Queen Mother’s pre-Google adventures in Iceland and Nic’s wonderfully naive and frankly insane experience of the 2021 Women’s Torino-Nice Rally (ten Alpine passes in eight days WHAT).

But I was really struck by something that the first speaker, Emma, shared during her re-telling of a Christmas adventure on the Carretera Austral in Chilean Patagonia.

The Carretera Austral is a 1240km road that runs dead south through one of the most wild and remote places on the planet, with the Andes mountain range to the east and the Pacific ocean to the west, in a region populated by fewer than one person per square kilometre on average.

It’s a forbidding road to cycle alone: hundreds of kilometres of undulating hills, with scarcely any of the demographic distraction of towns or villages — or even any opportunity to make a turn left or right.

When, in the distance, Emma saw a sign that said 18km to her campspot for the night, she rejoiced. When, close up, she saw that the sign read 48km, she despaired.

But the relentlessness of the ride worked over her psyche in the way that only physical exercise can. Her mental landscape gradually turned with the wheels she pushed.

The road is here. The hills are here. I am here.

I chose — and I choose — to be here.

In such a situation, dread for the road ahead is, well, pretty absurd.

636km in Winter

On Wednesday night, I fell asleep in Inverness and woke up in London.

(Full marks, incidentally, to the Caledonian Sleeper — cheaper and far more convivial than a day train.)

I was on my way back from completing the sixth stage of my second tour around Britain, covering 636km from Edinburgh to Inverness across nine days.

Leaving Elgin

Last week I wrote about how we should rebrand November as Yes-vember and shift our wintertime adventuring mindset away from ‘cold, miserable’ to ‘crisp, magical’.

(For those of you wondering: nope, I never solved the problem of cold feet. Not even the mysterious air-activated chemical foot warmers that G kindly bought me did the job. Next time: get sponsored by a heated sock company?)

What I heinously failed to mention last week was my dread.

The Dread

My feelings pre-ride

Without really meaning to, I might have given the impression that I decided to go cycling in Scotland at the end of November and then that’s what I went and did.

It wasn’t that simple.

In the run-up to the ride, I wasn’t feeling my best and I went through the motions of preparation on autopilot.

Mechanically, I filled pannier bags with sleeping kit and warm clothes and fitted Martin (my bike) with water bottles, snack bags, tool kits and all the other accoutrements of cycle touring.

I did just enough work to get myself into a position where I could still go up to Scotland.

But even as I was driving crosscountry to meet G, who kindly offered to give me a lift up to Glasgow, I was still not convinced that I would go — that I should go, even.

Who cycles around Scotland in the frosted tip of November? Shouldn’t I rather stay at home, bed down for winter and work? Wouldn’t I rather take saunas and watch the World Cup?

At This Point…

Huge thanks are in order to G, without whose logistical and psychological support I wouldn’t have had the gumption alone to get my ass up north.

Somehow, she made adventure the path of least resistance.

We all need allies like that: thank you!

But Still: Dread

Even after we’d arrived in Glasgow, even after a day of rest and recovery, I was still hesitant to catch a train to Edinburgh and begin the ride.

Breaking inertia is always the hardest part of doing anything. Going from zero to one: The Doorstep Mile, as Alastair Humphreys calls it.

Why not stay in the warmth and maybe leave tomorrow?

Or, actually, there’s no need to push myself to ride at all.

I could find somewhere to work from Glasgow and enjoy the company of my friends up here for a week of warmth instead of cycling alone around the cold coastline.

In the end, I was decided by the gentle persuasion of my own preparations, bolstered by memories of past experience with inertia and a growing sense of expectation from those around me that I was here to ride.

And the weather forecast signed rain for tomorrow.

Best would be to start today, now, this evening, with a few hours of night-riding to camp, across the water from Edinburgh on the northern shore of the Firth of Forth.

There was nothing left to do but get moving. And with decisive action, dread dissolved to thrill.

The road is here. The hills are here. The cold is here.

I chose — and I choose — to be here.

Fortune Favours, Erm, Me Sometimes

As you can hopefully see from my photos, my choice was paired with fantastical fortune.

Kinnoull Hill outside Perth

Aside from two hours of drizzle through the morning of my first full day’s ride and a hail squall near Carnoustie, the weather was clear sunshine, unbroken but for the long nights, which were filled by the light of more distant stars and an otherworldly crescent moon.

Such fortune went untarnished by yet another snapped chain — I wonder what I’m doing wrong? Probably just cycling too much.

Also Kinnoull Hill outside Perth

My nine days of sunshine and stars couldn’t have been in more extreme contrast to the experience of a fellow tourer I met on that sleeper train from Inverness.

Nurul had cycled from the west instead of the east. Her ride had been a battle of winds and rain, off road or main road, through the central highlands.

Originally from Malaysia, Nurul is one of those ordinary humans going about doing extraordinary things while the rest of us are writing emails and washing duvet covers.

Her ride began when she woke up one summer morning to the realisation that she was vanishingly alone in the world: no ancestors, no descendents. Everyone who had ever cared for her was dead.

So Nurul quit her job and flew to Amsterdam, determined to start connecting with some of the other seven billion humans on this planet.

I’m lucky that one of them was me.

8am, Euston Station

Fuelled by a dim memory of how much she loved the freedom of cycling when she was a kid, Nurul’s original plan was to spend a couple of weeks riding from Amsterdam to Hamburg.

But a chance meeting with some Danes led her further on, and, once in Denmark, why not keep going?

Eventually, in the long light of Sweden, she met a Dutch guy who was cycling back home to Amsterdam.

‘But this is Sweden! How do you get to Amsterdam from here?’

By the time Nurul got back to Amsterdam, she realised with a shock that she only had four days left on her 90-day EU visa — too much of a scramble to get her bike packed up and a flight home.

So she cycled across the Netherlands and hopped onto a ferry to Harwich.

(I’d never considered how handy Britain’s exit from the EU is for long distance cycle tourers!)

Nurul’s plan was to take a few days in London to sort her travel back to Malaysia, without the pressure of a four-day deadline.

But you’re getting a good idea of what happens when Nurul makes plans…

Yep: she cycled a thousand kilometres up country to Inverness.

Come Ride

Nurul still hasn’t learned her lesson, though. Worried, perhaps dreading, the onset of winter, she now, finally, plans to fly home.

I get it: Malaysia is a tropical country. Even if it wasn’t, hell, I myself was dreading the prospect of cycling in the UK in November.

I wouldn’t blame Nurul for returning home. But that didn’t stop me, as we said goodbye at Euston station, from beseeching her to tilt her handlebars southwest.

Midwinter in Cornwall is no worse than Scotland in November, I told her, certainly not the November she’d experienced, with its freezing hail and sub-zero temperatures.

Come stay with me, come ride with me. There is so much more to see, so many more of the seven billion here to meet.

Three Shifts: Statistical, Logistical, Psychological

Since 2020, when I left home to cycle the first stage of my second round Britain ride, I’ve cycled a total of 5,109km over 73 days.

The biggest statistical shift between this multi-year, staged journey and the first time I cycled around Britain is how far I travel each day.

In 2011, I averaged 50km per day more than I am cycling this second time round. Madness.

The biggest logistical shift is from doing the whole thing in one 58-day sprint in the summer of 2011 to splitting the ride into nine stages, spread over five years.

Half a decade. Wonderful.

But the biggest shift between this journey and the first is the shift in my internal and external outlook, from isolation to connection.

First time around Britain, I scarcely spoke to a soul. I did barely anything but eat, sleep and cycle (in the words of fellow round Britian cyclist Anna Hughes).

Although I had a wonderful two-month adventure, at times I felt vanishingly alone.

Of course, as Nurul well knows, I was never alone: I was alone in my mentality. I chose isolation and dread over connection and courage.

Always Connect

Nine, ten and eleven years on, everything I do for this bike ride is about overcoming dread and finding the courage to connect.

Connection between body and bike, between bike and road, and between myself and enlightened, enthused, inspired people like Nurul.

And it’s not just the bike ride. Cycling around Britain is a cypher for everything I do.

In one of my favourite of his essays, George Orwell wrote:

Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it.

Now I cannibalise his words:

Every line of serious work that I have written since 2015 has been written, directly or indirectly, against disconnection and for connection, as I understand it.

At the top of this email, I said that I write stories that help you and me understand the world (and ourselves) a little better.

And the throughline of understanding is connection.

To cannibalise another great writer:

Always connect.

Postscript: Connection, Reconnection

After writing today’s story, I received an instant lesson in the principles of always connect.

Half an hour ago, I was sitting in my post-work sauna, when two women, one in her twenties, one in her fifties, walked in.

‘Hello, how’s it going?’ I asked, as I always ask — trying for a connection.

They were down from Oxford and Birmingham on a little pre-Christmas mother and daughter break.

‘Oh, I grew up in South Oxfordshire,’ I said.

It turned out that I was sitting next to Jane, my pre-school babysitter.

Always connect. Who knows — it might turn out to be reconnection.

Yes To Yes-vember! Selfless heroes of the journey: closest to the upspray from the wet road, toes to the wind, 60 times a minute pushing on the pedals, and with every pounding what warm blood remains further condensed

This, as some of you will certainly know by now, is my second time cycling this way.

Back in 2011, this section of my 58-day circumcycle of Britain took me six summer days.

This time around I’ve been on the move three days already and I’m less than a third of the way to Inverness.

Well, actually, I got to Perth yesterday lunchtime so that’s only half a day and I left Edinburgh on Tuesday as the sun was setting at half past three. So that was only four hours’ riding in darkness and mist.

Wednesday was a full day’s ride, but a full day’s light in November in Scotland is less than eight hours. A scarce comparison to July 2011, when the light lasts more than twice as long.

I guess this is why November — the end of November, no less — is not the typical time of year for a bonnie bike tour.

It also explains why I haven’t seen any other tourers on this ride so far. Only swaddled commuters and university students pushing around Saint Andrews.

On previous sections of this ride, I’ve enjoyed connecting with other tourers going my way: saying ‘Yes’ to the tribe in Brighton, catching tailwinds along the north coast of Wales, camping on the beaches of whisky-soaked Islay.

None of that this time.

Instead, I’ve been received with blunt wonder. At the Kangus Cafe in Kirkcaldy, I was literally cheered off the premises, clutching a bag of delicious plant-based baps.

It reminds me why I love swimming in the sea in January: the look on the faces of passers-by, wrapped up in thick winter garb, as I emerge dripping in icy relief from the salt spray.

No easier way to feel like an everyday superhero, I reckon.

A driver gives me the big thumbs up through his rain-pocked windscreen. Fair play, mate.

That’s just one of the tiny reasons why I’m proposing we ditch the lame branding of this most sinuous of months.

No to November — Yes to Yes-vember!

  1. Colder temperatures mean fewer picnics, but more hours in cafes and pubs, where easy community is found.
  2. The warming, centring wonder of tea.
  3. Fewer cars on the road, fewer tourists to share the attractions and (crucially) table room at cafes.
  4. Fewer dog walkers to sniff out your camping spot. In the deep darkness after five, basically anywhere flat is a great, secluded place to pitch up.
  5. More night time = more sleep time, particularly the long morning lie-ins, cosy in the tent.
  6. Night riding is excite riding.
  7. Meltable food doesn’t. Chocolate, vegan block, butter, cheese — even ice cream!
  8. All the fun, but none of the heaviness of Christmas. Mince pies and Christmas cake, but not yet wall-to-wall East-17 and Mariah Carey.
  9. All the amazing kit. Okay, I acknowledge that kit does cost money and it helps that I basically do this sort of thing professionally now, but… Proper winter kit is thrilling for what it can do for your comfort. Key items so far: insulated sleep mat (£££), thermal base layers (£), quality lights for hours of night riding (££).
  10. The weather can never disappoint you. It’s winter: you’re expecting cold and rain. It doesn’t always happen. Rejoice. (In fact, it’s only drizzled for two hours out of the 18 that I’ve been riding.)
Tentsmuir Forest

PS: Aren’t You Cold?

97.2 percent of me: absolutely not. While I’m cycling, even in the drizzle, I’m cosy from helmet to heel.

Layering for the win.

Even though my two feet make up only 2.8 percent of my total body weight, it’s a wonder how much misery that final fraction can cause, with blood vessels swollen to bursting from liquid to solid.

The solution to cold feet doesn’t seem to lie in layering. I’m wearing two pairs of socks (one waterproof), plus two sets of overshoes (one thermal).

Layering isn’t the solution because trapping warm air doesn’t seem to be the problem.

The problem is inactivity — an odd thing to say given how much exercise I’m doing, but hear me out.

Cold feet aren’t a problem when I’m hiking through snow, for example, where my feet are active players, flexing this way and that.

This only happens when I’m cycling in winter, where my feet are nothing more than terminal platforms; contact elements between piston thighs and crank pedals.

They are the selfless heroes of the journey: closest to the upspray from the wet road, toes to the wind, sixty times a minute pushing on the pedals, and with every pounding what warm blood remains further condensed and crushed.

The problem might not be layering, but I’m determined that my toes know how grateful I am.

So yesterday I went out and bought not one but two more thermal layers for my poor phalangeal platforms — and my shoes are in the oven.

Fingers and toes crossed for today…

Lies And The What What Now Now While livers and kidneys and stem cells do their surreptitious work, the rest of the world, friends, family and lovers from back home look on and ask of us the what what now now

Last week I told you no lies. But perhaps I was sparing with the truth.

I said that Thighs of Steel left Glasgow on 16 July and arrived in Athens on 17 September.

Truth.

I also said that 95 cyclists rode a cumulative 71,337km over the course of 49 days.

Also truth.

But there’s a gap between the truth and the whole truth, right? You know what I mean.

In those 49 days, we didn’t quite cycle all the way from Glasgow to Athens — even after you excuse us the cross-Channel ferry.

We missed a bit.

Let me take you back to Dubrovnik and the beginning of Week 7.

Probably A Hill / Gravel / Borek

Covering the 800km between Dubrovnik, Croatia and Thessaloniki, Greece inside one week was always going to be a big ask.

And not just because of the distance.

The mountains of Montenegro, Albania and Macedonia barred our way to the cotton and pomegranate plains of northern Greece.

Oh, and all this on a route we’d never done before, on roads that could run out at any moment.

Albania. Go. Now.

Naturally, it was hands-down the most popular week of the trip, selling out on day one on this hapless promise of unknowable adventure:

This is the week for people who LOVE not knowing what’s around the corner (clue: probably a hill / gravel / borek).

We’ve never been to North Macedonia before (have you?) so we’ve no idea what to expect, but the internet tells us it’s freakin’ gorgeous (if a bit hilly). We’re looking forward to the endless views and the bottomless mountain lakes.

As ever, we don’t know where we’re staying each night until that day, so we may be welcomed into homes, adopted by villages or wild camping beside a river. Expect to meet extremely friendly strangers and strangers who are extremely confused by us.

Before The Lake

After two days climbing through Montenegro, including the sixteen switchbacks of the Kotor Serpentine, we camped on the edge of Lake Shkodër, right on the border with Albania.

We arrived at camp in time to blow up the inflatable aubergine (yep), chuck a frisbee around in the shallows and then, because apparently we weren’t tired enough after a 97km ride, embark on a leisurely grueling swim out to a rocky island.

About halfway across, I was reminded that, over water, however distant your destination seems to appear, you should triple it.

The guilty Lake Shkodër (Montenegrin side)

The evening sun hurt our backs, the lake weeds caught our strokes, the vast current clubbed our legs.

We struggled back from the island, crawled ashore like wet things from the Pleistocene, and collapsed into a pot of dinner as mosquitoes danced.

Within 15 hours of that ill-advised swim, I was fixed to a drip in an Albanian hospital while my friend was being jabbed in the butt with a needle of drugs.

The Author, On His Death Trolley

After The Lake

We think we picked up the stomach bug from dirty water in the lake, but who knows.

What is certain is that, although almost everyone managed to cycle the 130km from Lake Shkodër to Tirana, by midnight all but five of the party were stricken.

There are no days off on Thighs of Steel, but there was no way we were going to cycle any further the next day.

Thighs of Steel, maybe, but bellies of jelly. Or worse.

A rest day was the only option.

Luckily, we had found a bucolic campsite up in the foothills of Mount Dajti, populated with ducks, chickens and a clutch of (now) horrified campervanners.

The proprieter was a jolly woman who, after seeing our condition, mocked us for not being able to handle our alcohol. When we revealed the true extent of our indisposition, she was appalled — until we explained that we’d picked up the bug in Montenegro.

‘Ah, Montenegro!’ she cackled. And restocked the toilet paper.

By the evening, most people were able to prop themselves up on an elbow and nibble a little plain pasta. A couple of us managed a game of Bananagrams. Some mad cats even cycled down to the city for a tour of the fleamarkets.

We called council and made the decision that anyone who could hold down the morning porridge could ride on the next day — with the proviso that Calypso, our beloved support van, would scoop up any strugglers.

But our recovery day meant we were travelling one day behind schedule.

In our fragile condition there was no way that we could make up the time, so, instead of reaching Thessaloniki on the seventh day, we ended the ride in Florina, a hot, flat ride over the border from Macedonia.

Then we caught a train.

In Thessaloniki, we snatched one last dinner together before saying our goodbyes.

The next day we welcomed the final week’s cyclists and rode six days to Athens.

5,304km from Glasgow, but somehow missing something…

Connecting The Dots

Why is it that we feel compelled to finish things?

Why, on Monday, did I feel compelled to take a train from Athens to Thessaloniki, meet fellow core teamer Fen, drive Calypso to Alexandreia, park her up in a quiet suburb and catch another train with our bikes to Florina — only to turn around after a night’s sleep and ride 124km (into a strong headwind) back to Alexandreia, thereby linking Week 7 to Week 8 and making an unbroken land route of 5,428km all the way from Glasgow to Athens?

I don’t know. But it felt really good. And not just because of roads like this:

It felt good to honour the ride that was a year in the making. It felt good to honour the other cyclists who couldn’t ride the full route during Week 7.

It felt good to take to the roads again and remember the purity of why we do this without the frantic circus that comes with riding in a large group.

It felt good to join the dots.

We have now raised £96,964 and if you want to help us join the dots to our £100,000 fundraising target for refugee solidarity charity MASS Action, you can donate here.

I know times are tough for pretty much everyone right now, but every donation makes a difference. Take these examples of what a donation could do for the Khora community spaces in Athens:

  • £10 buys 20kg of fresh fruit and veg to serve at the Khora community kitchen, free for anyone who needs a hot meal with friendly faces
  • £50 covers the costs of running the Khora Asylum Support Team for a day, providing vital, free legal support to asylum seekers in Athens
  • £100 pays the electricity, water and gas bills at the Khora kitchen for a fortnight
  • £250 covers food supplies needed at the Khora kitchen for a whole month

It does feel good to have connected the dots, to have finished a project. Like, really finished it.

But now, sitting improbably beneath a glacier, I’ve come to that other moment, where one project ends and I feel…

The What What Now Now

Well, the immediate what what now now is that I need to get to a secret location on the edge of the Morvan in central France. There, awaiting repair, is Calypso, fallen at the last, with oil spewing from her undercarriage.

But once the mechanics have been called, once the vehicle has been recovered, once she limps onto the ferry and makes her tired, troubled way back home, and I have, perhaps, showered and slept, then I will be faced with the what what now now.

Projects like Thighs of Steel take everything you’ve got, all thrown into a threshing machine, and scattered, in this case, across barren gravel tracks from the Clyde to the Acropolis.

During this grisly process, something powerful and enduring is created from the entrails of the various participants — no doubt about that — but it can take some time for everyone to regenerate.

In the meantime, while livers and kidneys and stem cells are doing their surreptitious work, the rest of the world, friends, family and lovers from back home look on and ask of us the what what now now.

The answer is I don’t know know now now.

But I do have some ideas, generated from a grid I made, which I’ll share because you might also find it useful if you’re having trouble figuring out your own what what now now.

To avoid jinxing all my nascent plans, here’s an empty one, drawn in the back of a notebook designed in Tehran, bought in Athens:

Get stuck in. Add or change the columns and rows until you have your own full-on personalised Zwicky Box of What What Now Now.

~

Thanks to everyone involved, to Fen and the tortoise, also to Tim Ten Yen, and of course The Much Much How How And I.

Not A Charity Auction 'Cycling together, reaching our destination and fundraising for refugees, brought everyone together and created a sense of intimacy that’s very difficult to find.'

Happy Friday! And greetings from Athens.

It’s been quite the ride.

Thighs of Steel, a rolling community of fundraising cyclists, left Glasgow on 16 July and arrived in Athens on 17 September.

Over the course of 49 days, 95 cyclists rode a cumulative 71,337km and climbed up 757,975 metres of elevation, the equivalent of more than 85 Everests.

Powered by 781 bowls of porridge, 11kg of peanut butter and untold megatons of pastries to fill a 2,341,500 calorie cycling deficit.

Brought together by at least 34 punctures (including one tyre pin-cushioned by 15 thorns along one apocalyptic goat track), 435 tent erections at 42 camp spots, plus two saline drips and a butt jab during one of two trips to A&E.

Together we have raised £94,574 and we’re open for donations for another few weeks before distributing the money to solidarity communities working with refugees and other people on the move in Athens, the UK and northern France.

Today’s story is about what Thighs of Steel does in the world (hint: it’s not cycling) and, inadvertently, how you might zoom out from the particular to uncover the universal purpose to everything you do as a human.

It’s big picture stuff, so I’ve illustrated the story with seven photographs taken by cyclists on the ride. You can find more on Instagram. Enjoy.

Not A Charity Auction

CREDIT: Zeina Hawa (Glasgow to Bristol)

A lot of people ask what it is that Thighs of Steel do and the answer is that the answer is different for everyone involved.

But here’s my answer.

We’re Not Movember

Thighs of Steel is a fundraising organisation. The way we fundraise is to organise bike adventures to give people an excuse to invite their friends to donate in solidarity with refugees.

Yet, in those two sentences alone, there is a contradiction.

If we wanted to maximise our fundraising potential, instead of spending nine months planning a bike trip, we’d throw all our energy and resources into schmoozing at charity auctions for High Net Worth individuals in The City.

Or, even better, we’d create mass participation events, like Movember or the World’s Biggest Coffee Morning, rather than a logistically complex continental adventure that is forceably capped at 96 participants.

Ergo: Thighs of Steel is not purely a fundraising organisation because, if it were, it’d be a horribly inefficient one. There’s something else going on.

CREDIT: Grace Compton (Glasgow to Milan)

We’re Not A Cycle Club Either

Thighs of Steel was formed as a Community Interest Company and, on our registration documents, this is how we describe our public benefit:

All communities within the United Kingdom stand to benefit from our company as our bike rides are open to people of all ages and fitness levels to join.

There are rides of different degrees of difficulty to challenge experienced cyclists and also encourage and include those who are new to cycling.

The individuals who participate and also those who follow our activities will benefit as we are promoting and encouraging healthy activities and challenges.

As well as health benefits, we are also promoting environmentally friendly travel (travelling by bicycle) which aims to inspire people to use their own bodies, thereby encouraging lives with a low carbon footprint, which has a positive impact on the whole community.

All of this is true, but there’s no at all mention of fundraising, the very reason Thighs was set up in the first place!

This is because the donations we raise don’t exclusively benefit UK populations and therefore fall outside the cut-and-paste regulatory requirements of a CIC.

And this isn’t the only time that our two primary activities of fundraising and cycling feel like they’re in competition with each other.

CREDIT: Catriona Mallows (Trieste to Dubrovnik)

Are We Fundraising Or Cycling Here Or What?

During the difficult moments, sweating through the Lake District, struggling up the Dolomites or vomiting into a toilet in Albania, it can take a certain amount of effort to remember why we’re doing this horrible thing: caught up in effort, we forget why we’re fundraising.

Conversely, at peak moments, during sunshine descents, pistachio ice cream or geothermal sea baths, many of us feel a guilty tension between our personal joy and the difficult reality of daily life for refugees, the people we’re riding in solidarity with.

Both forgetfulness and guilt are dangerous states of mind that can sap our appetite to do anything at all, whether productive or pointless, difficult or delightful.

At its worst, our activities could seem pretty crass: a bit of fundraising bolted on to a cheap bike holiday.

But rather than try to resolve this tension between our stated aims of fundraising and cycling, let’s zoom out to a wide perspective where we’ll see them feeding into each other as two expressions of a third, much greater, purpose.

CREDIT: Linde Geerinck (Glasgow to Bristol)

Zoom Zoom Zoom Out

Up close, things look disconnected. It’s only by zooming out that we can see the connecting lines between everything that we do.

This applies to our personal lives as much as the operational activities of a non-profit.

By zooming out, we can see what a £5 online donation from your cousin Frank has in common with rubbing someone’s back while they throw up into a toilet bowl.

The connection is connection.

One of the Thighs cyclists this year was Naoum Sayegh, a Syrian engineer who lived for 11 years in Lebanon before moving to the UK not long before Covid.

As well as being a great part of our little bike crew, Naoum is also super enthusiastic about embracing British culture, but until now has found authentic connection with his fellow citizens hard to find.

London is very individualistic so I don’t have the same social fabric as I had in the Middle East. I felt very isolated living in London alone. So, when I joined the ride, one of my main goals was to build this connection with British cyclists.

He wasn’t disappointed:

Cycling together and aiming to reach the same goal, reaching our destination and fundraising for refugees, brought everyone together and created a sense of intimacy that’s very difficult to find within British communities in England.

And because every night Thighs of Steel throw ourselves on the generosity of the communities we land in, Naoum was also able to connect with complete strangers across Britain (or at least along that thread of cycle road that connects Glasgow and Bristol).

Camping at community farms and being hosted by locals really helped me see the UK from a different perspective.

When we stopped at Claver Hill Community Farm in Lancaster, they cooked us a delicious meal with vegetables from the farm and gave us some outstanding apple cider — how sweet!

Then I sat down with the hosts and had a very interesting conversation about how they live and how community functions outside of London.

Being pampered by our hosts created a connection that is very important.

CREDIT: Jim Yeoman (Trieste to Dubrovnik)

Let Me Count The Ways

Naoum counts two obvious ways that Thighs of Steel fosters connection: within the tight team of cyclists and with our camping hosts.

But there’s much, much more.

Cycling connects me as an individual to my own mind (agh, why won’t this hill stop!) and my own body (yes! I am strong!), as well as to my bike (another snapped gear cable!).

As Naoum said, over the course of a tough week of cycling, groups bond through both joy and adversity: one of the incredible things about organising this trip is seeing week after week of cyclists arrive as strangers and leave as friends.

These connections can last a week; they can last a lifetime.

Naoum mentioned our hosts, but what of the hundreds of people who helped us with directions, pastries, water or a smile? Every single one a spark of a connection, acknowledgement of something shared, and inducement to share in return.

The ride also connects us to the world, to its nature and construction: the landscapes we pass through, the tortoises we protect from onrushing cars, the wind, the weather, the birds of prey, the waves of the ocean, the kittens.

We leave the ride more connected to ourselves, to each other and to the rest of reality.

That’s a whole lot of connection already, but solidarity fundraising is in itself another gargantuan act of connection.

The 95 cyclists all set up fundraising pages and invited their wide networks of friends, family and casual acquaintances to participate by donation.

The most successful pages used creative strategies to connect communities and pull people into the project: parties, wine tastings, raffles.

Even those who never donated still heard about the ride and its purpose in an unmeasurable circle of influence that reaches out still.

Connection on connection.

And finally, of course, the money raised is funnelled directly into refugee projects specifically set up to foster connection and community.

Thousands of people will connect with those projects over the coming year and, being humans, the connections that they find will help make the world a better place for us all.

It’s not just cycling, it’s not just fundraising, it’s not just a £5 donation and it’s not just rubbing someone’s back while they vomit into an Albania toilet.

It’s connection.

CREDIT: Georgie Cottle (Milan to Athens)

Only Connect

Connection, for me, is the purpose of Thighs of Steel. In fact, it’s what drives pretty much everything I do.

When I’m confused about why I’m doing something, I try to see how it will help me connect with the universe around me.

It’s usually not hard: everything we do connects us. If you want to get really zoomed out, then every act that you’re a part of is a small contribution to the workings of the cosmos.

The point is to amplify those connections and make them as generative as possible.

~

If you want to connect to this story, then my fundraising page is still open. Annoyingly, I’m £50 short of my target 🥰

CREDIT: Jim Yeoman (Trieste to Dubrovnik)

Carpocratian Touring

The second century followers of the gnostic Carpocrates believed that human souls must go through every possible earthly experience before they are released and return to god’s side in heaven.

For most ordinary people, this means reincarnation after reincarnation as they labour through tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, rich, poor, beggar, thief. But the Carpocratians tried to pack everything — absolutely everything — into a single lifetime.

I know how they feel.

Thighs of Steel is an undertaking of Carpocratian magnitude and the last month has seen a total of 48 cyclists riding 2611km from Glasgow to Milan.

Over a hundred kilometres a day, packed into twenty-five heatdawn, overdrawn days.

So please accept my sincere apologies for not writing to you the last couple of weeks.

I am now taking a break from cycling while the ride continues from Milan to Dubrovnik without me.

This break will be amply — even excessively — filled with the frantic gathering of thoughts as I seek to process what on earth has happened over the past month.

Also sleep.

Turning Points

I’m writing today from a farmhouse near Garlasco, a quiet town in a quiet corner of Lombardy, totally unremarkable to the locals, but nevertheless subject to a constant stream of remarks from me and my British companions, evenly split by topic between the heavenly pizza and the hellish mosquitoes.

Since I last wrote, our fundraising cyclists have covered every inch of the road (and sometimes gravel) between Bristol and Milan.

The change in scenery has been mildly dramatic:

Lovebrook Farm, our last night in England, on the chalk downs of Sussex
Climbing the Col du Mont Cenis (2083m), over the Alps, from France into Italy

Putting those two photos side by side gives an impression of distinct and dramatic movement. One moment your eyes are on the downs, the next on the Alps.

It looks like a clear and obvious turning point: that moment in a story where everything changes forever.

But that’s in stories.

On a bike ride, change is infinitesimal and incremental and our wheels are always turning.

Between that first and second photograph, we got up out of our tents, ate breakfast, did some cycling, ate some food, did some more cycling, drank our water bottles, refilled our water bottles, did more cycling, put on sun cream, did more cycling, ate dinner, went to sleep, woke up, got up out of our tents, ate breakfast, did some cycling, ate some food…

For two weeks.

There are no turning points — except those we choose to recognise after the fact for the purpose of understanding our lives, for telling our story.

Making sense of our experiences is one of the reasons I love writing to you and why it’s a shame in a way that the past three weeks have been so full of life.

I wonder if the Carpocratians allowed themselves any time to process, or whether ‘storyteller’ fell outside their definition of earthly experience.

Writing gives us a moment to put down a marker, recognise some turning point in experience or learning, and help us understand how what we’re doing fits into the universe at this moment in space/time.

So here are four turning points from this journey, one for each week of the ride so far.

Glasgow to Bristol: A Short Ride Across Town

The two months before this ride began were stressful.

In the manic weeks in the run-up to our departure, I wrote myself (and you) letters about the electromagnetism of responsibility and the need to replace control with trust, but I still arrived in Glasgow with a sneeze-cold.

Thirty blood tests, five Covid tests and two courses of antibiotics did nothing to alleviate the stress I felt, nor resolve the question uppermost in my mind: forget the century of cyclists signed up to ride, would I be able to take care of myself over the next 5,000km?

I needed, or thought I needed, a holiday.

Then, before we were anywhere near ready, it was already time to cycle across town to meet the first week’s cyclists at Glasgow youth hostel.

Spinning wheels, one, two, three kilometres. Friday rushhour, Clyde summer sunshine, giddy core team.

This short ride turned inertia to momentum, old questions to new, and blind doubt to blind faith.

By the time we crossed into Dumfries and Galloway, the stress was gone. The sneezes followed stress into the wind the next day.

Bristol to Paris: Cheese On Toast

That first week was tough. Thighs of Steel had never ridden so far in a week before: 754km with an Everest of climbing. In a heatwave.

But we had done it.

Together we had done it — and we had raised a lot of money in solidarity with refugees in the process. Most of the cyclists on the Glasgow to Bristol leg raised over £1,000 each.

In the heat of the struggle, the cycling had taken every ounce of our strength, while daily disasters had taken every ounce of our ingenuity and saying goodbye to fast firm friendships had taken every ounce of our social emotional energy.

And now we had to do it all over again, with ten complete strangers.

The turning point of this second week was relearning how quickly we humans can go from utterly depleted to utterly repleted.

Hunger draining our legs. Heat draining our minds. Off-road gravel draining bashed bikes. Then a smashed GPS screen.

We freewheel downhill to a cafe marked as ‘open’ on the map. Desperation for water-fillers and stomach-fillers.

Cafe’s closed.

Back up the hill, in silence.

Another cafe.

They only serve cheese on toast.

No matter: water at least, tea at least, shade at least.

But wait. This isn’t cheese. This is Cheese. This isn’t a cafe, this is The Milk Churn, home of Sussex Charmer.

Fifteen cyclists tucked well in. Even the vegans. Powered all the way to Lovebrook.

Turning point: there is nothing that can’t be fixed by comfort food. (Except perhaps smashed GPS computer screens: for that you’ll need Laka cycle insurance.)

It’s not inconceivable that the success of the first week from Glasgow to Bristol was a fluke. But Bristol to Paris showed us that the Thighs method works.

Fresh croissants at dawn, demi-bottles of lunchtime wine, massage circles at sundown.

Something in the alchemy of the way Thighs of Steel was founded attracts people with not only a strong, positive and collaborative work ethic, but one that’s paired with equal parts joy.

Paris to Lyon: Pineapple Chess

Sometimes the most signficant turning points are scarcely more than a dramatic inflection, an almost imperceptible change of emphasis, but one that leaves an important, lasting impression on our experience.

Paris to Lyon was exactly that, for me at least. It was fun, actual fun, cycling with friends old and new for a week through Comté, Beaujolais and Tour de France country.

Days in the hot saddle chatting shit, inventing songs, playing games: ‘I’ve got a business’, one word stories, Pineapple Chess. Nights wild camping under stars, nuzzled by donkeys, rescue piglets and other tame animals.

That’s not to say that it wasn’t a tough week. But when you’re having fun, things just flow, right?

It’s a virtuous circle of energy: other people love to gather around fun and, when people gather together, problems get solved easily, almost before anyone’s noticed there was ever a problem.

That was the turning point of Paris to Lyon. And, if you want the rules to Pineapple Chess, you’ll have to donate 😂

Every penny goes into our MASS Action fundraiser in solidarity with refugees, asylum seekers and other people on the move across Europe.

Lyon to Milan: No Ikaría

I was worried about crossing the Alps on my bicycle.

The Scottish Lowlands, the Lake District and Hay Bluff are one thing: the French and Italian Alps are quite another. Not helped by the realisation that I hadn’t even taken a dump on a serious mountain range since, ooh… 1990.

Now: I’ve always been proud of my heavyweight cruiser of a bicycle, but with some of the others riding carbon, I was a little nervous to be giving away an eight kilo handicap before we even left the start line.

I was so worried, in fact, that my bowels occupied the first 24 hours of the week unavoidably voiding themselves and I was forced to spend the first long, hot, flat day in the van.

But early the next morning, sitting in the Alpine garden of our hosts Pierre and Pascal (found through slow travel hosting site Welcome To My Garden), madly trying to swallow down the prospect of more than 2,000m of climbing in the day, I decided to seek inspiration from all the other tough rides I’ve ever done.

As I shoveled soothing porridge into my belly, I searched Strava, where I record most of my ride data, by elevation climbed.

I was pleasantly surprised. The rides I did last year through Cornwall and Devon were similar total elevation and, in fact, steeper climbs.

But nothing in the Alps — nothing — could be tougher, or even be close to being as tough as the ride I’d done three years ago on the Greek island of Ikaria: nearly 3,000m of steep climbing, in hot summer sun, increasingly off road.

The Alps, I decided, with their smooth roads and steady switchbacks, would be a cinch.

And so it proved.

Okay, so ‘cinch’ might sound like an overstatement, but when you’re riding in a generous community, always ready with a joke, a song or a word of encouragement, the metres and miles dissolve into the road.

And, besides, even in the toughest moments, there’s always the scenery.

Routine Strength

It’s fair to say that I started out on this journey pretty worried. As an organiser, worried about all the things that could go wrong with the ride, but also increasingly worried about whether I personally would have the strength to see it through.

The last time I was part of the Thighs of Steel core team, back in 2019, I was also worried — and amazed, amazed to discover that, rather than being depleted, exhausting day by exhausting day, sleepless night by sleepless night, my strength only grew over the weeks, until I was fit to burst as we rode into Athens.

But 2019 was a long time ago. Much has changed. Would those wells run so deep?

As we rolled on and on, I was relieved. They do.

Humans are amazingly adaptable animals and even our relentless routine — early starts, big climbs, late nights — has become quotidian, tapping into fathomless reservoirs of energy that my daily life never needs.

And I’m not special. This isn’t something unique that my brainbody does.

As we sweated and strained our way up to the Basilica of Notre-Dame de Fourvière, dominating in gold and glass the skyline of Lyon, one of the cyclists remarked: ‘I can’t wait to go on more adventures like this — now I know what I’m capable of!’

Because I’m an irritating contrarian, I had to disagree with her.

‘No you don’t. That’s the whole point. You’ve cycled 600km in six days, in a heatwave, and you still haven’t hit the wall. You have no idea what you’re capable of.’

And learning that is one hell of a turning point.

What must terrify us most as humans is not how little can be done, not how powerless or puny our lives are, but rather how great and signficant, especially when we join together and reach for limits out of reach.

Have you hit the wall? Have you reached your limit?

I don’t believe you.

Philoxenia and the Magic Cobbler

For the next couple of months I’m cycling to Athens, as part of Europe’s longest charity bike ride.

5,000km, a hundred people, through ten countries, over nine weeks gives me a lot of time to experience things, but not a lot of time to write things.

Today I happened to wake up at 5am — so here we all are!

We started the ride last Saturday morning and yesterday we finished the first leg, arriving in Bristol in an absolute ecstasy of a downpour, raindrops the size of popcorn.

You can follow the ride on the Thighs Instagram, Facebook or my own personal agony, ecstasy and knee cramp via the Strava updates on my fundraising page. (Ahem.)

Britain is beautiful by bike

Philoxenia is the wonderful Greek concept of generosity and friendship towards strangers, guests, gods, gods in disguise, foreigners, travellers and friends of friends of cousins of friends.

I’ve written before about philoxenia and my own solo experiences of bicycle touring (here and here), but, when travelling with sixteen other cyclists and a bloody great van, the generosity of strangers towards strangers that we receive rises to truly Homeric standards.

It’s hard — impossible — to pay tribute to myriad of kindnesses, large and small, seen and unseen, that the people of Glasgow, Dumfries and Galloway, Cumbria, Lancashire, Shropshire and Wales showered down upon us over the past 750km, but here are a few that rise to mind this morning.

June in Hesket Newmarket who let us use her campsite free of charge, ‘Consider it my donation’, her fridge-temperature bathroom papered with sheep-based cartoons and proud newspaper cuttings of Prince Charles.

The elderly woman in Windermere who wasn’t quite sure how to use her garden hose, but, once shown, took over the task of hosing down our oven-hot cyclists with a cackling child-like relish.

Steve The Magic Cobbler in Preston who not only sorted us out with a new set of van keys (don’t ask), but also performed card tricks while we waited.

Paula, Paula, Pauline and Keith at The Kathleen & May Heritage Museum in Connah’s Quay for letting us doss on their floor, surrounded by exhibits on the River Dee and the local paint industry. Thanks too for the fried-up breakfast butties that put our porridge to shame.

Fathomless thanks to the communities at Claver Hill and Three Pools who hosted us in Lancaster and Abergavenny, and to Phil and Bec who Warmshowered us on the hills overlooking Offa’s Dyke near Montgomery. If you’ll have us, we’ll be back.

Joe at Rogue Welsh Cakes for donating three dozen exquisite Welsh cakes. I wish I could say that they’d been savoured, but after seven straight days of cycling, they were mainly devoured as delicious calories. Luckily, Joe does postal orders for easy at-home savouring.

In fact: thank you to all the strangers who heard about the ride and handed us cash donations in solidarity with refugees, asylum seekers and other people forced from their homes. The purest form of philoxenia: stranger to never met stranger.

All the pub landlords who patiently filled our water bottles and waved us in to empty our bursting bladders. There are now fewer than 40,000 pubs in England and Wales for the first time since the opening of the Domesday Book (probably).

Even as someone who doesn’t drink much, that feels like a bit of a shame, particularly for the countryside communities that we cycled through. We’ll keep on buying chips and Scampi Fries.

Finally: thanks to the rivers and lakes, the woods and fields, the mountains and valleys, the road and hedgerow, the wing, feather, snout, hoof and fur, the wild and the tame that swaddled us all in gentle cradle, wrapping the journey in threaded cloth of nurture and nature.

Podcast: Talking Thighs of Steel with Bikepacking Buds

If you’d like to listen to me telling stories about that unique intersection between a) cycling really far, b) migrant solidarity and c) bugling on the beach, then — snakes alive! — you are in luck.

I did my first ever guest spot on a podcast this week, chatting to Saoirse at Bikepacking Buds, a rad community that aims to create a network of bikepackers across the UK.

Listen on Spotify (you don’t need an account) and hear about cycling Britain on a £50 auction bike, riding to Athens four times, how to fix broken brakes with duct tape, doing laps of Dartmoor for the sake of GPS artwork, and, of course, the spirit badger origin of my touring bugle.

How To Give Me Birthday Presents (And accidentally take positive action on something you really care about)

I’ve spent the last six months working my ass off behind a computer screen to help make Thighs of Steel 2022 a sweat-n-spokes reality.

Now it’s time for the easy bit: cycling 5,000km from Glasgow to Athens.

SORRY WHAT?!?

Oh yes. I’ll be part of the core team for six of the eight weeks: from Glasgow to Milan (yep — over the Alps) and then again from Dubrovnik to Athens, through Albania and Macedonia.

Being core team means I’ll cycle about two thirds of the way and drive Mama Calypso the other third, supporting ninety pedal-pushing, wild-camping, fundraising cyclists through the biggest physical challenge of their lives.

And I won’t sleep for two months.

Together, we’re aiming to raise at least £60,000 for MASS Action, a volunteer-led charity that support grassroots projects like Khora, a social kitchen, asylum support centre and free shop for displaced people in Athens.

Our aim is to empower dignified and sustainable initiatives for migrants and asylum seekers in the UK and Greece. 💪

Enough typing!

If you’d like to listen to me telling stories about that unique intersection between a) cycling really far, b) migrant solidarity and c) bugling on the beach, then — snakes alive! — you are in luck.

I did my first ever guest spot on a podcast this week, chatting to Saoirse at Bikepacking Buds, a rad community that aims to create a network of bikepackers across the UK.

Listen on Spotify (you don’t need an account) and hear about cycling Britain on a £50 auction bike, riding to Athens four times, how to fix broken brakes with duct tape, doing laps of Dartmoor for the sake of GPS artwork, and, of course, the spirit badger origin of my touring bugle.

So what has this got to do with my birthday?

Next Friday, I’ll turn 40.

That seems like a nice round number and, when nice round numbers come along, it’s not unusual in our culture for people to mark the occasion with generous gifts.

I’m going to make this easy for you.

Instead of going to the hassle of wrapping up and posting me one of your old DVDs, subscribe to this newsletter between now and my birthday next Friday, and I’ll donate the entirety of your subscription fee (£30) to the fundraiser on your behalf.

As a bonus, you’ll receive all of the bragging rights associated with becoming a paying subscriber (and it will automatically renew next year, so stay sharp if you don’t want to go quite that far).

You might even receive gifts in return — like last year, when I sent out a book to all paying subscribers.

I am, for example, planning a surprise and surprisingly physical subscriber-only newsletter magazine-letter, on the theme of propinquity, delivered to your door (if your door is in the UK).

If this all sounds a bit much or you prefer random acts of kindness, you can simply donate to the fundraiser through JustGiving. Like, right now.

Thank you 🙏

The Bad News

What my impending sleeplessness also means is that, from mid-July to mid-September, these newsletters will inevitably become spontaneously irregular.

They’ll also, more likely than not, be obsessively focussed on cycling, cycling, cycling and, as you’ve already glimpsed, amplifying our message of international solidarity and maximising the impact of our and your financial contributions.

I hope that I’ll find time for one or two more thoughtful emails, but please don’t expect a whole lot more than a cache of images and word-images captured on the freewheel.

Think of it as a summer break. We all need one.

The Cataclysmic Event Hypothesis Nothing propinks like propinquity

Nothing propinks like propinquity
~ Ian Fleming, Diamonds Are Forever

Propinquity is the property of nearness.

On an archaeological dig, the closer together artefacts are found, the more similar their likely provenance. These artefacts are said to have high propinquity and, most likely, nearness in space equals nearness in time.

If beads from a lapis lazuli necklace are found in the dust around the bleached bones of a Neolithic hunter, then it’s fair to assume that they were both buried at the same time.

If the burial was uncovered in Orkney, then — bloody hell — you’ve found evidence that Neolithic Orkadian hunters had trade links with ancient Afghanistan.

That’s the law of propinquity in archaeology.

In social psychology, propinquity is one of the main factors in personal attraction.

Nearness in time and space, together with the regular frequency of encounters, explains why so many romances begin at work.

Work-based lovers are said to have high propinquity and are doomed to spend the rest of their days sharing long looks over a PowerPoint, sneaking a fumble at the fax machine and studiously pretending not to notice each other at the office party.

Propinquity can also be used to capture other, non-physical, similarities between people. We feel closer to those who share our political and religious beliefs, upbringing, education or sense of humour.

Even totally coincidental match-ups like sharing a first name can raise our sense of propinquity with another human. Davids are the best.

Why the heck am I going on about this?

The way most of us experience reality is linear. We feel bounded by time and space. Because of that, propinquity — hereness, nowness — is everything to us humans.

Stand by for a bold statement:

Your physical environment (space) is the most immediately relevant factor dictating the course of your life in that moment (time).

Because we’re such social beings, what this means is that the most important person in our lives is always the person closest to us in physical space at that moment.

Not convinced?

Think about this grisly scenario next time you’re crossing the street and a car comes fast round the bend.

Who’s most important to you right now — the driver, with his steering wheel and brake pedal, or your dearly beloved waiting for you to get back from the shops?

The brakes fail. You get hit.

Who’s most important to you right now — a passing grandma with an enthusiastic, but terrifyingly shaky memory of a first aid course she did sixty years ago, or the world’s greatest trauma surgeon twiddling her thumbs in a hospital in Basingstoke?

The Cataclysmic Event Hypothesis

This macabre thought experiment is what I call The Cataclysmic Event Hypothesis.

The idea made its first appearance back in 2008, when I thought I was going to become An Important Writer and wrote a 44-page manuscript modesty titled The Meaning Of Life.

If there is a cataclysmic event right now, I am going to be relying for my life upon those people in closest proximity to me.

Obviously, a cataclysmic event like being involved in a car crash is an extreme example, but isn’t this hypothesis exactly what we’ve learned during the pandemic?

Our nearest becoming, truly, our dearest.

Life made worthwhile again by the boy next door, the girl upstairs, neighbourhood support groups and a smile across the shared garden.

As I pompously wrote back in 2008:

[…] People talk even today of the ‘spirit of the Blitz’: catastrophic events tend to bring the best out in human beings. But why restrict our best behaviour to only after such a disaster?

[…] The most important things to you in any one moment are the things immediately around you: make things better for them and things will become better for you as well, because they are your environment and you are all part of one organism, the society.

As we’ve also discovered during the pandemic, virtual propinquity has changed the rules — but only somewhat.

Telephones, the Internet, social media and video conferencing help us maintain a sense of high propinquity with people far away, if not physically, then at least psychologically.

Equally, however — as many people have found during long periods of isolation and as that morbid thought experiment suggests — virtual propinquity is, when the chips are really down, an illusion.

No: we are entirely dependent, or rather interdependent with the people with whom we share our immediate physical environment, right now.

Nothing Propinks Like Cycle Touring

But why am I banging on about propinquity?

It’s not the usual topic of conversation for someone who just cycled 439km through the isles and kyles of western Scotland during a heatwave.

No — I should be boring you with an endless slideshow of what I done on my holidays.

Alright then, here you go:

1: Chain snaps. 2: Dave ‘fixes’ chain. 3 & 4: Rinse and repeat.

Well, besides being a generally interesting new concept that might completely transform the way you interact with everything and everybody in the world around you, forever until you lie stone cold dead in the ground, allow me to paraphrase Ian Fleming:

Nothing propinks like cycle touring

Sunday Afternoon: A Hill On A Tight Corner, In The Middle Of Nowhere, Scotland

I am 25km into an 85km bike ride and, crucially, 30km from the nearest bike shop. This is crucial because, two seconds ago, my chain snapped.

I have pushed my bike to the grassy verge and am now staring in disbelief at the metal snake lazily basking on the hot asphalt of the country lane.

It’s at this point that I have a flashback to a scene in my kitchen the week before, confidently fitting a new chain with all the smug satisfaction of an amateur who knows too much.

After ascertaining the above-mentioned crucial information, I have no choice but to attempt a roadside recovery.

Luckily (deliberately, to be fair) I have the necessary tools at my disposal. But fitting a chain is a pain in the ass (unless you have a thing called a ‘master link’) and, above all, a mess in the ass (especially if, only ten minutes prior, you heroically squirted a full litre of lubricant over the entire transmission, chain, sprockets, cogs and all).

Half an hour later, having used any excess bike oil to paint some pretty nifty body art, the chain is back on, the snake back in its bed.

I am mildly pleased with my handiwork, but not so proud that I don’t walk up the rest of this agonisingly steep hill.

Back on the flat, I test the chain with a few turns of the pedals. Despite the heat, every creak and twang sends cold shivers down the back of my neck.

I pull over and ponder my options: cycle back the way I came to the nearest bike shop thattaway (30km) or press gingerly on ahead, trusting my mechanical knowhow until the next town thattaway (45km).

It’s at that precise moment, oily fingers stroking oily beard, that another cyclist whizzes past me — gone, flying down the hill into the hazy distance, before I can blurt out the words, ‘Excuse me, you haven’t got any expertise in on-the-road chain repair, have you?’

Happily for me, cruising behind this bomber biker, is her husband, who sees my ponderous look and asks if anything’s up.

Propinquity And The Port Sunlight Wheelers

Iain pulls to a stop beside me and the exchange that follows is remarkable.

It’s not remarkable because he’s wearing an anglepoise mirror attached to his sunglasses so that he can keep an eye on his wife when she stops to chat to strangers.

It’s not even remarkable because he generously bequeaths me his own spare master link in case my chain snaps again later down the road.

It’s remarkable simply because he stopped.

About five cars passed while I struggled to tie my chain up in knots on the roadside. Hot-and-bothered people with places to go and children to feed, no doubt.

But Iain stopped. He alone acknowledged our high propinquity and he alone offered the words of comfort that gave me the strength to ride on ahead:

The exact same thing happened to me and the wife on Islay, ten years ago. On a tandem. With a kiddy trailer. Exactly the same: we were going up a steep hill and — crack — the chain snaps.

So I took out a link, same as you, and rivetted it back up, same as you — and it worked. It’s the exact same link that’s on the bike now, ten years later.

Get back on the bike and have some confidence in your work, lad.

Stepping back on the pedals with an oily handshake and a smile, Iain did indeed leave me full of confidence.

Utterly misplaced, of course — the chain snapped again not 15km later — but that’s not the point.

The point is that all the friends, all the money, all the power, all the joy and happiness in the world couldn’t help me out of my predicament in that moment.

The only entities that could possibly help me were those with whom I shared high propinquity.

Iain, in other words — Iain of the Port Sunlight Wheelers on the Wirral.

In other words, a complete stranger.

Stay Alive

So the next time you’re doing, well, anything at all, stay alive to your time and place, and embrace propinquity — even if, especially if, they are ‘strangers’.

Instead of ‘minding your own business’ or jacking up on virtual propinquity through your phone screen, look to strengthen the connections you have with the beings immediately around you.

You never know when and how they might need you and you might need them.

Arran – Islay – Jura Down on words, high on images

Apologies for the late running of this service – I neglected to bring the little duberry that magics words from my typewriter to my phone.

What that means is, rather than nothing at all this week, this story will be down on words and high on images.

I hope that’s okay by you. I also hope it might encourage you to travel in whatever sense of the word works for you this weekend.

If you do decide that the Western Isles is the place to be, then I must mention one huge / tiny element of the trip scandalously not shown in any of my images: midgies.

My advice? Grow a thick skin, or come in winter.

1 / 6

If you’re stuck inside in the rain and feeling envious, please remember: I am covered in midgie bites and itching all over. The image is not the experience.

(It’s still bloody nice, though!)

Three Small Things At The End

  • Every year, Islay has a whisky festival over the last two weeks of May. Each of the island’s 629,682 distilleries has its own special ‘open day’, with music and dancing and free drams for all.
  • George Orwell nearly died in a boating accident when he got caught in the whirlpool of Corryvreckan (the third largest in the world), off Jura.
  • In Sweden, apparently, secret beauty spots, away from the tourist tramp lines, are called ‘wild strawberries’.

I hope you find a few wild strawberries this weekend. Normal service resumes next Friday…

58 Days In Memory’s Universal Flux Cycling around Britain Part IV

In 58 days over the summer of 2011, I cycled 4,110 miles around the coast of Britain.

A decade later, in the foreshortened world of 2020, what better time was there to set out on a journey I’d always promised myself I would one day retrace?

But now, ten years older and wiser, instead of cycling over 70 miles a day for two months straight, I’m covering 40 miles a day in bursts spread over four years.

Edinburgh from Salisbury Crags

My 460 mile ride from Kings Lynn to Edinburgh was part four of what will become an eight-legged journey and my arrival into the Athens of the North marked my fifty-eighth day on the road.

Following Southern England in 2020 and Wales in 2021, I’m now about 60 percent of the way around the island…

Map made using Jonathan O’Keefe’s Strava Multiple Ride Mapper. If you’re really interested, you can also explore the ride in more detail on Komoot.

… Or am I?

Looking at the gaps in the journey already — the northeastern tip of East Anglia, the north coast of Devon and Cornwall, the Black Country, the Welsh heartland, and, not least, Grimsby — I’m wondering: shall this ride ever be complete?

Putting aside even the geographical lacunae, I feel the flux of the universe as my feet touch the pedals, every atom in the stream growing, flowing and dying on, even as I race down the road in pursuit.

‘The Road goes ever on and on, Down from the door where it began. Now far ahead the Road has gone, And I must follow, if I can.’ (JRR Tolkein)

This whole trip may be nothing more than a vain attempt to defy Heraclitus and ‘step twice into the same river’.

Everything flows and nothing abides; everything gives way and nothing stays fixed.

The way up and the way down are one and the same. In the circle, the beginning and the end are common.

Into the same rivers we step and we do not step.

Not wanting to get too deep on you, but the only thing holding this ride together (and perhaps my whole being) is the weak bond of memory — or at least the illusion of such a memory.

Building The House Of Illusion And Memory

As hard as my leg muscles have worked, my memory works six-fold, constructing from the basement to the attic, storeys upon storeys, as it traces back and forth between 2011 and the 2020s.

Topographical

Despite the passage of a decade, I’m amazed to find that I recognise many of the places I travel through.

Not exclusively the remarkable places either: I vividly remember cycling out of Middlesborough on a hot day in 2011. The broken concrete of a disused airfield, the abrupt silence of the birds and a sandy track between trees.

Leaving Middlesborough on Sustrans NCN Route 1

This time around, I knew what turns to take, running ahead of my GPS, marvelling at all the little blue Sustrans signs that were then my only guide.

Autobiographical

The circumstances of my nan’s death that led to my leaving on that cycle around Britain eleven years ago and what has become of me since that first journey.

Comedy writer, uncle, outdoor instructor, cyclist-at-large, skateboarder and surfer.

All shared with friends and loved ones, some here for good, others passing through.

Episodic

In 2011, I stayed in Newcastle with an old friend from childhood.

John taught me a lot about comfortable cycle touring: padded shorts for my long-suffering behind, glucosamine for my knees, handlebar ‘bull horns’ for hill climbing and to ease the ache on my shoulders.

This time around, John rode with me for 12 miles either side of his new home in Whitley Bay. Now it was my turn to share a decade’s worth of tea and cake touring experience with him.

Courtesy of the incredible Mister Ridley’s Parlour, a former bowling pavilion decorated in outrageous Victorian splendour in Ridley Park, Blyth

Flashbulb

Vivid memories of emotionally charged events. Like crossing the border into Scotland on 29 July 2011:

I cover the two and a half miles to the border with all the vigour of a man who’s just eaten an entire packet of Jaffa Cakes.

My overwhelming feeling at leaving England is elation.

For a hundred yards, I am in no man’s land. Ahead is a sign that reads, Welcome to Scotland; behind me a sign says, Welcome to England.

The last town in England: Berwick upon Tweed

I scan the foxglove hedgerows for some Scottish significance, in roadside flora, fauna or filth: none.

The significance I seek is on the inside: I feel the spreading butterflies of adventure.

I am a stranger here, in a strange land. The harder I smile, the harder the sun shines.

Procedural

Even the familiar motor skills required for climbing onto a fully loaded touring bike and pushing the pedals is a function of memory, laid down since childhood.

Every element of touring now is a rhyme from a decade of adventure. Pack up your bike, put up your tent, McGuinn. You ain’t going nowhere.

Going nowhere from Craigmillar Castle Park, Edinburgh

Collective

Interdependent and embedded among our personal memories are collective memories of our political, social and cultural milieu.

In 2011, it was impossible to escape the political landscape of scandal and austerity. War in Syria, Tony Blair on trial and police murder in Tottenham.

In 2020, of course, every interaction was marbled with the course grain of the pandemic.

This year, I lost count of the number of gardens, fences, windows, walls, rooftops that flew the flag of Ukraine.

As the muscle fibres in my legs stretch, break, grow and wither, the greatest survivor of this never-ending adventure is memory, creating meaning and character in every episode that I commit to words.

Thank you for reading and sharing these memories. Special thanks to the Shearers for their help in making them in the first place — have a wonderful dino-wedding!

Serving suggestion

Round Britain IV: Cycling Diaries Kings Lynn to Ravenscar

Day 1: Kings Lynn to Boston (66km)

Resuming where I left off two years ago, today I rode from Kings Lynn to a canalside camp just the other side of the lovely market town of Boston.

I’m dressed for Bournemouth, where it’s already summer, and today I froze in a biting northerly wind. Tomorrow I might see about replacing my sandals for shoes…

Big plus of riding in spring: cherry, hawthorn blossom and horse chestnut candles to cheer me!

Day 2: Boston to Cottingham (139km, maybe a touch more)

Lincolnshire knocked out in a day. Not too shabby! (It is very flat, to be fair…)

Some delightful off road sections and canal paths. Also wind.

Frozen toes somewhat comforted by the acquisition of overshoes from the Aladdin’s Cave of F&J Cycles in Lincoln.

Day 3: Cottingham to Ravenscar (107km)

Through the Yorkshire Wolds, including both the ‘capital’, Driffield (shout out to The Bike Cave vegan chocolate orange cake dipped in oat milk turmeric latte), and the ‘gateway’, Hunmanby (shout out to the ‘now very few’ members of the Hunmanby In Bloom committee who made my short stay there so peaceful).

This makes it sound like I had a nice time today. Well, I did. So there. Cycling doesn’t have to be a sufferfest.

This ride to Edinburgh is all part of my training for six weeks of Thighs of Steel this summer (including the Alps, which not even the Yorkshire Wolds can prepare me for!)

If you would like to get in on the game early and show your support for refugees and those rebuilding their lives after war, conflict and persecution, you can send a message and donate here.

Thank you!

If you would like to watch my stately progress as a dot on a screen, then YES, we do live in a Big Brother dystopia. You can do that here.

Alternatively, you could follow me rather less obsessively on Strava.

Up next: a coast ride to Middlesborough, aiming for an old friend’s place in Whitley Bay tomorrow evening.

This is the same friend I stayed with in Newcastle eleven years ago.

Our paths have taken a circuitous road since the last time I was up this way and, by great fortune, my friend has only recently moved back here after many years away.

A lovely circular story, chiming this ride with my last. And, yes, he’s getting married next week.

Cycling Connections from Kings Lynn to Whitby

I’m currently sitting in Sanders Yard Bistro, hidden away in a historic potted plant courtyard, a sharp cobbled descent down the looming cliff of Whitby Abbey.

It’s been more than 300km since I rode out of Kings Lynn, picking up from where I left off in 2020.

This is the fourth leg of my recapitulation of my 2011 ride around the entire coast of Britain.

Being now eleven years wiser, I am taking my time, and expect another three stages and two summers of touring before I have finished.

I ride and I write to make authentic connections, something I struggled with back in 2011.

(Believing, with unfounded mystery, that everyone hated people who wore socks with sandals, and that it was not only the vampires who were out to get me.)

On the first three days of this nine-day stage, my deepest connection has been with the spring.

Spring.

I’ve not done much touring in April before and I’ve been taken aback by how much is going on, everywhere I look, all the time.

Riotous nesting birds. Bluebells in the dappled woods. The first whiffs of cow parsley on the verges. Hens, geese, ducks, pheasants, fowl all busy with their own life admin, my passing only a clucking nuisance in theirs.

And, above all, the shocking silence of the blossoms.


There is never a dull moment, scanning the trees and the hedgerows for apple, cherry, hawthorn and the first candles of the chestnut.

There’s so much colour in our countryside that it’s frustratingly impossible for me to pin a name to the dozens of other pinks, whites, yellows and purples that I’ve marvelled on.

When I get home, I’ll consult a big book of blossoms and give these magnificent displays the quiet attention they deserve. I hear that’s a thing in Japan.

Human connection, perhaps because of the cold weather, has been less apparent than on my summer rides.

Positive, friendly, supportive, people and place, but nothing to fix a story in the memory.

Until this morning, when who should bring me breakfast and tea, but James Astin’s aunt.

James Astin’s aunt

There’s no reason for you to have heard of James Astin, and that’s kind of the point.

James Astin, his aunt confided, left one day from the bandstand right here in Whitby and cycled all around Europe, then into Russia, across China, south through Indonesia to Australia and then across to Alaska and all the way down through the Americas.

Quite the ride – but what struck me were the three stories that his aunt chose to divulge:

  1. Once, cycling through China, James battled along 92km of a four lane motorway, only to be stopped by the authorities and transported right back to where he began.
  2. The number of times he had to light a fire in his tent because of how cold it was. And the number of times he set fire to said tent.
  3. James had to break his trip halfway around to fly home for a wedding (not his own).

What this tells me is that the worst experiences make the best stories. Also weddings.

Something to remember next time things are going south.

One day, maybe, however terrible things are now, this’ll be something your proud aunt will tell a stranger in a cafe.

Failing that: drop everything and join a wedding.

How To Sleep In A Tent: A Story 11 Years In The Making

Ravenscar.

The last time I was here I was desperately searching, with the help of my dad (long suffering telephonist for round Britain cyclist) for Ravenscar youth hostel.

As darkness, rain and sea all closed in on the cliffs below me, I despaired, and threw my bike, my bivvy bag and myself under a bush for shelter.

Shame that the bush was a gorse.

The Great Gorse Of Ravenscar. A familiar sight.

I’m sure I can do better this time.

As the cold drops colder with the fading sunlight, I find myself surrounded by an abundance of excellent camping spots and frankly astounded that my younger self managed to get it so horribly wrong all those years ago.

I’m in the abandoned quarries for the Peak Alum Works on the edge of Fylingdales Moor.

The industry has left the ground nicely levelled out, a quiet copse of trees sheltering a cinder-soft, gorse, thistle, branble and nettle-free clearing.

Tucked away from the path, but still in earshot of the waves swooshing against the rocks below, the silver birch form a merry band, their leader volunteering to snuggle up with Martin II (AKA King Duncan I) for the night.

It’s so perfect, in fact, that I sleep until nearly 8am, a full ten hours.

For anyone wondering: yes, camp sleep can be that good.

The unfavourable juxtaposition of my two experiences at Ravenscar illustrates two developments in my wild camping strategy.

Three if you include the inspired suggestion (by a dog walker on the Isle of Wight in 2020) that I use poo bags, but I’ll save that discussion for a time less close to lunch.

1. OS Maps

Smartphones are a double edged sword for the general population and no more so than for the wild camper.

But what I risk losing in disconnection – that sense of always being elsewhere, of app-watching, media monitoring, and even just listening to the radio of an evening – I gain in knowledge.

OS Maps are a boon, not for touring navigation, but for quickly finding likely spots for wild camping.

Yesterday, for example, I cycled straight past the perfect wild camping spot. On the coast, in full view of the ocean, a short trundle off the path, but with easy access, a clutch of picturesque ruins for shelter and a drystone wall to shield me from view.

As hard as it was to drag myself away, I refused the lure. From OS Maps I could see that this was private land, on a likely busy footpath.

I couldn’t be bothered to cycle a circuitous route to the farmhouse to ask permission, so I looked further ahead on my route and pinpointed an area of flat open access land right on my route: the abandoned quarry.

But, looking out over the landscape, I was even more reluctant to move on. To me, it looked like a mess of woods, gullies and gorges. But I decided to trust the map. And was rewarded.

Funnily enough, I think I camped only yards away from the gorse that I threw myself under 11 years ago.

The difference between these two camping experiences, of course, is daylight and confidence built on a foundation of years of experience.

There is nothing like the unexpected discovery of the perfect camping spot, but on long tiring days, OS Maps has become an invaluable tool.

2. A warm mattress

This could be broadened to include the whole sleep kit, but the mattress is so often overlooked and, in cold temperatures like last night, often the most important element of a warm sleep kit.

Most of your heat will be lost to the ground, not to the air.

Did you know that your sleeping bag is only as good as your mattress? And that camping mattresses have temperature ratings exactly like sleeping bags?

Nope, nor did I until a couple of years ago and now I won’t shut up about it.

Bygone Bicycles There’s something exquisite about unfolding the worn creases of a forgotten map and following, again, the inky lines where my pen once traced the turning of my wheels

Unfolding The Map Shelf: Northern Scotland, 2011

There’s something very relaxing about not being able to type. In my case, not being able to type means not being able to work, at least not in the hyper-productive sense. It means more slow time for things like organising one’s map shelf. (You do have a map shelf, don’t you?)

When I did exactly that earlier this week, I found the old map of Northern Scotland, much tattered, which I’d used when cycling around Britain back in 2011. (Did you know you can read the book of the ride?)

You can see where, at the end of every day, tucked up against the trunk of a tree, I inked in my anticlockwise route. If you look very closely, you can also see where I camped every night — X marks the spot. If you look with a magnifying glass, you can even see where I had to double back to Alness to fix a tyre that exploded with shotgun terror on the Black Isle.

A map is a wonderful souvenir for an adventure. (So wonderful, in fact, that Alastair Humpheys once told the story of a pilgrimage along a sacred river in India using the medium of map.)

It’s all very well having our memories of adventure saved forever and ever amen in the databases of apps like Komoot or Strava, but there’s something exquisite about unfolding the worn creases of a long forgotten map and following, again, the inky lines where my pen once traced the turning of my wheels.

The Happening: Britain to Bordeaux, 2009

While planning the 2022 edition of Thighs of Steel’s London to Athens adventure, I had reason to go even further back in time, to 2009 and the diaries I wrote on my very first cycle tour: transporting my friend’s Halfords Apollo from our childhold home in Oxfordshire to his new home in Bordeaux.

So I loaded up, told my parents I was going some place and cycled out of the garage. They waved and took photos, did all those nice things, and then closed the garage door behind me. I turned left, then left again…

Mercifully, the rest of the diaries aren’t a turn-by-turn account. Re-reading them today, as a seasoned cycle tourer, I recognise all the aches, pains and unpleasantnesses of days on the road.

By day four, I’d already suffered a broken rack, brake failure (which, knowing nothing about bike mechanics, I ‘fixed’ with tape) and the hell that is Basingstoke.

Also: knee pain, stomach cramps, lips chapped like the ‘crust of an old baguette’, a bed-stricken fever and a sore neck that meant I couldn’t turn my head past 10.30 and 1.30 on the clockface.

The experience of being unable to raise one’s royal behind from the throne without excruciating agony gave me an insight into old age that I do not wish to experience again until a more appropriate age, when I shall have had the foresight to install some sort of pulley system, ramp or catapult.

It’s a wonder that I ever went back to bikes. But the diaries also show glimpses of my first ecstasies of unbounded exercise:

On the road, no one can hear you scream, shout, sing, snort. Storming fury, shouting defiance. Leaving the trapdoor of emotions far behind on the road.

As well as more pleasant postcard images, the ones all cycle tourers collect as they roll through strangers’ lives:

A group of elderly Frenchmen playing petanque, one of them wearing a stripy jumper. I feel like I’ve won the lottery in a game of I-Spy

The final day’s ride, from Saintes to Bordeaux, was spectacular in that it featured a solid eight hours of rain:

Steady streaming hissing rattling rain, seeping, steaming through the grey wall, piercing, prodding, poking as I ride, going left some, going right some, but mostly going right on ahead, into the misty wet, hopelessly putting one foot forward, the other chasing it endlessly. And all I pass are closed patisseries.

By this point, I’d got the brakes more or less working — in the dry, that is:

My brakes deteriorate so quickly in all this rain that I can only shake my head and shout ‘no!’ when a car pulls across my path.

Yikes.

Needless to say, I didn’t become another statistic for the mortuary (although my friend nearly did after I removed my brake tape fix without telling him). Somehow, I fell enough in love with cycle touring for it to be the least worst option for getting around Britain a couple of years later.

The clue for why is found in the diary too:

Too long waiting, too long waiting for something to happen. It’s only when something does finally happen that you realise how it was happening all along, just outside your front door, only you didn’t know how to see it, didn’t know how to feel it, didn’t know where to put your feet — didn’t know how to become the happen.

I discovered that, besides chapped lips, riding a bicycle along an open road also gifts us a euphoric sense of optimistic opportunity. Less than ten miles into the unknown of a 547 mile journey, I wrote this:

The Sun was starting to win, the grass was filling my nose and that open green lane was rolling out under my wheels. There was just something about it, something that said: ‘Yes. This is going to happen.’

A Road Poem

My first three long bike trips were all done alone and I would entertain myself by building poems over the rhythm of the pedal strokes. Here’s one from the Bordeaux diary, sung to the tune of ‘I Once Swallowed Three Hatpins’:

I once caught a bluebottle
Right between my teeth
When I tried to unlodge it with my tongue
It buzzed right underneath

Now I’m sick with fever
And I’m sure the fly’s to blame
But I’ve tried every medicine going
And my stomach just isn’t the same

It wouldn’t be much of a problem
But cycling over a bridge
I wish I’d paid more attention
When invaded my nostril a midge

So listen to this little poem
And remember my tale of woes
Wear a mask when you’re cycling the country
Cos if it isn’t the mouth, it’s the nose!

Can you tell I was running a fever? :))

Turkish Delight falls out of the sky If a picture speaks a thousand words, then each one of those letters yells a poem.

There are only three more days of cycling left before we finish spelling out Refugees Welcome in the largest bike-powered GPS drawing the world has ever hypothetically seen.

After 1,905km and 24,118m of climbing elevation, this is what we’ve got so far:


If a picture speaks a thousand words, then each one of those letters yells a poem.

Where Refugees was all about doing the distance and spreading the word, Welco has been all about other people, other cyclists and other fundraisers.

Georgie and I have been thrust into the background, supporting artists of an all-star ensemble cast. Humble van drivers, camp strikers, porridge stirrers.

We’ve hosted 27 cyclists so far, with another 27 to join us on the M and the final E. The energy of all those humans makes everything and anything possible. Whether that’s quite literally climbing Steep Hill…

Or dealing with the aftermath of an ominous popping sound when changing lanes on a dual carriageway…

This was first thing on Monday morning, ten minutes after waving off the ‘O’ cyclists at Falmer Station. I was hungry and needed the toilet, but felt like the first thing I should do is report the incident to the RAC.

I barely had enough time to find a toilet and buy a cuppa before Mark rattled up in his roadside recovery vehicle.

Mark’s ‘little trick’ involving a ball of steel wire didn’t do the job, so he towed Calypso to the inestimable PJE Automotive. But, as I watched Calypso and all our camping kit vanish into the pale distance, six hungry mouths were cycling inexorably towards a forest camp, expecting tents, clothes and a birthday dinner.

I walked back to Kemptown, where Thighs Core Team stalwart Bobby lived in a former Pupil Referral Unit. Bobby lent us a backup backup van (Harold) and he quickly talked me through its vagaries — the fuel pump, the shoulder shove to unlock the back, the steering wheel lock.

As I was pulling out of the Pupil Referral Unit, Bobby added one final warning: ‘Don’t panic if Turkish Delight falls out of the sky. A friend of ours hid thousands of them in every nook and cranny of the van and they have a habit of appearing unexpectedly.’

I screeched off into the Brighton traffic, only realising halfway into a snarl up that I hadn’t eaten lunch and it was almost four o’clock. At that very moment, braking into the red lights, a packet of Turkish Delight fell from the overhead mirrors.

I made it to PJE Automotive about half an hour before closing. Calypso was already being worked on. Three mechanics swarmed her undercarriage in a flurry of fixingness.

This was a heartening sight, bar one minor detail: Calypso was three metres up and I needed, not only everyone’s tents and bags, but also two cooking rings, an incredibly heavy gas canister, the crockery and cutlery and three crates of food, including a surprise Colin the Caterpillar birthday cake for Georgie.

So began an impressive recovery operation of an altogether different kind. As I shouted vague instructions from ground level, a tottering mechanic on an extendable ladder liberated as much of our kit as he could get his hands on.

It would have to do. I threw almost everyone’s tents, practically all of their bags and pretty much most of the cooking stuff into the back of Harold and, finally, headed for the forest.

A couple of hours later, Georgie was blowing the candles off Clive the Caterpillar (IT WAS A FAKE!) among a circle of friends — many of whom were at least partially dressed in their own clothes — as if this was exactly how we’d planned it all along.

This is what Thighs of Steel is all about: the collective pushing those pedals. Doing things that we never thought we could.

The clutch now moves ‘like butter’. I can hear the sound of chopping knives from the kitchen. Bobby has lit a fire on the beach. We’re ready for the last rides of the summer.

Brighton Palace Pier at sunset. At dawn, we ride again…

Talking politics with strangers Approaching a stranger to ask for their signature and contact details is pretty daunting when you think there’s a 50/50 chance that they’ll hate everything about you.

On Wednesday, we stayed with the wonderful Christine and Hayden in Alton (home of Sweet FA). We shovelled down a spectacular dinner in double quick time: Christine had invited a circle of friends to listen to our stories from the road.

I hadn’t prepared a Powerpoint, so instead I gave a impromptu bugle recital and a depressing speech about the Nationality and Borders Bill.

One of the high points of this bike trip is having conversations about immigration and asylum with the people we meet.

It’s great that everyone knows at least vaguely what’s going on in Afghanistan at the moment, but not so many people understand how our government is ripping up the 1951 UN Convention on Refugees.

So here’s my bullet point digest for you to share with friends:

  • The new Nationality and Borders Bill is in direct contravention of the 1951 UN Convention on Refugees. This strikes me as a bit of a shame, given that the UK was one of only ten original signatories of this landmark document.
  • The new Bill creates a two-tiered asylum system that distinguishes claims based on the means of entry to the UK rather than by whether the human being entering is actually in need of asylum. This prejudice is explicitly forbidden by Article 31 of the 1951 Convention.
  • Should the new Bill pass, the only admissable refugees will be the few who arrive here on painfully limited resettlement schemes. For example, the government has committed to resettle 20,000 Afghans over ‘the coming years’.
  • The UK currently stands in nineteenth place in the European league table of asylum applications per capita of population, below Greece, Germany, France, Spain, Sweden, Belgium, Slovenia, Switzerland, Austria, Malta, Italy, Finland… You get the point.
  • Even if the government’s resettlement promises can be trusted — which they manifestly can’t — the new Bill would send the UK spiralling even further down the list of safe nations for those fleeing war.
  • Furthermore, under the new Bill, those who enter the UK ‘irregularly’ — i.e. without a passport and visa — will have their asylum cases deemed ‘inadmissable’ and the government will try to deport them.
  • If you are a refugee, it is essentially impossible to enter the UK with a passport and visa. Do you imagine those fleeing Afghanistan had time to apply for a visa on their way out? The result: the asylum claim of every refugee coming to this country under their own steam will be ‘inadmissable’.
  • If the government simply can’t get rid of them (because their freakin homes are on fire!), then these people will be allowed to apply for asylum… but…
  • Even if these irregular arrivals are ultimately awarded refugee status, they will never be given the right to settle here and will be regularly reassessed for removal. Again: this prejudice is explicitly forbidden by the 1951 Convention because it’s manifestly unfair.

The British were very successful at promulgating the myth that their Empire was founded on good will and fair play. This was always a gargantuan lie, but it’s a lie that this government seems particularly eager to expose with the extraordinary cruelty and arbitrary injustice of its Nationality and Borders Bill.

Every time we stop the GPS for a bike break — lunch wraps, punctures, bedtime — we need to get our logbook signed off by a member of the public. This means that we talk to a lot of people about what we’re doing.

At the beginning of the trip, we were both a bit worried about discussing refugees with any old stranger on the street.

The anti-immigration, anti-asylum right wing press is the most popular in the country and, naturally, we thought that these newspapers would reflect the views of their readers. Not only that, but the elected government of this country is run by a man that the BBC can, without fear of slander, describe as ‘a liar and a racist’.

Therefore, basic probability told us that a good chunk of our unsuspecting witnesses would hold strong, negative views on the right of refugees to claim asylum in this country.

Approaching a stranger to ask for their signature and contact details is pretty daunting when you think there’s a 50/50 chance that they’ll hate everything about what you’re doing.

As the trip has gone on, however, we’ve come to the heartening conclusion that The Daily Mail and the Conservative Party can’t possibly reflect the real views of the people of this country.

We’ve not done a survey, but it’s statistically fantastic that zero of the 114 people in our witness book neither read the country’s most popular newspapers nor vote for the most popular political party.

Yet the vast majority of people we’ve met on this bike ride show great compassion towards those forced to flee their homes. Indeed: most people tell us that they think the government should be doing more to help.

This government, and the billionaire-owned press that goads them on, are not only heartlessly vindictive, but they foment a social atmosphere that divides us and makes us scared to share our true political beliefs with each other.

This trip has not only given me the strength to approach strangers and open up political conversations, but also the confidence that they won’t rip my head off. Far from it.

If we are going to defeat the Nationality and Borders Bill — and the countless others that this government are yet to write — then we need to be able to trust each other.

This bike trip has shown me that we can.

So let’s.

How to break things: an update ‘I set out to fail,’ he said, ‘and I nearly ended up winning.’

  • Days Cycling: 11
  • Distance Cycled: 842km
  • Everests Climbed: 1.54 (13,601m)
  • Tiramisús Devoured: 3
  • Guinness World Records Surpassed: 1

I can’t technically say that we’ve broken the world record because the ride isn’t over yet (nor the record verified), but Thighs of Steel have definitely surpassed the previous record and, with every day that passes, the world’s biggest bike-powered GPS drawing gets even bigger.

Since I last wrote, we have rounded off the ‘f’ in Exmoor, cycled the Jurassic Coast of the ‘u’ and passed the world record distance out on the Somerset Levels of the ‘g’.

As we crossed into Glastonbury, Mayor Jon Cousins met us to sign the logbook and mark this momentous occasion with a nice cup of tea. Georgie had Guinness — what else?

Speaking of tea: if you ever have the fortune to be cycling across Exmoor, make a stop at the Poltimore Arms to meet publican, politician and raconteur Steve Cotten. He looks and sounds a lot like comedian Bill Bailey.

Georgie had only stopped at the top of the hill to wait for me to catch up, but we were soon sitting down for a hot drink with Steve and the pub cat, Frederick Albert Hitler.

‘I never charge for tea or coffee,’ Steve told us. ‘Some call it bad business, I call it good manners.’

As we arrived, Steve had just received a parcel containing white jodhpurs and a pair of leather riding boots.

‘They won’t let me drive — I’m half blind — so I got myself a crazy horse,’ he explained. ‘Everyone says that horse will be the death of me, but I know all the local elite dressage trainers so I’m going to learn dressage and win Olympic gold at the next Paralympics.’

He must have seen the doubt in our eyes because the next thing he said was: ‘I’m serious. People don’t believe me, but they didn’t believe me when I said I was going to run for parliament and see what happened there.’

He points behind us to a massive canvas poster of Steve on the campaign trail: ‘A vote for Steve Cotten is a vote for North Devon’.

‘I set out to fail,’ he said, ‘and I nearly ended up winning.’

Putting the ‘f’ in Exmoor

I’ll restrict myself to three other highlights of the past week: homemade tiramisú, campfires and unbridled generosity. These recurred with pleasing regularity along the ride — or all together at once in the case of one memorable evening with Laura and Jon at Bulstone Springs.

What more could a steely thighed cyclist need? Courtesy of Bulstone Springs’ gorgeous new glamping grounds

Open hearted generosity is a feature of cycle touring. Not only from our wonderful hosts who welcome us into their homes, but also from many of the people we meet along the way.

Yesterday, six friends-we-hadn’t-yet-met donated in cash quids, fivers, tenners and even twenties. This makes Wiltshire by far and away the most generous county we’ve cycled through and it’s inspired me to spend my day off making a donations bucket to strap to the front of the bike.

I’d better get cracking actually — my bike suffered a mechanical yesterday and I don’t fancy testing the limits of my frayed gear cabling on the White Horse hills. With fair winds and good fortune, the next time I write, we will have finished writing ‘Refugees’.

Until then: choose love.

Admin or admiration? 4 days into our 27 day world record ride and it's no coincidence that all the roads here incorporate the word 'Hill'

We are now 4 days into our 27 day bike-powered GPS drawing of Refugees Welcome and it’s no coincidence that all the roads around here incorporate the word ‘Hill’.

Copstone Hill, Cuckoo Hill, Polson Hill, Beech Hill Cross, North Hill Lane. (There’s also a Cockrattle Lane, but that’s a different story.)

Since our departure from St Austell on Tuesday, we’ve climbed over 6400m: coast to coast to coast through Cornwall, followed by a loop-the-loop of Dartmoor.

For those of you catching up, Thighs of Steel (of which I am a mere cog) are attempting to create the world’s largest bike-powered GPS art by riding a serpentine route around the south of England that spells out the words ‘Refugees Welcome’.

If we are successful, it will break the current world record by a completely unnecessary 1500km.

FOLLOW THE RIDE

But, as they say, it’s all for a good cause. We are fundraising for Choose Love, a charity that re-distributes donations to dozens of grassroots refugee projects in the UK and abroad.

These projects have been hit hard by the pandemic and would be completely unable to offer any services at all without the generosity of hundreds of individuals making small cash donations.

What’s great about Choose Love is that they can send the money wherever it is needed NOW.

As you may have gathered from the news, forced migration happens suddenly and it’s often the small grassroots projects that are best able to respond fast enough to help people when they need it most.

Thank you for all your donations – they are powering both our thighs and (more importantly) the work of these refugee support projects.

DONATE

These first four days (we hope) will be the toughest of the whole tour, certainly in terms of distance and elevation, and I would be lying if I said that, at times, I have not reflected unfavourably upon my life choices.

Such as on Wednesday, when we cranked our way up two irrelevant hills to form the inlet of the ‘R’, only to return over the same exact same hills to finish off the tail.

And these are not hills in the sense that you might imagine if you live in the Home Counties, East Anglia, or even Scotland. These are Devonshire and Cornish hills. Road builders here seem to delight in driving you perpendicular to the contour lines. Not a zig-zag in sight, just a sheer wall of asphalt.

But the consolation in those absurd moments of repeated routing is not what we are doing, but why.

At the end of our hill reps on Wednesday, in the very butt of the R, a man called Ray Christmas signed our logbook. Ray Christmas!

Wait – the logbook? Ah, yes, the logbook! Every World Record Attempter’s nightmare – literally.

I swear, two nights ago, I dreamt that Philip Schofield agreed to sign our logbook in exchange for sexual favours.

Schofield, aside, the logbook is the evidence Guinness need to verify our record. Every time we stop, we have to write that information into the logbook: date, time, distance travelled, location – and get that information signed off by an independent witness.

It’s a lot of admin. Stop the GPS, check the time, check the distance, enter the time, enter the distance, add up today’s distance to yesterday’s total distance, eat half a flapjack, cast around for a human being who looks like not-a-dick.

Then we launch into The Spiel – ‘Sorrytobotheryoudoyoumindmeaskingafavourwearetryingtobreakaworldrecord’ – all the while gauging their eyes and frown lines for signs of curiosity and generosity or suspicion and derision.

No, this logbook is more than admin – it’s a total ballache.

But, I confess, these witness signing ceremonies are often the highlight of our day.

The vicar of Holy Trinity, St Austell, who prayed for our steely thighs.

Luke and David at Bodmin steam railway, who donated £5 and a Thomas the Tank Engine flag.

The family in the wind and rain who donated halloumi fresh from their barbecue.

The woman wearing the Choose Love t-shirt in Boscastle – how could we not stop her?

The inestimable Janet Downes who carted us from R to E and donated homemade cheesy flapjacks.

Margitta and Nick and Lee and Laura and Pippa and Rolf and Bri and Penny who have hosted and roasted us in their warm homes.

Ian the accordian player from Of Stone And Earth in Chagford.

Debbie and Rob from the village shop in South Brent, who insisted on doing a Facebook Live with us and donated £10 and a bag of dark chocolate gooseberries.

The volunteers at Spreyton community shop who donated two pieces of Bakewell Tart.

Gordon Ramsey.

Wait, what? Yes – TV celeb chef Gordon Ramsey. Spotted by Naomi out on a bike trail, enjoying a quiet cup of tea. At least he was enjoying a quiet cup of tea until Naomi fell off her bike in shock and I went up to him shouting ‘Are you Gordon Ramsey?’

To be fair, he took it pretty well – better than I would have done if someone had come up to me and shouted ‘Are you Gordon Ramsey?’

He signed our logbook, wished us well and gave me a fistbump. What more can you ask?

So, the logbook: yes, it’s a chore, but it’s also given us the moments that make this bike ride like no other bike ride.

This experience has made me want to make a logbook, a sort of a guestbook, for all my future rides too. How wonderful to make these connections as we pass through these villages and towns, how lucky.

I suppose it’s all about how you look at the world, isn’t it? My feelings about this baleful world record lurch, moment to moment, from admin to admiration.

Open minds, open hearts, open logbook.

Stories in the lamplight We try to make sense of the scenes illuminated in our lamplight, but really there’s nothing out there but an unbroken string of stories, some told by me, some told by you.

Welcome to Liverpool – the world’s eleventh least stressful city, according to research commissioned by a CBD vaping company.

Make of that what you will, but, of the remaining British cities, only Manchester and Edinburgh made it into the top forty.

After all, with its literary riverside, leafy parks and leftie communities, it’s not impossible that Liverpool is a less stressful place to live than Amsterdam, Sydney and Lisbon. The Beatles certainly seemed like a cheerful bunch of lads.

Talking of the Fab Four (plus a few more), this morning I visited Penny Lane. Mainly because it was on the way back from the charity shop where I’d bought a much-needed pair of brown corduroy flares to make myself respectable around town.

I know that this is Liverpool and that, fashion wise (more than one person has remarked), anything goes. But my blue checkered Speedos – somewhat appropriate for the beach after a hot day’s cycle – were beginning to make me feel a little self-conscious around town.

Penny Lane itself is an unprepossessing street elevated to such lofty legend that its old painted sign has to be put behind protective perspex.

I spent a happy hour listening to the stories of Julie Gornell at the Penny Lane Development Trust, which was set up to save a derelict corner of the lane from developers. Now there’s a garden, a memorabilia shop, a mural called the ‘wonder wall’ and – what else? – the original yellow submarine.

Note 1: The name ‘wonder wall’ has nothing to do with Oasis. It was a 1960s psychedelic film for which George Harrison wrote the score.

Note 2: The original yellow submarine was built in 1966 as a functioning submersible by Arthur Johnson of Grimsby for his daughter. Nothing to do with the Paul McCartney song of the same name. Wild.

Note 3: Penny Lane is not (or definitely is) named for James Penny, a man who, in 1788, vehemently defended the Atlantic slave trade to Parliament with the astonishing claim that, on his ships at least, the slaves were not only ‘amused with Instruments of Music’, but also rubbed down and given cordial whenever the weather got a bit sweaty.

Note 4: Peaking at number two, McCartney’s Penny Lane (alongside its psychedelic twin, Lennon’s Strawberry Fields Forever) has the honour of being the song that broke The Beatles’ run of ten consecutive chart-topping singles in the UK.

Talking of strawberries: I’m eating one.

Welcome, after two weeks of camping, 1,181km of cycling and 13,106m of climbing, to Liverpool.

Note 5: That’s the same distance as London to Poznan and the height of one and a half Everests. If only all fortnights were this productive.

Working backwards, I took lunch today with three bike touring friends. In this Olympic year, I’m passing on the torch: as I finish, they begin, cycling off on full stomachs and their own ‘rolling equipment’.

Ghandi Manning is probably in the top two most-prepared cycle tourers I have ever met. He packed light for this Shropshire ride: only his hammock instead of a tent and none of his drone photography kit. But he still found room for a Swedish numberplate, a curved handle walking stick and, of course, Meg the Leg.

Meg the Leg is a leg that is also a lamp. What more do you need?

Suddenly, my stylishly eccentric bugle (which, I may add, brought a lot of pleasure to tourists on the Mersey Ferry yesterday) looks like the lightweight affectation of someone yet to fully commit to Saddle Life. I have much to learn about packing for pleasure.

Note 6: Ghandi is beaten into second place by a man we once encountered on the Danube whose bike was so fully-laden that he had to walk alongside, pushing.

As touring cyclists, we measure our days in meals, and breakfast was shared with two new friends I made out on the road yesterday.

Swept along on a tailwind from Abergele to Birkenhead, I gave Dan and Jonah the benefit of my GPS navigation. In Liverpool, Dan and Jonah gave me beer and a place to sleep.

This didn’t seem like a fair exchange, so I footed the bill for three rounds of eggs, avocado, beans and mushrooms on sourdough, which set them on their way home to Halifax.

Scrolling back through my timeline of the past week, I see more of these flashes of light.

There’s Mike, the Connah’s Quay cafe and heritage centre chef who sells egg baps for £1.50, grows tomatoes in raised beds on the harbourside and can feel the presence of three resident ghosts.

A Napoleonic-era sea captain marches up and down the museum in his three-cornered hat, disappearing through walls and the like. Mike often hears the laughter of a good-natured little girl ghost, who’s got one side of her face burnt off. But woe betide you if you cross an evil spirit who lives upstairs, pinches bottoms and tells you to fuck off when disturbed.

Back in the realm of the living, there’s Richard, hipster patisserie chef and owner of the last working windmill on Anglesey, who saved his cafe staff’s jobs over lockdown by pivoting to the production of chocolate, gin and Mônuts – doughnuts so popular that the queue starts an hour before opening (not that I’m bitter I missed out).

There’s another Mike, of Dolgellau Bikes, who – you might remember – once spun me around and set me back on the right way round Britain. Now his business is all hire bikes and, when I called in, ten years after that first visit, he looked hot and harried with twenty plus bikes out back, waiting for Covid disinfection. He dreams of retirement and more time for his true love: windsurfing.

There’s Dylan and Joy, who have retired, to the quiet foothills of the Rhinogydd, a steep climb east from Harlech (the steepest climb in the world until the Guinness Book of World Records had a rethink). They chose this remote location because, they told me, neither are people people.

These non-people people welcomed me in for tea on their hayloft balcony overlooking the blue mountains of the Llyn, filled my water bottles, invited me for breakfast and told me how they volunteer as part of the community rescue team that has saved Harlech swimming pool from shutdown. My kind of non-people people.

There’s James the fundraising canyoneer, Ffi the marbling postie, and Dafydd the trig-chasing wifi engineer: all Warmshowers hosts who took care of me when I needed a friendly face and a dunk in the hot, soapy stuff.

My ride, I realised somewhere on the mountain road between Machynlleth and Dolgellau, isn’t about me. It’s as if my bicycle is fitted with a lamp that illuminates brief moments in the lives of others.

It’s up to me, if I can, if I dare, to make sense of the images that flicker first here, now there, before moving on without interpretation to the next un-narrated scene.

There are lessons, I’m sure, in the memories like shards lodged in my brain: the van driver who silently raised his fist as he drove down and I rode up the Llyn; the white-haired woman who tooted her horn and shouted thank you as I pulled over to let her past on Anglesey; even the one-hand-on-the-wheel lorry driver whooshing by too close, whose spare claw was more gainfully employed in digging out his left nostril.

CYCLIST DIES, MAN CLEARS BOGEY

Even that headline is an image churned into the whole of what has already been pasturised and labelled: Round Wales 2021 (on both Komoot and Strava).

Waking up this morning, on a saggy mattress in a bare room in a dusty musty student house emptied out for the summer, I couldn’t help but grin.

What about? Finishing the ride – is that it? I looked around for some sign, some image that I could interpret, that would sum up in a moment the whole of the last two weeks.

A framed poster had fallen from the ex-student’s wall and smashed: MISTAKES ARE PROOF THAT YOU ARE TRYING.

That line doesn’t work as an epitaph for this bike ride. Here’s another that doesn’t work either, spoken to me by the guy whose house I’m staying in tonight:

You’re the first adventurer we’ve had stay. Most people just come here, get pissed one night and go home.

We try to make sense of the scenes illuminated in our lamplight, but really there’s nothing out there but an unbroken string of stories, some told by me, some told by you.

Whatever you do, do it while you can.

Wiener brecwast Greetings from west Wales: a corner has been turned...

I’m writing this from the west coast of Wales, as the wind picks up its suitcase and prepares to shake out the contents onto the bed of land that I ride through. Storm’s a-coming.

Talking of inclement weather, and continuing the Bob Dylan theme of the past couple of newsletters, today’s letter is inspired by A Hard Rain’s A Gonna Fall.

Dylan once said that every line in that apocalyptic song was just the first line of a whole other song that he worried he’d never get around to writing before music itself was wasted by nuclear winter. Take these lines from the first verse:

I’ve stumbled on the side of twelve misty mountains

I’ve walked and I’ve crawled on six crooked highways

I’ve stepped in the middle of seven sad forests

I’ve been out in front of a dozen dead oceans

It’s evidence of the density of the writing and the concision that we’re sometimes forced into by the sheer fact that to write it all would be to fill six volumes – and who has time for that?

So, without wanting to stand my scribblings shoulder to shoulder with Dylan’s Nobel Prize winning catalogue, imagine that behind every sentence there are stories that I don’t have time, space or skill to expand right now. Just like the weather, the last week has been thick.

We cycled too far and forced stops in the churchyard stocks, following the hay trucks billowing dust in the wheat-gold afternoon.

We walked into a welcome as warm as the sundown, plated up salad, that coleslaw, barbeque and hair-dryer damaged paddling pool.

We ate stacks of Rogue Welsh Cakes: stacked and loaded with ice cream, before lying in the shade of an ancient Cypress that’d seen a hundred summers like this one.

We sought out the most southerly point of Wales, slipped our feet into the sea, and watched two women carry home two huge bags of rubbish, left by campers in the nature reserve built up around a former lime works.

We played Uno. We played rummey. We looked into the night and watched as the moon grew full and fat.

We ate melted flapjack on the cliff edge, while overheating sheep sheltered behind a dry stone wall.

In Bridgend, I replaced cycle shorts that had grown obscenely thin in the decaying tropical miasma.

We collapsed from the heat at the top of a deer park, the smoke stacks of Port Talbot pluming on the horizon, and slept in secluded splendour.

We sat in the shadow of Lidl, one of us breakfasting on salad with pomegranate and cashews, the other trying to make a meal of cold frankfurters and smokey cheddar slices. We will always have Lidl.

Swansea came and went in a slow afternoon of tea and company, piecing together tired muscles, sea swims punctuating the hills and rocks of Mumbles and the Gower.

We stayed with a UFC fighter and his family of seven dogs, wife and young baby, lying in the hot bed while he built up flat-pack garden furniture outside.

We rode the coastline fast, baking our backs in the desert sands, while 4x4s make like Jesus in the shallow water.

We wade out to sea and dip our heads before one last climb together, bicycles being now the instrument of our purpose.

At Carmarthen, heart hurting under cool canopy of oak, I cycle on alone.

That Wales ends; this Wales begins. Tens of metres become hundreds; hundreds become thousands: climbing, always climbing. Then coasting, always coasting.

The flying ants burst from the ground. One insect draws blood. A sheep runs out into the road. I chase it back to the flock.

Distant memories return, of a flick comb souvenier, bought at a gift shop in Tenby thirty years ago. I drink tea served by a woman whose legs are cut off below the knee.

I meet Ana, a cyclist from Ukraine who once rode from Luton to John O’Groats with no money, spending two months on the hospitality of strangers.

At St David’s I meet a woman who, in the 1990s, cycled 3,500km over the Andes on a £90 mountain bike.

I watch the glow of the dying sun through the ruined wheel window of St Davids Bishops Palace. I remember this moment from ten years before.

I climb and keep climbing. A man sitting in his garden leaps to his feet to applaud at the top of the hill: ‘Not many make it,’ he says, ‘but you’re past the worst now.’ I tell him that seems unlikely, as I’m bound for Snowdonia.

I collapse into a field of hospitality, exchanged for three barrowfuls of soil, and watch the red sun burn up into the Irish Sea. I sleep long and wake to fresh winds and tea and cereal from a new-found friend.

Too much more to come, but now it’s time to ride again, up towards Aberaeron, where I hear legend of an ice cream shop not to be missed.

Plumb lines and cockpits The upshot of my visit, on a hot June day, to Neil’s upstairs studio was spending a penny to save a pound. Reader: I needed not a larger frame. I needed data.

Of plumb lines and protractors

A couple of weeks ago, I thought I needed a whole new bike—or at least a whole new bike frame. The Dunx chassis that I’d driven a ridiculous distance to collect came out bigger than my old Marin and I worried that my pedal position was more torture rack than action settee on a thousand-mile ride.

Knowing the knee-clicking importance of a well-fitted bike, I was fully prepared to drop another undisclosable sum of money into the laps of the aluminium founders.

But first, fearful of returning to square zero, I needed confidence on exactly what size of metal triangle would best accommodate my thorax, levers and abdomen. So I booked a professional fitting with Neil of Fit To Ride, Poole.

The upshot of my visit, on a hot June day, to Neil’s upstairs studio was spending a penny to save a pound. Or spending £110 to save at least £500. Reader: I needed not a larger frame. I needed data.

Data worth ~£400

I perched astride Martin, fixed in place to a roller with a fan blowing hot air into my hair, distracted by a motionless wall-sized panorama of the Alps; Neil tinkered around me with plumb lines, rulers and protractors.

He’s used to tuning up road bikes for max power. I warned him not to laugh.

The most important thing I learned from Neil, however, was that frame size is much less important than I thought. In the hands of a professional, dramatic micro-adjustments of the seat post, saddle rails, handlebar stem, angle and rise can admit even the most monstrous of riding positions.

I ride upright—a position so unaerodynamic that I must be at least twice as fit as Mark Cavendish. I had managed to achieve my absurdly erect posture by cranking an adjustable handlebar stem way past its vertical limit for the utmost rise and utleast reach.

The effect was, in Neil’s words, cramped and hunched; in my words, relaxed and comfortable. Although, now he mentioned it, a folk memory arose from tours past: a shooting stiffness in the shoulders that only hypodermic massage could relieve.

After raising the seat post an inch and shuffling the saddle back a few mill, Neil proved his point with a protractor. My lower back was indeed of the military persuasion, but my handlebars were so close to my belly that, from the fourth thoracic north, my vertebrae had no choice but to volte-face, kink and plunge.

The results of such a posture are not only painful in the neck, but also, Neil assured me, inefficient in the muscle groups engaged in forward propulsion.

Neil’s response was to exchange my over-wrought stem for one that did the diametric opposite, one that pushed my fingers far over the front wheel. The knock-on effect was to straighten my back and edge the angle between spine and shoulder closer to its biomechanical sweet spot.

I’ve been riding with this new setup for the past couple of weeks, but Neil warned me that it could take five hundred miles before my body works out its new muscle memories. I haven’t had knee pain while cycling for many years: any change to my pedal practise, even change dictated by protractor, is a gamble.

Tomorrow, I leave for a thousand kilometre ride around Wales. Soon I will learn whether the gamble has paid off.

Of cockpits and cash

As anyone who owns a bicycle well knows, the goddess of the highway giveth with one hand and taketh away with the other. The money I hypothetically ‘saved’ by not buying a whole new frame, was spent with thrilling liquidity on an array of instruments for what Neil persisted in calling my ‘cockpit’.

Ever since I’d been struck dumb in Romania by the enviable cockpit of a moustachioed Steely called Bertie, I have wanted aerodynamic tri bars on my touring bicycle. Goaded on by Neil—‘All the long distance cyclists have got them these days’—I have finally taken the swallow dive.

As the owner of a flat-bar touring bike, my life has already been transformed once by the addition of end bars (credit to John in Newcastle for that innovation). Could it be transformed a second time with these sleek arm rests? Time shall tell.

But that is not the only new member of my cockpit crew. I have also succumbed to bikepacking fashion and acquired a handlebar bag—supposedly of ten litres, but I’m not about to waste perfectly good drinking water checking that. In my case, this handlebar bag is nothing more than a robust dry bag zip tied to my bars.

The pièce de résistance of my pimped up cockpit is a brand new GPS computer—the admirably typo-ridden Wahoo Elemnt Bolt. This frighteningly loseable piece of hardware is a tiny, yet incredibly detailed world atlas, onto which I can superimpose the turn-by-turn instructions for my intended route.

The first time I cycled around Wales, back in 2011, I used a road atlas for navigation and, with no digital Hermes to guide my wheels, I furiously spent many hours lost, as this extract from my bicyclogue of the journey reveals:

Through Harlech, with its men, to Barmouth, where I cross the mouth of Afon Mawddach. Happily swishing through the fields and woods of the hills, I’m expecting to hit the seaside again soon. I’m constantly looking ahead, around this bend, over this hill, through this wood, soon I’ll hear the swish of the sea, soon.

Then I hit a town that shouldn’t be there. I cycle along vaguely, bewildered by my map. It’s a pleasant enough town, with grey slate and flint buildings and a few people enjoying the gap between rainstorms. It’s just that none of it should be here. Eventually, after dawdling through the town, trying to find a comprehensible road sign that might indicate where the hell I am, I find a bike shop. I tie up and go inside.

‘Excuse me,’ I ask the vigorously tanned bike mechanic. ‘You couldn’t tell me where I am, could you?’
In fairness to him, he would be well within his rights to look at me now as if I’m insane. But he doesn’t. He just says something like: ‘Dththgththaye.’
A look of panic flickers over my face. I check my map. ‘Erm, where?’
‘Dththgththaye,’ he repeats, patiently.
I panic again. He takes pity, turns the page on my road map and points: Dolgellau. There is no way we can be there.
‘Are you sure?’ I ask before I can stop myself.

Now he is looking at me as if I am insane. Somehow I have managed to cycle north-east, when I should have been going south-west. For eight miles. After all my anxiety about avoiding Anglesey and other diversions, I feel strangely liberated from the tyranny of Knowing. Not Knowing, I’m not worried about where I am, where I’m going or how fast I’m going wherever it is that I’m going.

That was then, but how now will I suffer this year, at the mercy of the all-knowing Wahoo? A Wahoo that, all being well, shall, by the end of the summer, be a world record holder, no less. Will I pass muster? Or will I long for the days of unknowing?

~

Thanks to Dunx Cycles and Fit To Ride for their help putting together Martin II.

If you’ve got any recommendations of places to explore in Wales, then please let me know. Likewise, if you live in Wales and fancy joining me for a turn about the hills.

Spell It Out

This summer, I’ll be cycling about 2,400km with Thighs of Steel, following a route that quite literally makes REFUGEES WELCOME, while fundraising £100,000 for Choose Love.

This is the route we’ll be cycling

In a bold attempt to get loads of mercenary publicity for the cause, we’re also aiming to break an official Guinness World Record along the way.

You are invited to join us for 100km or more. I know of at least three readers of this humble newsletter who are committed. Together we can do more.

If you’d like to donate, then go ahead and click here (put your solidarity archetype into the comments!). Your money will go straight to grassroots organisations offering refugees the warm welcome that our whiffy government withholds.

🍲 £10 could pay for culturally appropriate food supplies (including fresh fruit and veg) for a family of 4 for a week

🚌 £50 could pay for destitution support for an asylum seeker, helping with essential costs like food, sanitary products, bus tickets and a phone top-up

⚖️ £250 could pay to run a drop-in centre for a day, providing vital, free legal support to asylum seekers

🧸 £500 could contribute to the salary of an expert caseworker supporting unaccompanied children as they start to rebuild their lives in the UK

Brutal! Look what happens to a bike after 18,000 miles On the importance of stuff

It is with some pride that I announce that Martin, my 2011 Marin San Anselmo touring bike, has finally met his match. At some point in the last few months, the chain stay of his frame cracked and snapped in two.

The fact that neither I nor a professional bike mechanic noticed anything wrong apart from a strange skipping in the chain is testament to how amazing bikes are. Martin was literally snapped in half and I was still more or less happily pootling around.

It’s impossible to say how far Martin and I have travelled together since I bought him in 2011, but a rough estimate using data from various bike computers suggests somewhere in the region of 18,200 miles—more than enough to qualify as a ride around the world.

The first picture I have of Martin, only a few hours old. Look how shiny!

Martin: A timeline of adventure

Note: if you’re not at all interested in bike touring or my holiday snaps, then feel free to skip ahead to the next subtitle…

Our first journey together, nine years ago, was around the coastline of Britain. Two months of putting one wheel in front of another, wild camping together in fields, under hedges, in forests and on canal towpaths.

A year later, we repeated the trick in Tunisia, cycling through olive and palm groves, between salt lakes, past Roman ruins, and through two different kinds of desert to the sand seas of the Sahara.

The largest salt pan in the Sahara: Chott el Djerid in south Tunisia. Martin took me there in 2012.

In the wet summer of 2016, Martin (now officially christened Martin) rode in duet with a vintage racer called Joy from London to Vienna. We matched tracks from the South Downs to the Bavarian Plateau, from the banks of the River Thames to the vineyard sprawl of the Danube. Our accommodation, still wild, upgraded to hilltop castles and monasteries.

Camping at Stift Melk, Austria. The abbey is famous for its 18th century frescos and the 11th century tomb of Saint Coloman of Stockerau, an Irish pilgrim mistaken for a spy, tortured and hanged. Martin took me there in 2016.

More recently, Martin found true companionship in the community of bikes that is Thighs of Steel. In 2018 and 2019, we covered over 2,000 miles together across Europe, discovering new countries, new friends and new talents. Martin got himself a chainring downgrade which helped us over the mountains. In Athens, he even got himself a blue tattoo, of which he is still very proud.

Climbing up into the mountains of Romania with Thighs of Steel in 2018. Martin carried me there.

Finally, in our swansong year, Martin learnt the healthy pleasures of daily rides during a catastrophic pandemic, playing his part in the incredible Around the World project that raised over £130,000 for refugees. And, of course, in the lockdown-lifted summer, Martin came full circle: imprinting the south coast with his tyre tracks exactly nine years after he last toured Britain.

Lands End 2020 (L) and 2011 (R). Martin carried me there—twice.

Consumerism gives stuff a bad rep

I don’t want to blow this out of proportion: we’re living through a pandemic. My old bike is broken. I’ll get another one. It’s no big deal. But I’ve never had nearly as much fun with any other object as I’ve had with Martin.

When I flipped him over and saw the thick black crack against his mud and sand-flecked white skin, I felt like I’d slipped into an alternate universe.

A broken frame was nothing more than we deserved: nine years of high-impact, heavyweight touring caught up with the partnership. It was bound to happen one day or another. I was lucky that it didn’t happen while I was out touring—although, on reflection, maybe it did.

Throwaway consumerism has, I think, dirtied the purity of possession. Many people, myself included, have hankered after ascetic minimalism: a glorious rejection of the waste and want that modern capitalism has brought us.

But it’s worth remembering why certain convivial objects are precious to their owners—and perhaps to hold all our purchases to a similar standard of value.

What did Martin ever do for us?

A bicycle extends our human frailties. We become bionic, able to move many times faster and further than we ever could on foot, and much more efficiently. I have done things with Martin that would have been unimaginable without him.

I’m thinking, of course, of the life-altering adventures I mentioned earlier, but I’m also thinking of our day-to-day. Martin made it possible for me to live an expansive twenty-first century lifestyle without ever needing a car or taking an aeroplane flight.

Every week, without complaint, Martin lugs my heavy shopping bags five kilometres across town. Together we’ve visiting sixteen different countries, excluding England, Scotland and Wales. Every day he teaches me something about perseverance, self-reliance and community.

Martin’s made me oodles of new friends and ridden me to work, school and social events—especially during my years in London, where the cost and patchy provision of transport makes travel in the city such an unequal battle. (Hence why The Bike Project gives free bikes to refugees.)

But at what cost?

You won’t be surprised to read that I’ve run the numbers… 🤓 The original Marin San Anselmo cost me £488.99—still the most I’ve ever spent on a single item. But I’ve spent many times more on maintenance and spare parts over the years. To be precise, over his entire lifetime, owning and maintaining Martin has cost me £3,323.

That’s a heck of a lot of money, but—get this—counting from the day I bought him to the day he broke down at the end of my cycle around southwest Britain comes to exactly 3,323 days. Martin cost me one pound for every day that I owned him. Or about 18 pence per mile.

That, to me, is incredible value. There aren’t many other possession that have given me so much. Certainly some of my books, my Alphasmart Neo2 typewriter, yoga mat, guitar, teapot, plants and running shoes. Not much else that I can think of.

What about you? What possessions bring outsized value into your life? I’d love to hear from you—especially if you hold all your purchases to this standard.

On the naming of things

It is only right that we celebrate our most highly prized possessions—and, yes, give them petnames. I never loved Martin so much as when he was baptized Martin and grew a personality. My girlfriend at the time misread the brand name ‘Marin’ and contrasted his blocky functionality with the sleek lines of her own vintage racer.

Giving names to inanimate objects might sound silly, but I think it helps combat throwaway consumerism. A name and a personality is the beginning of a story and, when we tell stories about our favourite possessions, we honour, not only their service, but also the ingenuity, engineering and natural resources that went into their construction.

And this ingenuity and engineering is what’s so beautiful about the design of a bicycle. When Martin’s chain stay snapped, what did I lose, exactly? Why didn’t I feel this way after the rear mech sheared off, or all those times my chain snapped or wore out?

Indeed: what is left of that 2011 Marin San Anselmo that I bought from the Cycle Surgery in Camden Town nine years ago? Nothing more than the handlebars, forks, frame and rack. Everything else has been replaced—even the name.

Stuff has a soul

This reminds me of the ancient philosophical conundrum known as the Ship of Theseus: if you replace, one by one, all the planks of a ship until there are none left of the original, is it still the same ship?

The same metaphysical question is asked of Abraham Lincoln’s axe, which needed its handle and then its blade replacing. It’s a question that could be asked of ourselves: we shed our skin every few weeks and every ten years we get a new skeleton.

But as well as posing an insoluble philosphical question about the persistence of identity over time, the Ship of Theseus prompts us to think about what happens at the end of our stuff’s life.

Aristotle decided that the fully-replaced ship was indeed still Theseus’s. And if a yes is good enough for one of the more practical ancient philosophers then it’s good enough for me.

A great ship is a great ship forever. A great axe is a great axe forever. A great bike is a great bike forever, even as the parts are replaced one by one. Because well-designed stuff has something about it that endures. We could call it a soul.

So I’ll keep what I have of Martin—the original handlebars, forks and rack, as well as all the other components I’ve bought more recently—and replace the broken frame as I have replaced bent wheels, snapped chains and worn brake blocks.

The bike is gone, long live the bike!

What now for Martin Jnr?

Thankfully, a friend has very generously leant me her spare bike to ride (thanks GC!) until I’ve found a new frame for Martin Jnr. One of the more alluring options is the idea of spending this lockdown building my own bamboo bike frame.

I first came across the Bamboo Bicycle Club ten years ago, when I had neither the money nor the cycling experience to justify investing £300 in a wooden bike. But now… Now they do ‘home build kits’—surely it’s meant to be!

Philoxenia around Britain Huge thanks to everyone who hosted me or simply made me smile

Philoxenia is the Greek idea of generosity and friendship towards strangers. During my cycle ride around the south of Britain in the summer of 2020, I was the happy recipient of many, many acts of generosity. This page is so that I can thank some of them publicly.

Thank you!

Part 1: The Southeast

On departure

Huge thanks to everyone who is helping to make this ride feel even remotely possible. Special thanks to A.C. for the ideas and company, The Tim Traveller for disturbing Youtube AUDIENCE advice, the Thighs of Steel family for oodles of inspiration and for the Wahoo, Documentally for my birthday microphone, and, of course, thanks to the Charles Family for the sense of home to which I will return. Insha’allah.

Week 1

Huge thank you to everyone who has made the last week such a friendly place. Especially to Yes Tribe Michelle, Rob Wills and Annette Coppin for heartful hospitality in Brighton and Hastings.

Week 2

Thank you, thank you, thank you this week to my hosts and hospitable friends, old and new: Tom and Claire, Anna, Thom and Anna, Claire, Naomi, Ben, Annie and Poppy, Fern and Beth and Lucy.

Major major thanks to Anna Hughes, who not only guided me to a peaceful sleeping spot in Epping Forest, but also took the time to record a great interview about Flight Free UK—only for me to mess up the recording. Sorry!

Week 3

Huge thanks to the hospitable friends and strangers who have made the last seven days such a delight: Pandora, the Wickers family, Sarah and Chloe, John the ferryman, Lesley the artist, Debbie and Steve, Duncan of the incredible Dunx Cycles, Peter Langford the world record holder, and the extraordinary, expecting Matt and Lisa.

Thank you also to all the patient woodland creatures who put up with me wild camping in their homes. Even the ants.

But I reserve extra extra special thanks for my final hosts on this tour of southeast England: Documentally and his wonderfully generous family. Camping in a friend’s back garden was a celebratory end to this part of my journey and I was overwhelmed with too many kindnesses to mention.

Part 2: The Southwest

Week 4

Huge thanks this week to: David and Margaret, esteemed parents of The Tim Traveller, for a lovely cup of tea – only nine years delayed. David, a retired Anglican vicar, told me how Covid-inspired Zoom services are now spreading The Word to people who wouldn’t be seen dead in a church. In every crisis, an opportunity.

Thanks to Will and Daryl, the two tourers from Lincoln, who brightened my day with enthusiasm for life on the road. And then slagged off Exeter cathedral: ‘It’s not fit to wash Lincoln’s boots!’

Above: Three cycle cap models and, in the background, an okay cathedral.

Mighty, mighty thanks to Exeter Paul, a truly generous host who saved me from a thunderstorm and revealed the true meanings behind what I called ‘the racist elephant’.

Thanks also to the many other people who have shared fleeting wisdom and encouragement along the track. You enrich my days.

Finally, and above all, to the family Charles for a mid-cycling holiday in the heat.

Week 5

Enormo-thanks this week to Andy and family for hosting me in Mevagissey and for keeping me company on an eventful ride to Helston: two ferries and a change of tyre.

Gigantic thanks also to the Granvilles of Helston for two nights of warmth and record-breaking hospitality. As ever.

Thanks also to the highways and byways of this southwest corner of Britain. We’ve been safe together so far – long may it continue!

Week 6

A short list of deep gratitude to the people who were inordinately kind to a lost and bedraggled stranger:

  • Ricky the first-day-back otherwise-empty bus driver who took me and a very sorry-state Martin from Chew Magna to Keynsham.
  • Paul and Annie (and the two dogs) for goose-field camping, nettle wine, a pick-n-mix feast, with cups of tea looking out into cloudbursts. I found this loving home on Warmshowers.org—a community of legends who open up their doors to touring cyclists all over the world.
  • Peter and family (and two further dogs) overlooking the stormy Somerset Levels, who shared their medieval banquet and gave me a night’s dominion over their piano room and airing cupboard.
  • The wondrous people of Tudor Road in Bristol who warmed my cockles and combed my hair when all was tangled.
  • Storm Francis also made me feel welcome, blowing me all the way up the north west of the country to refuge. Bus shelters, cafe awnings and spreading oaks became dear friends.
  • Final thanks to the Granvilles, who teach me more about philoxenia every time I bugle my way into their presence. Big love.

Cycling around Britain: Why is this happening? 2,210km DONE // Southeast and southwest Britain COMPLETE

On Tuesday, I kind of rolled into Bristol, after cycling 1,012 kilometres around the southwest of the country. That means that, since the easing of lockdown, I’ve pedalled the whole of the south of England: from Britain’s most easterly point at Ness Point in Lowestoft to its joint-most photographed signpost at Land’s End.

Combined, the two halves of the tour—southeast and southwest—have gobbled up 2,210 kilometres’ worth of tyre tracks. But one statistic is suggestive of the difference in my cycling experience. In the east of the country, my thousand-plus kilometres involved a little over 6,000 metres of climbing. In the west, my thousand kilometres dragged me up over 10,000 metres.

Update: Strava data puts my southeast ride at 7,742m of elevation and the southwest at 15,444m—almost exactly double the climbing over a slightly shorter distance. This data is much closer to my felt experience, but then I would say that!

The take home message is tourers beware! Komoot, Strava and RideWithGPS each appear to use very different maps to calculate elevation data, with variations of up to 50 percent in some parts of the world. That’s huge. This StackExchange post from 2013 concludes that Strava was the most trustworthy of those apps tested—but that might well depend on where you’re riding.

Devon and Cornwall are hilly: 10,000 metres is a Ben Nevis on top of a Mount Everest. But the statistics don’t really tell the full story either: these hills are sharp, up to 33 percent in places, on narrow, winding roads, with descents too dangerous to build momentum for the next.

Hence my twin fascinations this week with a) proper bike gears and b) everything happening for a reason. Hopefully the promise of b) will keep you reading even if a) makes your eyes twitch with boredom.

My round Britain rides since 17 July. You can scan more detail on Komoot

Why me, why now?

Eighteen kilometres from the finish line, riding in merriment along the shore of Chew Valley Lake. I was making good time—a friend called to ask would I be in Bristol for lunch?—and the rain, hard on my heels, flogged and foaming at the head of Storm Francis, was for now holding off.

The road alongside the lake had recently been resurfaced and there was a temporary 20mph speed limit to stop the loose gravel spitting out of car wheels and giving pedestrians and cyclists brain damage.

A car passed me at forty. I had scarcely finished my impotent admonishments, when my chain locked up. This wasn’t a mere clumsy shift: my cranks could spin neither clockwise nor anticlockwise. I skittered to a stop, looked down and saw a pretty pickle:

Among bicycle mechanics, this is technically known as ‘a right mess’. The rear mech has twisted at a screwy angle to the chain: like it had melted under tension.

At this point—so near and yet so far—it’d be easy to curse the heavens. I hadn’t cycled 1,000 kilometres over the past two weeks to finish like this!

But what if this frankly tour-ending disaster was all happening for me, not to me?

After all, I was lucky. This could have happened an hour ago, as I aquaplaned through rocky off-road puddles in the Mendips, a soggy trog from all civilisation. But it has happened here: around the corner from a cafe. I could eat some chips, call some friends and find a solution.

The cafe was closed.

But the toilets were open. Swings and roundabouts. I laughed. Then called some friends. We found a solution: I could unmount the rear mech, break the chain, remove half a dozen links and turn my bike into a fixie: a one gear wonder.

I laughed again: the wind whipped the sound up into the hills. Over the summer I’ve met a lot of people more or less new to cycling. These gentlefolk are often the beneficiaries of a forceful rant about the witless cupidity of bicycle manufacturers.

A forceful rant

As far as I’m concerned, any cyclist who wants to preserve their knees-up-Mother-Brown talents absolutely must have a bike with gears. Many gears, yes, but more importantly the right gears.

Gears are at least half of the miracle of cycling. When they were first invented, gears were banned at the Tour de France. They made the race too easy in the sadistic eyes of the demented organiser.

But most of us, our yellow jerseys faded in the wash, want cycling to be as damn easy as possible—and that means getting the most out of the genius of gears: a tiny front chainring and a decent spread at the back.

These are the kind of gears designed so that even the steepest hill can be tackled in the saddle, giving you and I about another twenty years of squatting potential before knee surgery.

But these are precisely the kind of gears that the big bike builders ignore in favour of a set that suits the show-off accelerate downhill suicide slalom brigade. Who will pay more for their wheels.

And the lack of education around gear mechanics means that your everyday common or garden cyclist also ends up chasing the wrong metric when buying a bike. Instead of thinking hard about the physics of bicycle locomotion, people are eased in the direction of a simpler rubric: kilograms.

Almost understandably, bicyclists believe that a lighter bike will be easier to ride. It might be, but the difference will be scarcely noticeable and cost a lot of money. Ease is in the gears.

It’s frustrating when friends ask me about spending hundreds and thousands (not the cake topping) on lighter frames when all they need to do is switch to a smaller chainring. Shaving a couple of kilos from your bike’s waistline is nice, but won’t give you the massive mechanical advantage that better gearing will.

Rant over.

Sorry—nearly over.

If you’re not a cyclist, do yourself a favour: learn more about gears. When you realise how easy cycling can be on all topography and terrain, maybe you’ll come around.

If you are a cyclist, do yourself a favour: learn more about gears. Hill climbing is no harder than cycling on the flat—slower, maybe, but not harder—so long as you have the right gears and know how to use them.

In Exeter, I did a quick hill-climbing test with a friend of mine, comparing the gearing on his bike with the gearing on mine. We found a short, sharp incline outside his house and I got him to ride up on his bike in the lowest gear.

‘Actually, this is pretty easy,’ he said as I watched his legs push hard down through the pedals.

‘Try mine,’ I replied, shifting it into the lowest gear. He swung himself onto the saddle, eased his feet down onto the pedals—and nearly fell off.

The gear ratio on my bike was so extreme that the cranks turned with barely any pressure: my friend had never dreamed that such mechanical advantage could make hills so comfortable.

Seriously: Alee Denham on Cycling About has a fantastic series of articles on the subject. Read them all.

Back to the story

As I pulled the ugly twisted metal that used to be Martin’s rear mech away from the hanger, I realised that it was still attached to the frame by the (new) shifter cable. I had no wire cutters and my teeth aren’t what they used to be. I inspected the scissors and wood saw options on my penknife. My penknife hid itself at the bottom of my bag and tried to look busy.

Then a man pulled up in a small white van: he was down here from pest control in south Wales to check on the toilets. ‘Sorry to bother you,’ I blurted at him, ‘I don’t suppose you’ve got a pair of wire cutters or pliers, have you?’

Smiling like the Mona Lisa, the workman ducked into the back of his van and rattled around among his miscellanea. A pair of wire cutters appeared in the palm of his hand. ‘Take them,’ he said. I laughed: this was going to work.

All set to go, I washed my hands in the conveniently located toilets, and wobbled triumphantly back past the Chewy ducks.

Getting in a fix with a fixie

The problem with building a fixie bike, I discovered, is that the chain needs to fit perfectly: neither too tight, nor too loose. This is hard to achieve on the road: I don’t even know if it’s possible.

My fixed chain was on the loose side. When I arrogantly decided to shift up to a larger chainring, the chain pulled taut over the cogs, the limber flex vanished and every turn of the pedals became a grinding tug of war.

My bike was, to put it politely, fucked. But the unlikely fix had held the couple of kilometres to Chew Magna and I rolled gently to a stop outside the Cooperative Food supermarket.

I knelt down and got my hands oily. A man, on his way to an eat-out to help out pub lunch with his girls, leant over my shoulder: ‘You alright? What’s the problem?’

The man lived over the road and offered me tools and spare parts; his two talkative young girls eagerly me a deathmatch game of Dobble.

I thanked them and decided that what I really needed was a peanut butter sandwich.

~

On my knees outside St Andrew’s Church, a rotating cast of onlookers sympathised with my plight. An hour’s worth of oil under my fingernails, busted chain links scattered on the holy ground, and I was ready to ride again.

Two hundred metres onward, my second technically incompetent foray into bike mechanics auto-aborted and the chain snapped. This time there were no conveniently located toilets.

Swings: Storm Francis loomed over the horizon.
Roundabouts: so too did the number 683 bus to Keynsham.

And this is how I met Ricky.

A broken bike on a deserted bus

Ricky: Everything happens for a reason (or: you can’t deny that everything happens, so you might as well look for any reason that makes sense of it all)

‘It’s my first day back on the job since February,’ was Ricky’s opening line after taking my fare. For the twenty years before lockdown he’d worked as a coach driver, taking kids out on school trips mostly. Of course all that work has evaporated, like a skein of summer rain on his widescreen windscreen.

Now. I’ve spent the vast majority of my time cycle touring engaged in a battle of curses with other road users. That’s a horrible exaggeration, of course, but remember those Devonian and Cornwallian hill roads? They’re steep, narrow and windy—in both its whine-dy and win-dy phonemic forms.

Definitively not the kind of roads happily shared by both fossil fuelled and peanut-butter-sandwich fuelled modes of transport.

To be fair, most drivers are as considerate as can be given the anti-convivial infrastructure. There are plenty of passing places where either the on-rushing driver or the on-panicking cyclist can pull over. Waves, thanks and thumbs ups can then be cordially exchanged and both parties can put their feet to their respective pedals and hasten onward to their doom.

But some drivers…

Climbing up from a ravine beach in the sleeting sideways rain, up a 33 percent gradient, I was confronted head-on by the broad beam of an expensive Land Rover.

For context, a 33 percent gradient is about as tough a climb as a human-powered bike can manage. Climbs at the Tour de France rarely peak at such a steep incline. And those riders aren’t encumbered with an extra twenty kilos of camping kit (they don’t even carry their own peanut butter).

As I sweated up the incline, salty rivulets on my handlebars, the Land Rover ahead resolutely budged not. Something of a stand-off, except we were both sitting down—albeit at slightly unequal degrees of comfort.

There was no bike-sized gap on either side of the vehicle’s wing mirrors, which poked into the nettle-strewn hedge. But I’d be a poltroon of the highest order if I was going to turn around and cycle back down this Eiger impersonation so that this climate-controlled tourist could save himself the hassle of reversing thirty metres to the passing place behind him.

So I stopped and waited, catching my breath, until the man reversed and we could all get on with our tiny lives.

~

Now, though, I was on the other side of the glass, listening to Ricky talking about carting schoolkids round down the back lanes of the West Country.

‘Some cyclists,’ he started, ‘not you, like, but some of them…

‘I was behind this one cyclist, on a straight main road—and he had every right to be there, course he did—but there was about a mile of traffic backed up behind me. I could hear them beeping at him to move over, right?

‘A coach takes a long time to build up speed, see. I need a long straight to accelerate enough to overtake, right? But this road had double white lines down the middle. I can’t legally cross those white lines to overtake. Not with forty kids in the back, I can’t—I simply can’t do it.

‘So there I am, crawling along at ten, twenty miles an hour, and we come to a lay-by—a proper long lay-by, mind you, good surface and all—easy for this cyclist to pull over and let me and this mile of traffic behind me pass.

‘You know what? He carried right on cycling.

‘Course he had every right, every right to do that,’ Ricky finishes, ‘but that’s why some drivers get upset.’

~

So this is why I’m here. What would I have learnt from another eighteen cycling kilometres on top of over two thousand? Chances are, I’d only have got stressed out fighting through the kind of city limits traffic I’ve fought hundreds of times before.

But on this otherwise empty number 683 bus to Keynsham, Ricky’s passed on something worth passing on. And it wouldn’t have happened at all if something shit hadn’t happened to me and my bike eighteen kilometres from home.

‘I’ll tell you what, mind,’ Ricky adds, ‘white vans are the worst. I don’t lose my rag and tell them to eff-off—I leave that to my schoolkids!’

Cycling around Britain: Detours

Welcome to Wadebridge, pride of the Camel Trail – a former railway line that’s been converted into a busy cycle path, following the gentle curves of the estuary from Padstow. It’s most glorious for families pulling trailers of toddlers and for tired tourers who win respite from the havoc of the Cornish verticals.

Views from the calm Camel Trail

While sitting here, a father and son duo pulled up on their laden touring bikes (father carrying double his coffee-deprived son). We swapped the usual news: they are heading back the way I’ve come, along the Camel Trail to Padstow and then climbing up to Newquay, St Ives and, in a couple of days, Land’s End.

They aren’t from this country and are only here because America is closed. ‘So we will have to spend some more time in your country,’ says the father.

‘But we weren’t expecting so many hills,’ he adds, ‘and they are so steep. We are doing Devon and Cornwall so everything else after this will be easy!’

Tackling the slopes alone – with only the occasional ‘that looks hard’ or thumbs up from a passing road user – it’s gratifying to halve my efforts with another tourer.

Especially with these two. Where are they from? Switzerland.

~

Having said all that, earlier today, like Robert Frost, I came to where two roads diverged. Both were marked on-road cycle paths, both bore a sign to Padstow, which pointed the way to my second breakfast (the first taken under a bus shelter during a downpour).

But one sign said Padstow 4 miles, the other Padstow 7 miles.

‘Long I stood, and looked down one as far as I could, to where it bent in the undergrowth’.

Making the most of technology unavailable to Robert Frost, I even checked the contour lines on the OS Map on my phone. Naturally, the longer route also afforded me another climb or two.

But the longer I tarried, the clearer it became to me: as the poet took the road less travelled, so I should take the road more difficult.

Any hesitation, really, is a clue. Adventure doesn’t happen on the straightest line from A to B.

What would have become of the Hobbits if there’d been a motorway or a flyover, taking them across the mountains of Mordor without stopping to admire the scenery or mingle with the locals?

Adventure occurs in the margins, in the moments I take to pause in a place – like my greetings of the Swiss – or in the detours.

The reward for my morning’s detour

It doesn’t mean anything to arrive (besides a sit down and a cup of tea), so take the harder, longer road. There will always be one moment that makes me agree that was all worthwhile – if only because, as Robert Frost puts it:

‘knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back’

Upon my arrival, I become the sum of all those momentary decisions of which cycle path to take (or which ‘ego tunnel’ to explore). Future me would rather that I’d taken the longer, the harder road, the road less travelled.

Looking back on these moments of decision, the left turns of life that we take for no good reason, we see that it’s the detours that make ‘all the difference’.

~

Indeed, this has been a week of detours. Here are two videos, one from a detour to Dartmoor and one from a detour to Land’s End.

 

Cycling around Britain: Leave no trace

Once I’ve recovered a faculty or two, I’ll be cycling across Dartmoor to a wild camp spot at Foggintor Quarries, following the trail of two awesome tourers I met/accosted in Exeter.

Will and Daryl have cycled the opposite way to me, down from Liverpool, around Wales and through Devon and Cornwall. It was a real joy to share stories and compare insect bites while they drank coffee and I ate a spectacular kimchi and tofu sandwich from The Exploding Bakery Cafe.

The past three days of riding have exhausted not only my sweat glands, but also my supply of adjectives. East Devon is not a designated Area of Outstanding Beauty for the purposes of a practical joke.

The Jurassic Coast at Sidmouth

In this case, both words and photography are inadequate to the task of inserting you into the scene, but hopefully they might cement you in your budding opinion that, yes, you will leave your house and step outside to feel the rivers, glades, and pastures that quietly surround you.

Doreen’s Garden, Branscombe

In the absurdly pictogenic village of Branscombe, a strip of thatched cottages and rose petals that conspire before a cobblestone church, sits a garden that unrolls into the valley. From the top, you can see carefully tended beds and meditative benches and a sign that says: ‘Doreen’s Garden, open to visitors all year round’.

I didn’t meet Doreen, but I put a pound into the collection bucket for the Devon Air Ambulance with a prayer that Doreen is merely the spade-head of a new movement to open up ‘private’ space to public enjoyment.

As someone ‘wild’ camping around England, a place where such guerilla accommodation is technically illegal without the permission of the landowner, the concept of public and private space is very important to me.

I’m reassured by the old folks I meet on the road, the salt-of-the-earth types who have lived round these parts for years. They say things like, ‘Don’t worry about the No Camping signs – they’re only there in case a whole hoard of people move in and won’t shift.’

Despite this reassurance, wouldn’t it be nice if the default legal position was that leave-no-trace, short term camping is permitted so long as it doesn’t disturb livestock, wildlife or agriculture. Why not?

And you don’t have to look far for that legal structure. The Scottish Outdoor Access Code protects the right to camp responsibly: in small numbers, for two or three nights in one place, avoiding enclosed fields of crops or farm animals as well as buildings, roads and historic monuments.

In England, Wales and Northern Ireland the law and the perceived attitude to wild camping are very different. But I’ve been open about my accommodation choices and have met no one who has opposed them or even expressed disapproval.

So perhaps the public perception of wild camping is ahead of the law in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Perhaps that means we can change it. Perhaps it is already changing.

Maybe because of its long association with the military, the right to wild camp is protected on Dartmoor (very convenient because that’s the direction I’m heading).

In the Lake District National Park, the National Trust now ask that people avoid lowland areas and head to the higher fells – and of course to leave no trace.

The spirit of leave no trace is absolutely non-negotiable.

Leaving anything but an impression in the grass will have an adverse effect on the wildlife – and reduce the chances that wild camping, legal or illegal, will be tolerated in the future.

Leaving no trace in an empty field in Dorset.

The pandemic has brought millions of people out into the countryside – a glorious rediscovery of the natural beauty and medicine of this island – but an unfortunate minority have conservation-shaped holes in their outdoors education.

Recently, the Guardian reported that a throwaway ‘festival’ culture has been brought into certain popular wild camping spots and the damage caused means that local rangers are having to clamp down on all overnighters.

Of course, clamping down is not the solution: the problem doesn’t seem to exist in Scotland, with its long history of outdoor access. Because it’s part of their birthright, Scottish campers also inherit an inkling of how to camp responsibly.

In England, it’s as if we’ve only just discovered an enormous lake of ice cream and we’ve jumped straight in, boots and all, without regard for spoiling the dessert that we share. Education, beginning with leave no trace, is the spoon that everyone should be given, long before their stomachs start rumbling.

We need a change in the law. And we need more spoons.

I told you I’d lost a faculty or two.

Cycling around Britain: Bikes are horses too!

Every single day I’m on my bike there are moments when I think: ‘I could have been killed there.’

Cars passing at speed too closely is the most common one. Yet, every now and again, I come across a horse and rider enjoying the same country lanes as me and watch in awe as these same lethal cars slow right down, pull over to one side or stop until the horse has passed.

I wish that our nation’s car drivers understood that cyclists are as vulnerable (and as unpredictable) as horse riders. We sometimes swerve to avoid potholes that you can’t see; we sometimes are blown around by wind that you can’t feel. And our flesh tears as easily as any horse’s, I promise you.

While riding, I daydreamed of starting a cycle-protection campaign: Bikes are horses too!

Then I learnt that the government are currently consulting on a raft of changes to the Highway Code that would recognise the vulnerability of cyclists, pedestrians and horse riders to inadequate or inattentive drivers.

It can’t come soon enough.

So please, if you’d like to see fewer human or animal carcasses on your roads (or bodies taking up space in your hospitals), take five minutes to respond to the government consultation here: Changes to The Highway Code: improving safety for cyclists, pedestrians and horse riders.

Cycling UK has summarised the changes that will protect cyclists, but it’s worth adding that the proposed ‘hierarchy of responsibility’ will also establish in law the duty of all road users to protect pedestrians—and that means cyclists should ride considerately too.

Finally, if you see someone driving dangerously then please (when safe) make a note of the vehicle’s registration, colour, make and model (a quick photograph works well) and report the incident to the police on their non-emergency number 101. It takes a few minutes and your phone call could save lives. The AA has more information on how to make a report.

I don’t know why drivers think they can get away with dangerous overtaking manoeuvres when their numberplate identifies them so conspicuously. It’s like a bankrobber politely presenting their passport to the teller before pulling out an uzi and screaming, ‘Open up the safe, bitch!’

If only attendance at the Ogmios School of Zen Motoring was compulsory…

Cycling around Britain: A cheese sandwich in a rainstorm Finding philoxenia in modern Britain

Sunday evening. It was getting late to find a camp spot. I’d run out of water and I only had rice cakes in my panniers for dinner. Southwold was full, with queues for chips snaking down one-way street pavements.

My last hope for an open shop was a rumoured ‘filling station’ in Wrentham. I rolled to a stop in the empty village. A woman was picking weeds from her driveway. Debbie.

After some hand-wringing over the likelihood of an open shop on a Sunday evening in the Suffolk countryside, I spilled: ‘The thing is,’ I said, ‘I’m running a little low on water.’

Debbie looked surprised: ‘Well, I can fill up your water bottles!’ She led me around to the gate before adding, ‘Are you okay with dogs?’

~

In Coviddy Britain I don’t like to ask people for favours that might put them under uncomfortable pressure to accept. And filling my water bottles is a fairly intimate act unless there’s a hosepipe in the garden.

After ushering me through a remarkable garden living room (with a barbeque made from a North Sea pipeline!) and setting the kitchen tap running, Debbie invited me in. She leaned on the back of a chair and looked at me over her full moon glasses: ‘I wish I had more to offer you, but there’s nothing in the fridge.’

Then she had a revelation: ‘Would you like a hot shower?’

~

Debbie’s kindness was part of a noble tradition of hospitality for passing travellers. Over the past few years, I’ve met this generosity countless times, cycling through Europe with Thighs of Steel.

In Albania last year, for example, every single day at least one cafe owner would refuse payment for coffees, give us free chocolate bars or flag us down on the street to offer us a cold drink.

The concept has a rich history in Ancient Greek mythology—the famous Trojan War was triggered by an abuse of hospitality when Trojan Paris stole Menalaus’ wife Helen while staying with the Greek. Not cool.

Modern Greeks still have a word for this tradition: philoxenia, unquestioning kindness to strangers.

This bike trip has been a lesson that philoxenia is alive and flourishing in Britain too.

~

After inviting her husband Steve to join the gathering, Debbie offered me a plastic garden chair and the three of us shared a local ale.

Facing a barrage of relentless hospitality, I finally accepted a cheese and pickle sandwich that Debbie wrapped in tin foil for later. She put a Diet Pepsi on the table too.

As they told stories, it became clear that this was far from the first time Debbie and Steve had opened their hearts, minds and doors to strangers.

One night, not long ago, Steve met a trio of ex-army lads in the pub. They were suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and were on a therapeutic camp trip to work out some of their problems. One of the party was hyper, another was withdrawn. So Steve invited them over to the house for breakfast the next morning. When they didn’t show up, Steve drove out to the campsite and dragged them back for their egg and sausages.

Philoxenia.

~

As I stowed my water bottles for departure, thanking her again and again for her kindnesses, Debbie insisted that it wasn’t anything unusual.

‘It’s nothing,’ she said. ‘A few bottles of water and the end of loaf of bread!’

‘When you put it like that,’ I replied, ‘it doesn’t sound like much. But it’s not about the water. Most people wouldn’t give up their time so readily to strangers.’

I can imagine multiple scenarios that could have played out when I first approached Debbie outside her house. She could have been sympathetic and wished me luck finding a shop. She could have brought out water so that I could fill them from her driveway. She could have invited me in to fill the water bottles and then bid me safe travels.

And those are the positive scenarios. We’re living through a global pandemic for heaven’s sake—strangers are dangerous.

I imagined precisely zero scenarios where I left her house with a cheese sandwich, a Diet Pepsi, a bellyful of ale, a head full of stories and a heart full of tenderness.

‘Maybe this crisis has changed the way people think about others,’ Debbie said. ‘Maybe it’s brought us all closer together.’

~

As I reached a beautiful beach to camp on, the rain clouds swarmed down. Scrambling the tent up in record time, I lay on my airbed in the gloom and unwrapped the tin foil: four neatly cut squares of a cheese and pickle sandwich.

Do you know what? I think Debbie might be right.

Philoxenia in action

Over the past three weeks I have been the grateful recipient of thousands of acts of philoxenia, large and small.

Huge thanks to the hospitable friends and strangers who have made the last seven days such a delight: Pandora, the Wickers family, Sarah and Chloe, John the ferryman, Lesley the artist, Debbie and Steve, Duncan of the incredible Dunx Cycles, Peter Langford the world record holder, and the extraordinary, expecting Matt and Lisa.

Thank you also to all the patient woodland creatures who put up with me wild camping in their homes. Even the ants.

But I reserve extra extra special thanks for my final hosts on this tour of southeast England: Documentally and his wonderfully generous family. Camping in a friend’s back garden was a celebratory end to this part of my journey and I was overwhelmed with too many kindnesses to mention.

Somewhere around midnight, Documentally captured this video of me attempting to pin down the difference between this cycle trip around Britain and the last, nine years ago.

I can wholeheartedly recommend Documentally’s own newsletter. You can read his take on my visit in the latest edition here. Cheers!

Cycling around Britain: Nine years

What were you doing nine years ago? Please, have a think. What’s changed? How have you grown?

I know exactly what I was doing: cycling around Britain. There is something physically, intellectually and spiritually potent about repeating a ‘once in a decade’ journey. The same routines of cycling and camping give ample space for reflection on how much has changed between then and now.

It’s the same journey, familiar, but by no means similar. As Heraclitus observed:

No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it is not the same river and he is not the same man.

On this day in 2011, I was cycling from Tentsmuir Forest to Perth in Scotland. It was a short day’s ride of 48 miles. By this point in the journey I’d already cycled over 100 miles on two of the fifteen days and taken only one day off—to replace my old bike with the new one I still ride today. On 31 July, I broke through the 1,000 mile barrier.

This time around, I’ve cycled 444 miles and already taken four days off. My longest day’s ride has been 55 miles—and that was only so long because I took ages finding a camping spot in the Mad Max wastelands of Sheppey.

The Isle of Sheppey: part industrial wasteland, part nature reserve.

My first cycle around Britain was largely undertaken in a state of mild panic. Nine years ago, very close to where I sit now, here’s one small example from the story of that first round Britain adventure.

Six in the evening, somewhere outside Basildon, forty miles around Britain. I’m hauling myself down the hard shoulder of a fast dual carriageway, the direct route to Southend-on-Sea, when there’s a popping sound. The weight shifts and slings my bike lurching into the road. A car swerves past, horn blaring. My feet hit the ground, skidding to a stop. I scoot myself to safety. I look back: my bag has slewed off to one side and is now dragging halfway down the wheel. One of the bungee ropes has given way. I climb off and fix it up again, double wrapping my spare bungee tight around the rack. I cycle away, heart shaking, checking the bags with every paranoid turn of the pedals. I wonder vaguely how close I was to death. If a bungee had caught in my spokes, if the wheel had locked, if that car had been closer…

I’d never done anything like this ride before—and I knew nobody who had. I knew nothing about cycle touring, nothing about bikes and bike repair, and nothing about wild camping except that it was illegal. I’d only started cycling regularly a year earlier and my most recent day trip had ended with a dislocated shoulder.

Half an hour later, the rack itself snapped. Some of my panic was justified.

~

Panic in large part explains why I finished that first 4,110 mile journey in 58 days, with only four days off in the whole two months. Scared of what might happen if I was discovered, I cycled from the moment I awoke in my bivvy at dawn to the moment I thought it safe enough to hide in the shadows at dusk.

I was also scared that I couldn’t finish the journey so was driven on, addicted to doing one more mile before nightfall. This meant I wouldn’t take detours and was frustrated whenever I got lost, sticking to well-marked Sustrans cycle routes or the B-roads between towns.

Worst of all, I was scared to speak to the people I passed along the way. I thought they’d be disgusted by a sweaty, stinky cyclist who clearly didn’t know what he was doing. I hesitated before going into cafes and kept my head down when I did. Thank god for the few, precious friends I knew who lived or met me along the way: Ben, John, Zoe, Dani, Patrick and my parents.

~

This time is very different. I have done plenty of cycle touring now, including the confidence-building community adventures with Thighs of Steel. Now I know loads of people who do exactly this sort of thing. We share stories, laugh about our mishaps and revel in the unexpected.

This time, I know that I can cycle long distances, lugging my home behind me. I know how to diagnose and fix the most common things that can go wrong with my bicycle. I’m confident wild camping and have faith that nothing bad will happen even if I am discovered.

This time, I can’t worry about getting lost because I have my phone. The app I use for navigation, Komoot, has an active online community of cyclists who recommend places to visit along the way. It’s how I’ve been finding beautiful woods to camp in.

This time, I know that finishing the journey is the worst that can happen. This makes me slow down and, in slowing down, find the detours and adventures that make the road worth travelling.

Best of all, this time, I have friends. I’ve already stayed or shared tea with friends in Brighton, Hastings, Margate and London. And I’m no longer afraid to make new friends and talk to the people I pass—like the Yes Tribe adventurers who I stayed with in Brighton.

Or like the man I met shortly after passing this sign:

I was waylaid in Sandwich marketplace by Mark Daniel, who spied from my baggage that I was a fellow cycle tourer. Mark had been forced by Covid-19 to delay his departure on a two-year around the world bike ride and we chatted for a while about our bikes, our kit and our plans.

It was this idle conversation with a stranger that helped me appreciate the value of the passage of time.

In the nine years since I last cycled around Britain, I could easily experience how much I’d grown. Not only in my confidence with cycle touring, wild camping and talking to strangers, but in almost every area of my life: the friends I have, the work I do, the hobbies I hob, the places I’ve been, the people I’ve helped, the lessons I’ve learned. The length of my hair.

But then Mark Daniel told me something that blew my mind. He told me his age.

He was 62.

That puts 24 years between us—or 2.67 times nine years. If I can have grown this much since 2011, then what growth lies ahead in the next nine years? And in the nine years after that? And by the time I’m Mark Daniel’s age?

And, after all those 24 years of experiences, adventures, friendships and growth, then I could still cycle around the world? That is a wondrous thing to contemplate.

For many people, myself included, lockdown seemed to collapse time and shut down the optimistic vista of future opportunities. This adventure is doing the opposite for me—and I hope you too will take a moment to reflect on how much has changed in the last nine years in your world and how much could still be done in the time you have left.

There is still time for action and optimism. But that optimistic future depends on something that my nan said to me before she died, shortly before I left on that first cycle around Britain in 2011:

Do it while you can.

~

UPDATE: Throwing nine years ahead, Scott Ludlam has written us a letter from 2029 and it’s pretty exciting.

Cycling around Britain: Let’s go to Mordor

It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.

The Lord of the Rings is one of the great works of twentieth century travel literature and, cycling and camping over the Sussex Weald, I could very well be in Hobbiton.

Sunday was a mizzling day, so I was happy to fall in with the Yes Tribe tourers that I mentioned in last week’s update. They were riding to Brighton; I was riding to Brighton, so I switched off my phone and followed the tyre spray of fellowship.

Lockdown has opened up unexpected narratives for all of us and I’m still re-sourcing my conversational voice with company. At one point, over a menu in a Lebanese restaurant, it was gently pointed out that I was shouting.

In Fishbourne, I met a construction contractor who’s lost tens of thousands of pounds, with minimal support from the government, and has been forced to lay off his workers while trying to plant 76 lamp posts in 48 hours.

But I’ve also stayed with a fabulous Hastings-based performer/marine biologist who’s found a growing audience of kiddies and adults to introduce to sea creatures. In this video, I have a chat with the one and only David Annette-borough:

I’ve met adventurers, artists, office workers and people of all persuasions shrugging their shoulders and, by and large, following the one-way system of life.

While in Brighton, I stayed with fellow Thighs of Steel alumnus Rob Wills, a natural storyteller in multiple artforms: graphical and musical as well as conversational. He kindly gave me permission to record one of his songs for you.

So, without further ado, hit play on the audio up top and enjoy The Hobbit Song. Oh, and I’ve bought a bugle so you can also enjoy my bugling. If you’re subscribed to my Youtube channel then you can listen there too (sadly without my bugling at the beginning…)

You can get your dirty little mitts on Rob’s beautiful animal, astrolabe and poetry inspired art in the form of absurdly affordable giclée prints, greetings cards and story books on Folksy.

Finally: another huge thank you to everyone who has made the last week such a friendly place. Especially to Yes Tribe Michelle, Rob Wills and Annette Coppin for heartful hospitality in Brighton and Hastings.

Cycling around Britain: A proper adventure

‘That looks like a proper adventure.’

At the precise moment this gentleman bestows ‘proper’ adventure upon my travels, I am picking sludgey flecks of porridge out of my jersey and arm hair. It’s not the most adventurous moment of the past two days, but perhaps sums up what really happens behind the scenes on even the most proper adventure.

Which, I hasten to correct, cycling around post-Brexit, mid-Covid and pre-Apocalypse Britain almost certainly isn’t. I’m only thinking one week ahead, so at the moment this bike ride still feels like a haphazard jaunt along the south coast, which is exactly what it is.

I’d been trying to cook porridge using an Alpkit Brukit (like a Jetboil, but cheaper) and, although technically successful, the clear up job was nigh-on impossible. Copious litres of graveyard tap water only served to turn the mutinous porridge into glutinous gobbets.

When I shook out my dishcloth, these turned into oaty missiles, which respectfully sprayed themselves across the cemetery, coating me head to foot in properly adventurous porridge.

~

I’m writing this now on the Hayling Billy cycle path. A steam train used to chuff up and down these tracks, with the wind blowing in its face and views across Langstone Harbour to the big city big lights of Portsmouth. They used to catch oysters here too. Now people charge up and down on their bikes—earlier I saw a guy pulling a surfboard on a trailer.

For more adventure stories, subscribe to my Youtube channel. I’m already getting better at doing these to-camera pieces. I think this one worked out pretty gud:

I’m now sitting atop a spectacular hill, moments away from sunset, with a vegetable jalfrezi sitting, in its turn, uneasily in my stomach. Next up is a short ride to my woodland campground, where I’ll sleep the sleep of the thoroughly windburnt.

This is not a bike ride Cycling around Britain again?

In an alternate reality, right now I’m preparing to join Thighs of Steel on an adventurous detour through the wilds of the Carpathian Mountains as we wend our way from London to Athens.

In this reality, however, our epic fundraising adventure has long been cancelled and instead we spent May and June riding remotely, collectively raising over £110,000 for refugees hit by this thing called Covid-19.

I’m grateful that I haven’t been sick, that I’ve been able to continue working and that we’ve still managed to do some good for those less privileged. But lockdown does funny things to the brain and seeing my summer plans cancelled wasn’t a very nice feeling.

So back in April I promised myself that I would do Something Else. I drew up a few different options, which naturally depended on the state of the pandemic when July 2020 rolled around.

Top of the list was to cycle around Britain. Again.

~

2011 was the year of the Arab Spring. Barack Obama was in the White House (and ordered the assassination of Osama Bin Laden). Amy Winehouse died.

On 17 July that year, a few days after my nan’s funeral, I left home on a 58 day, 4,110 mile bike ride around Britain. It was my first huge bike tour and I knew next to nothing about bikes or the psychological challenges of riding so far. That ride gave me a wellspring of resilience that has stayed with me ever since.

Next Friday, exactly nine years later, I’m leaving home on my bike again to not cycle around Britain. Despite everything, I feel much better prepared. This time I know that this is not a bike ride. These are the tentative first pedal strokes into a physical, psychological and social unknown.

I’m not expecting anything. I’ll board my bike, fully laden with camping and recording kit, and do nothing more than turn the pedals to see what happens.

~

At the time of writing, cycling and camping in England is deemed safe by the government. How it will feel when I’m actually out there is a different question altogether: I’m acutely aware that camping in both Scotland and Wales is still forbidden.

2020 is not 2011.

It could be that the government, the virus or I decide that one day’s riding is more than enough and I come home on Saturday morning.

It could be that I enjoy cycling for a week, coasting between friends in the south, from my nest in Bournemouth to the concrete smoke of London. Maybe that’ll be enough. Maybe I’ll barely have time to catch a train to safety before the dread second wave winds through our communities.

It could be that I cycle on through East Anglia, pursuing the old roads to Lincoln and Durham and—if Scotland decides it’s safe—even onward to Edinburgh and Elgin. Perhaps the clouds will roll over and I will cycle on for six weeks and come back sunburnt in September with a sack of stories to keep me busy for another decade.

If Covid-19 has taught us anything, it’s to hold the future lightly. As the future tense in Arabic goes: insha’allah.

~

Under ‘pacing’ in my report card from 2011 you’ll find the words ‘could do better’. I cycled all day almost every day for nearly two months. I was permanently exhausted (my skin shrivelled up whenever I took a day off) and my encounters with Britain were more fleeting than I would have liked.

This year I’m taking the pace right down, concentrating more on the stories than on the distance. At a leisurely (!) 60km per day, six weeks is about enough time to trace half the country. If the tour is still safe and fun, I can continue with the second half in 2021. No rush.

The energy for this bike ride does not come from the physical challenge. It comes from a desire to understand the changes that have shaken this country. There’s a lot that confuses me in 2020 Britain:

  • What has lockdown done to our communities? What are we learning?
  • What state are we really in after ten years of Conservative rule? Are our politicians helping us build the society we want? Where are we succeeding and where are we failing?
  • How and why did we vote to leave the European Union? How are people taking this opportunity?
  • How awesome are bikes? What are bikes doing to bring communities together?
  • What, where and why is the north-south divide? And could Scotland thrive outside the United Kingdom?
  • Do Britons really believe that Black Lives Matter? Mark Duggen was killed by police while I was cycling in 2011 and I remember watching the news footage at a hostel in the Shetland Isles. Is this time different?
  • Are we turning the tide on climate change? Or is the tide turning us?
  • How has life changed since I last cycled this way nine years ago?

I hope to hear all kinds of interesting perspectives from people I meet along the way, which I’ll bring to you… somehow.

Although Covid-19 has made planning a last minute affair, I have been preparing the ground for more of a multimedia experience of storytelling this time around.

There will certainly be words; there may also be video and audio. Whatever happens, I’ll let you know right here.

~

Finally: huge thanks to everyone who is helping to make this ride feel even remotely possible. Special thanks to A.C. for the ideas and company, The Tim Traveller for disturbing Youtube AUDIENCE advice, the Thighs of Steel family for oodles of inspiration and for the Wahoo, Documentally for my birthday microphone, and, of course, thanks to the Charles Family for the sense of home to which I will return. Insha’allah.

I know this mailing list is full of awesome people. If you’d like to offer support, please please please reply to this email. Any cycle tour leans heavily on the goodwill of strangers and I’m grateful for anything and everything—from kind words up!

If you’d like to catch up on the story of my first cycle around Britain, I wrote a book about the journey called Life to the Lees. Get 10 percent off with code SAVE10 if you order today.

May we all lead responsibly adventurous lives.

Insha’allah and praise be to science-based risk assessments.

How to play Thighs of Steel Joining the world's longest charity relay bike ride

If you don’t know how the world’s longest (and bestest) charity relay bike ride works, then here’s a quick and dirty guide on How to Play Thighs of Steel:

1. Don’t worry – you’re not cycling the whole thing, this is a relay. Pick one week that fills you with butterflies of excitement rather than dread. There’s something on this route for cyclists of all abilities and we are totally non-competitive.

Historically, more than half of our cyclists have been women – I only mention that because cycle touring has a shit reputation of being lonely, miserable and macho. It’ll be challenging, but you’ll never be alone and, with smiles, songs and snacks, everyone helps everyone through. Most people only do one week of the relay – some crazies do two.

2. Do logistics. Book your time off work and your transport to and from the start and finish cities.

3. Train like heck. We have training rides every month in London and there are now over 200 current and former Thighs cyclists you can meet up with for beers and bikes. (In reality, you’ll probably only train a bit and then panic unduly. It’ll be fine. We all do this.)

4. Fundraise like heck. All the money goes to grassroots refugee organisations and we suggest you aim for a minimum of £500. We’re always on hand for fundraising advice. Putting on a party or a dinner is always a winner, but don’t forget the simple stuff like charity pots in your local cafes and pubs. Over the past four years, Thighs cyclists have raised over £320,000 for projects that are making a real difference to the lives of refugees in the UK and Greece.

5. Cycle a really long way. Wahay! Adventure and the unknown is our standard operating procedure as we wild ride, wild camp and wild swim our way across the continent.

People focus on the cycling, but what makes Thighs special is the people. Nothing bonds a campful of strangers like climbing a mountain in 40 degree heat, or getting sprayed down by a farmer with a power hose, or handing out a pannier full of figs picked straight from the tree, or mending a puncture in a thunderstorm, or just sitting by a lake at the end of a long day and watching the sun set in silence.

6. Come home with a suntan, steely thighs and stuffed full of stories to share. It won’t be the end unless you want it to be. Repeat with friends in 2021?

Signups open for real on Sunday 1 March, but you can get early bird access on Monday 24 February by joining a special mailing list. This is good because places go fast and no one wants to miss out!

Athens to the UK with (not by) a bicycle

My route from Athens to the UK was scheduled to take ~82 hours, but that includes about 9 bonus hours in Brindisi and 16 bonus hours in Paris. And does mean that I arrive in Portsmouth, which might not be everyone’s idea of the UK.

Leg 1: Coach Athens-Patra (€20.70)

They’ll take bikes underneath. I had to take off my front wheel, but otherwise left the bike intact.

Takes about 3 hours. Has wifi. More or less airconditioned.

Another option is to cycle along the Gulf of Corinth, which I have done before, in the opposite direction. 3 hours versus 3 days.

Leg 2: Ferry Patra-Brindisi (overnight)

It’s a 3-4km ride from the coach station to the ferry port. Ignore the one way signs and take the first ‘exit’ into the port, saving yourself a huge loop. There’s a handy AB supermarket just before you turn into the port.

Do you really need to arrive at least 2 hours before departure for check-in? Probably not. Did I? Yes. Passport control doesn’t open until 60 minutes before departure.

Don’t worry about boarding: the bike just rolls on and gets tied up. Easy.

I got the overnight ferry so that I could make full use of the cabin. Some people will think this is a waste of money when you could just sleep on deck. I think it’s worth every penny. I slept like a log from about 10pm until about 7am.

Plus it’s nice to have somewhere to dump all your crap while you romp about the ship. And I met a lovely chap called John from Poland.

The ferry arrives a short 3km ride from Brindisi town.

Leg 3: Train Brindisi-Milan (overnight)

Again, I booked an overnight train to avoid spending money on a hostel in Milan. That meant two things:

  1. A full day in Brindisi to eat focaccia.
  2. Only 90 minutes to get between station in Milan for my connection to Paris.

There was no problem getting the bike onto the train, but Brindisi train station doesn’t have a lift between platforms so be prepared to lug.

Try to book a lower bunk so that you feel less like a prick when you take up the entire floor space with your bike. You can’t squeeze the bike underneath the bed, so it has to fit into the space between the ladder and the window.

Woe betide you if there are two bikes.

Try to book a cabin near to the train door so you don’t have to carry your stuff so far. Alternatively, I simply moved my stuff up the carriage into an empty cabin about half an hour before Milan. This is only really important if you have a tight change, which I did.

I got a three bunk cabin, by the way. You will not be able to do anything in a triple cabin. The beds are comfortable, but there isn’t much head room. There are stools to perch on in the gangway, but you’ll frequently have to stand up to allow passage.

In spite of there being shampoo in your deluxe complimentary pack, I couldn’t find the shower. There is a sink in your cabin, but you won’t be able to get to it because your bike will be in the way. There are adequate sinks in the toilet.

Leg 4: Train Milan-Paris

I only had 90 minutes to get off the train, put my bike together, cycle to Garibaldi and pack up the bike again. Luckily, it only took me 45 minutes.

The Milan-Paris train left from platform 11 – useful to know, but only if it always does.

I got a hostel and stayed overnight in Paris, where I wandered around and ate crêpes.

Leg 5: Train Paris-Caen

Easy: just wheel the bike onto the train.

Leg 5.5: Cycle to port which is actually 16km away

Ooh – unexpected! Thank god I allowed plenty of panic time.

Leg 6: Ferry Caen to Portsmouth

Easy. The bike wheels on and, some hours later, wheels off.


So that’s it: Athens to the UK in four travelling days. It is possible to do the journey faster, but I was quite pleased with my free time in Brindisi and Paris.

As with any journey, things went wrong. I was never meant to go via Caen and Portsmouth – I’d booked for Cherbourg and Poole, but bad weather scotched that plan.

But that’s all part of the adventure and I’d much rather have these disruptions than the misery and suspicion of airport security and customs. Overlanding wins!

And if you’re worried about expense, then you might be surprised…

Cycling around Ikaría

I have circumnavigated both Britain and Tunisia on my bicycle (he has a name, Martin). Now I can add the mythological island of Ikaría to that illustrious list.

There are many myths attached to Ikaría, starting with the island’s very name – does it derive from an ancient word for ‘fish’, or was it here that the ill-starred Icarus crashed to earth?

There is the myth of the ‘long-lived’ population (a myth that goes back at least as far as 1677). It might be the calorie-restricted diet, it might be hard-working lives and no retirement, it might be close family, or the radioactive hot springs.

There is the myth of ‘Red Rock’, the island where 13,000 communists were exiled – quite possibly all of them ribetiko players (in spite of the disapproval of the Communist Party).

There is the myth of the Free State of Ikaría, with its own government, armed forces, stamps and, most importantly, flag. The state lasted 5 months in 1912; you can still see the flag flying.

Then there is the myth that Ikaría can make for a relaxing cycle tour, even in the dying embers of summer.

Ikaría doesn’t give up its myths easily.

~

The first warning landed on my deaf ears even before I’d booked my ferry ticket: ‘It is very hilly,’ my friend told me, ‘and the road isn’t too good in places.’

The second warning came moments after disembarking, met in a port-side cafe by an Ikarían friend of my friend. ‘It is very hilly,’ he said. ‘Mountains. And there is no road in some places.’

The third warning arrived at the end of an afternoon that had fair zipped along, fuelled by Popis’s aubergine in red wine, on rollercoaster contours where descents powered the climbs. ‘The road goes straight up from here,’ the painter under the tree said. ‘And, from Karkinagri, the road is impassable. You might be able to get through, but you’ll have to carry your bike.’

The fourth warning was a map. If it’s possible to have deaf eyes, then I had them. A circumnavigation of the whole island was less than 140km – a day’s work on Thighs of Steel – how hard could Ikaría be?

Turns out: really fucking hard.

There were plenty of moments, perched high up on a wheel-spinning gravel track, bike in hand, where I fancied an Icarus-like plunge into the sea rather than take another heave on the pedals.

It’s amazing how fast your body forgets the sweat-earned hills when you’re racing to sea-level at 50kph. Every day is showtime here: the sun playing in the waves, the clouds decorating the Amazonian canopy, the Ikarían rock, polished or volcanic, changing colour from bleach to blush to black.

Yesterday I took rest in the far east of the island. I walked over the headland to a cove where stone held the sea close, and the sand paddled underfoot. I dived from a boulder and let the current drift me out to the sunset.

I hiked up to the Cave of Dionysus, startling two bull-like goats into the thickets of gorse. The maw of the cave hung open, the walls melting with the crushed skulls and bones of thousands of years. A bottomless fear stalked me.

I climbed up along a trail marked with scarlet splashes of paint, chasing the falling light, cresting the hilltop as the sun bent itself into the western mountains I’d climbed two days before. The stars flicked on.

Thighs of Steel arrives in Athens, all together

After more than 6,000km and 90,000m of climbing, Thighs of Steel is done and dusted for another year.

Over the past 9 weeks, more than 90 cyclists have covered every single inch of asphalt between here and London. As part of the core team for 4 weeks this year, I have cycled 1,670 of those kilometres (8.9 laps of the M25) and climbed 18,600m (2.1 ascents of Everest).

I also shared 7 van days, supporting the incredible sweat-work of the fundraising cyclists, finding wild camp spots, fixing broken bikes, cooking hearty dinners and generally trying to make everything run as smoothly as a transcontinental bike ride can be.

After the glorious hospitality of Albania last week, the final ride from Igoumenitsa to Athens was littered with unforeseen crises.

  • Two bikes arrived destroyed by airlines. On day one, another bike fell apart on the road. On day three, a fourth bike succumbed.
  • On the first night, the police broke up our beachside camp with hard stares and unveiled threats.
  • The starter motor on Calypso (the van) broke, leaving the van team stranded on a beach with hungry, tired cyclists rushing ahead expecting food and shelter.
  • At the tunnel under the Ambracian Gulf, the whole team were told that the shuttle service for cyclists had been terminated, they couldn’t cross, and should instead make a 100km detour.
  • We had our first serious accident: a gravel slip on a fast descent that left a bruising dent in an elbow.
  • After fixing precisely zero punctures in the past 3 weeks, this week I personally replaced three exploded inner tubes – other teams copped yet more.
  • On the final morning of the ride, a thunderstorm broke. Sheet lightning, thunder claps and hard rain laying waste to the camp we’d pitched among the stones of an ancient archaeological site.

But of all the weeks I have taken part in, this was the one I enjoyed the most.

Albania was the country I most loved cycling through, but this week gave me the sense – nay, the strong belief that no challenge was insurmountable for this motley collection of strangers that had come together to ride and raise money for refugees.

This disaster-filled ride most encapsulated the Thighs of Steel ethos: whatever troubles we face, we face together and we solve together.

It is testament to the resilience and generosity of the human spirit that, when we come together in common cause, anything is possible. I feel like the past few weeks, in the company of so many committed people, have filled me up with good faith in our shared humanity.

On Thighs of Steel we usually ride in two or three groups so that we’re staggered across the roads. It’s easier to manage smaller teams and groups of four or five dodge much of the ire of other road users.

But it was fitting that, after weathering the morning’s tempestuous thunderstorm, Thighs of Steel 2019 ended with the 16 cyclists gathering in a restaurant just outside Athens and riding into the city to meet the van team at the summit of Lycabettus, so that we could celebrate our ride all together.

~

Thighs of Steel 2019 Fundraising Update: £67,736

£10,000 of your generous donations will help fund Pedal Power, a cycle training programme for female refugees in Birmingham. I’ve written a bit about Pedal Power and Thighs of Steel on The Bike Project blog if you’d like to read more.

Thanks everyone!

The Trials and Tribulations of Van Days Thighs of Steel 2019

Being part of the core team for Thighs of Steel this year is a very different experience to riding the full week as a fundraiser. Mainly because I spent two of the six days driving Calypso, the team’s support van.

That’s not to say that van days are easy. There’s an intimidating list of jobs that need to be done:

  • Pack up the campsite
  • Plan a meal and buy food for dinner
  • Drive ~120km (on the wrong side of the road)
  • Find the perfect wild camping spot for ~15 cyclists, not too far from the pre-planned route, but quiet, secluded, flat enough for tent-pitching, and ideally close to a river or lake for swimming
  • Cook the perfect camp dinner

A dozen hot and hungry cyclists depend on the van team getting this right. Oh – and you have to do all of this while feeling like absolute crap.

It is an unfortunate side effect of long distance cycling that your body mistakenly believes that van days are rest days. The body shuts down, the mind follows suit.

I felt like an extremely hot zombie. This was not great news, especially as I was driving and my French was in high demand to help secure us a wild camp site.

But on Thighs of Steel miracles happen. Indeed, the ride depends on miracles, almost every single day.

I’d been warned that finding wild camping for a dozen cyclists and a humungous van is the hardest part of the job. The plan is completely reliant on some kindly farmer, landowner or mayor taking pity on our ridiculous endeavour and letting us camp on their land.

After all, what would you do if you saw a circle of chairs, filled by dirty-faced foreigners, set up in your orchard?

But, in more than 20 weeks of touring, only once have Thighs of Steel been asked to move on. It is a daily miracle. Thank you, kind-hearted people of Europe.

With the help of my co-driver, I rang the doorbell of a likely-looking landowner, not far off route. We’d spotted a campervan parked in a closely-mown field behind his house.

With the help of his excitable dog, the owner was roused. He opened the door, and the dog bolted for freedom.

The man apologised, but couldn’t help: the owner of the field was in Belgium. He suggested that we ask the mayor, gave us directions to the town hall, and started calling for his lost dog.

We drove Calypso up to the quaint village Mairie. It felt like we were parking our tank on their lawn.

I began in faltering French: ‘We are 12 cyclists looking for wild camping…’ And, hallelujah, it was as if he’d been expecting us. ‘I have the perfect place,’ he smiled.

What followed felt like the oral part of my GCSE French exam: ‘At the crossroads go straight on and follow the road for 3km. You’ll see a low, white wall, with a gap in the middle. Go down this track, over a disused railway line through a wood, and then over a small bridge into a field.’

I follow the directions with apprehensive nodding. The mayor finishes by kisses his fingers: ‘And the river is perfect for bathing!’

We took his address to send a thank you card from Athens, and then drive out – slightly nervous – to our campsite.

To my astonishment, I’d understood his flawless directions and we found the field atop a tiny island, split by lazy turns of the river. Fishermen dabbled in the shallows and a paddleboard drifted past.

It was perfect (especially when the insects clear off).

We set up chairs in a circle, looking out at the sun dunking itself into the stream away to the west. We set the pot boiling with a vegetable curry.

Half an hour later, the cyclists arrive, stinking of joy, bells a-ringing. It’s only then that we notice the chairs are arranged in a perfect ring around a single, plump dog turd.


Thighs of Steel is Europe’s biggest charity relay bike ride, taking 9 weeks to cover the 6,000km from London to Athens, with a frankly silly detour via the Pyrenees to make it more than 90,000m climbing over three of the continent’s toughest mountain ranges.

So far, the cyclists and supporters of Thighs of Steel 2019 have raised over £38,000 £50,000 for Help Refugees.

If you want to help keep the lights on at grassroots refugee organisations across Europe, you could do a lot worse than contribute to my page here.

THANK YOU. I promise all donors something delightful by the end of the year…