I’m going to Wichita

 Wow. A pandemic.

If any of you have been reading this blog for a while you will know that I caught Covid back in the Spring of 2020. Actually, more like the late Winter. 

I had been the main organiser for a conference for my (now) former employer. It had been a very stressful and difficult event to organise, and culminated in a day that was overshadowed by the emergence of a new virus. Friday 6th March it was, and after two months when we talked about high-performance, and the next phase of growth, all in preparation for the usual break-out sessions and external speakers, all anyone now remembers is that it was the last “in-person” event for a very long time.

At the evening dinner I was seated next to a rather truculent individual, and spent the evening trying to be polite and pleasant in the face of his repeated moaning. He even moaned about his latest Italian skiing holiday, from which he’d just returned. Yes, you’ve guessed it.

The next day, a Saturday, I rode an Audax. I was pretty tired anyway, and I’m not sure if the infection had taken enough hold of me to explain why I only finished within 20 minutes of the cut-off time. It was a very cold and windy late-Winter day, I rode it on my own after Martyn’s car failed to start that morning, and I was conscious of having had a particularly tough few weeks at work. However by the next weekend, riding down to the Blackdowns with Martyn I really found it hard to even pedal. I turned back, leaving him to it, and on the way home, I had to stop a few times for a snooze as I found it hard to stay awake.

By the beginning of the following week I was actually ill, with all the symptoms of this new emerging Coronavirus, and I spent the following weekend asleep and feverish. There were no tests available by then, but antibody testing in May 2020 confirmed I’d had Covid-19, and since we had been in lockdown since March I knew for certain that my colleague had brought me back a present from Italy. He’d actually infected a whole bunch of people that day, so I guess you could call that Conference a Super-spreader event. I’m glad it disseminated something.

Much has been written and spoken of since then about vaccines, viruses, parties and politics. Friendships have been lost, I’ve taken redundancy from my job at that organisation, and in many ways the world seems a different place to that in early 2020. Back in the early days of the pandemic most people lived in genuine fear of getting the illness. The news media was full of stories of death and hospitals that could barely cope with the wave of sick people. There was little understanding of transmission and no known prevention or cure. The world was full of rules and angry people, one containing what we could do in the name of the greater good, the other railing about restrictions they felt were unnecessary.

Beyond Covid, my world has been through so much too. Major illnesses to all of our household, bereavements as we lost Mrs Mendip Rouleur’s Mum, my close friend, and others we knew. So many people suffering so much disruption. Junior off to the turbulent world of Pandemic University and having a really tough time. Turmoil in the job world for us and just about everyone I know. That’s before you take into account the strangeness of lockdown world, conspiracy theories about everything, me even growing a beard. Twice. If the world was turned upside down in 1649, then believe you me, we are living on St Georges Hill

Nowadays there is barely a mention of Covid in the news. Of course, the death of our longest-reigning monarch has taken over the airwaves in the last two weeks, but even before then the pandemic had become just a small piece of occasional stories, perhaps linked to long Covid, or other less immediate crises. The pandemic didn’t create many of the challenges we face now, holistically in the wider world, or more prosaically, for me and my family. But it’s magnified and exacerbated them, and also created a culture where the small-minded and the weak, feel panicked into making short-sighted and stupid decisions. I hope not to be amongst those feeling that fear. Even if I may have felt the effects of the fearful.

Foreign holidays in all their glory have returned. This seems like a good thing to everyone, but is it? In a world that is being destroyed by rising temperatures and rising CO2, is it right we head out on our tours of materialistic consumption of other cultures, or mindless drinking in hotter climes? Hard to say isn’t it, as with all things? But where does beneficial tourism end and destruction of the planet begin?

Guess where we went? Yes, that’s right, Italy. A lovely week in Sorrento and the surrounding area. Relaxing, eating, sight-seeing and enjoying  a break from the slog of 2022. So it’s with a particularly appropriate circularity that I now have Covid, Omicron variant,  whatever number we are on now, probably. Assuredly caught either on a coach trip back to the airport, or the flight home itself. Or the crowded arrivals hall, or frankly who cares where? Fortunately Junior has gone back to University and remains, a week later, symptom-free and Mrs Mendip Rouleur continues to test negative. Probably because at the first sign of a symptom I hot-footed into Junior’s vacated room and stayed there till she left for work this week in London. 

Actually, I’ve come to realise what a little paradise Junior’s room is. He has the best TV in the house, with the full range of channels, and the best bed, and access to everything he could need. I think I may need to make it a bit more unpleasant, otherwise he’ll be here when he’s 30! At least West Ham aren’t winning anymore, normal service has resumed. 

So now, as I watch my Strava fitness curve collapse again, and cancel all engagements for the next week, what am I left with? Well, a very irritating illness that is a bit more than a cold, with sniffles, coughing, headache, and nausea. (Note the Oxford comma in the previous sentence). But it’s nothing like the feverish fatigue with flu-like symptoms of March 2020. Not does it have any fear attached to it, and nor is anyone really remotely interested in it. For someone with asthma (like me) it’s enough to render my nights quite uncomfortable, but as long as I keep dosed on paracetamol and hydrated, and avoid eating too much, (and quite frankly I have little appetite anyway), I’m fairly sure I’ll be fine in a few days. Physically anyway.

In a way it’s a good time to get this Omicron out of the way. My cycling season had come to an end, limping to a finish a week after I crashed on a group ride on August Bank Holiday Monday, and I probably needed a bit of a break to let my body recover. Oh, the irony. But I’ve also just had a medical, with generally good results although there are some things to work on. At my age (yes it is next Saturday if you want to send a present) people make all kinds of assumptions about what you are capable of. But in many ways my medical has defied those. My VO2 is that of someone 23 years younger than my real age for example, and that’s despite my asthma. I know I need to, and can, lose some weight and improve my diet, but beyond that I’m in good shape. Physically anyway.

Once I have recovered from this current minor hiccup I do have a few projects I want to really get my teeth into. More on that in my next post. Unfortunately, all of them are unpaid, and whilst the coffers are not empty, I suspect the plans our new Prime Minister has will not be filling them anytime soon. So if anyone has any work that I can do to a good standard, with financial reward within travelling distance that makes the effort of commuting worthwhile (or a good standard of shower and secure bike storage), do let me know. I’m not fussed about what it is, as long as I can be good at it, and preferably it involves working with nice people, I’m all ears. Message me, I’m hear to listen. Someone else said that recently, but unlike them, I really mean it.

But I have an unease about both the Pandemic, and about its lingering impact that I can’t quite shake. I’m not talking about Long Covid either, although I feel and fear for the people suffering from that too. With a novel virus its true impact and ways of affecting us won’t be known for some time. This one is shaping up to be nasty, and will, like those in charge of our corrupt government, constantly mutate to try and hide the nastiness.

So is the pandemic over or not? Does anyone care? Are we now “living with Covid” rather than trying to fight it? What does that even mean? 

Last night I watched a particularly bad post-apocalyptic Zombie film called “World War Z”.  Brad Pitt probably did it for the money, but then again, so would I! Aside from the annoying trope of an asthmatic kid (appears in most post-apocalyptic films these days), it did have a ring of a reminder about how fragile our world is, and how easy it would be for it to collapse. Earlier in the week I’d watched Simon Reeve investigate zoonotic illnesses in South America, and how these are becoming more dangerous as we push into previously remote areas. It doesn’t take a genius to work out that the powerful and the scared are allies in these situations, exploiting peoples’ fears and prejudices to feather their own nests. 

But then if you think how quickly our country was gripped again by a strange Royalist-obsessive fever, and how notions of rational discourse and debate are swept aside so easily, well the Zombies are here already aren’t they? Add in unhealthy dollops of fear, an uncertain financial and employment situation, multiply by 100, throw in some unjustified paranoia about strangers, and what have you got? How quickly will people throw up their hands and say, “oh they are all the same, what can you do?” Before you know it, the camps are opening and the excuses are being made. Maybe this sounds like a different type of conspiracy theory to you, it probably even does to me. But I’m worried.

Someone has got to say enough. Someone has got to stop the slide and say, let’s be the grown-ups. We have to create a better world. Those of us that are Snowflakes, Woke, Progressive, Human, whatever we call ourselves, we have to fight back. We have to choose love.

The old Guy can’t come to the phone right now

 What a difference a week can make to your life. And to your resting heart rate. Whether it makes any difference to my cycling ability, well, let’s wait and see. 

For the first time since 2018 I made it to the Pyrenees. They have changed a lot in that time. The roads are stickier, the gradients are steeper and all the bikes are much heavier. Only joking of course, it was all pretty much as I’d left it at the end of the Cent Cols. It was me that had changed. Oh, and maybe the world too. 

I left Bristol Airport on Thursday 2nd June in scenes of pandemonium. Apparently it had been worse in the days before. If this is what a Jubilee does to the transport infrastructure, it’s yet more evidence of the damage having a royal family does to the country. But I persevered, and eventually found myself in the arrivals’ hall of Toulouse airport, on a calm and serene evening. I decided to drag my bike (in it’s box), my suitcase (suitably overstuffed with cycling kit), to my overnight stop (the Hotel Ibis Styles), which was after all just 1km away. I’d forgotten that even at 8PM it can still be very hot in Occitanie. Won’t make that mistake again.

I settled in for the evening, watching the sun go down, and feeling the stress seeping out of me. It felt like home, even if it isn’t. Although in a way of course, it is.

I had intended to potter about the City centre the next morning, but I overslept. I contented myself with a French breakfast of bread, ham, cheese and croissant, with suitable coffee. That blue sky was already in evidence, a deeper blue than you get in England, and I wandered over to Decathlon and bought a new shirt. More of that later. 

Lunchtime arrived and Lee from Cycle Pyrenees arrived to pick me up and take me to Foix. That sounds like it should be a Bing Crosby film. I’m not going to describe every single ride, climb, descent, meal, castle, mountain view, or even any of them. If you want to see any of them, ask to follow me on Strava or Instagram (guybuckland77). If I like you I’ll accept you. 

I’m not even going to tell you about all the things I learned about myself. There wasn’t much to be honest, I was too intent on enjoying myself. If you go to Cycle Pyrenees in Vernajoul (near Foix) I guarantee you will enjoy yourself too. If we meet soon I may give you a standard response about my holiday, but I can honestly say here, in my blog, that it was an outstanding trip and just what I needed.

The highlight for me was the penultimate day, when we all went out for a ride together, and I got to see a castle I’d long to visit for a long time. By then I was still climbing slowly, but I didn’t feel as if parts of my body were going to disintegrate before I got to the top. Yes, a short climb, but also a bit of fitness, a bit of knowledge (thanks Lee for the HR tip), and a lot of perspective.

The company of hosts and fellow guests was excellent. All better cyclists than me, they had inordinate patience to wait when they needed to, or not when I needed them to go up the road and leave me to my work. It may be true that it is harder than it used to be, but I think a lot of that has to do with the unfamiliarity, the absolute shellacking I’ve had in the past few years, and a certain psychological struggle that is receding as fast as my descent of the Col de Port (a PB in case you wondered). 

Which brings me back to the shirt. This picture on the morning I left, with that sky behind me. Or me in front of it. I look pretty good don’t I? I do look my age, but I am also fitter than a week ago. I’m not going to rest easy either. All my numbers are as good as they have been for four years, and I am confident I am going to get better.

I’m not interested in challenges, competitions, status, hierarchy or machismo. I know my place. The question now is, do you know yours? 

A song from the darkest hour

 I finally got to ride the Chalke and Cheese Audax last weekend. Well the weekend before, but who’s counting? Martyn and I had first thought about doing it in 2018, but for some reason we couldn’t make it, so the weekend after we set out to ride the route as an informal DIY. But we got a bit lost in the early evening and ended up slogging around near Mere in the gloom. We both did well over distance but it was not the real deal. 

2019 passed us by, I can’t remember why, maybe weather or football-attendance related or maybe it was the beginnings of the bout of whooping cough, but in 2020 we both entered again. Infamously I had two punctures within the first 20km, and given as I’d had 3 the weekend before I rightly bailed suspecting a wheel problem. Which there was. Martyn however gamely pedalled on and completed it on his own. He’s been doing a lot of that recently, I’m not convinced he knows why he keeps going with the 200km rides?

As for 2021, I think we were all a bit locked down at the time weren’t we?

So it was a relief, and also a joy, to trundle around the delightful route, puncture at 80km notwithstanding and finally complete the thing. It is a lovely route though, and was very well-attended, despite the first four hours on icy lanes in sub-zero temperatures. As for this year’s puncture, luckily the mud, cold and lack of reading glasses obscured the fully-cracked rim - the whole braking surface interrupted by a twisted crack. I’m sure there’s a metaphor in there somewhere. A miracle I didn’t get more punctures or worse.

I’ve just been to the physiotherapist this morning, checking in to see how much recovery still continues on the brachial neuritis. Good news, my grip strength is now “normal”, which as everyone knows is a statistical average, and given it was around 50% of normal nine months ago is great to hear. Recovery is continuing in almost all my muscles, even down to the lower forearms. Still not fully there, but it’s still progressing.

There is however, bad news, the recovery around one muscle, the left infraspinatus, has stalled, with no progress in the last three months. This muscle is a key one in rotating the shoulder and giving it stability. It has also caused impingement in the joint, meaning as other muscles continue to grow stronger, the imbalance will potentially get worse. I’m going for some repeat nerve conduction studies to see if this is nerve damage, and if so how bad, or if it’s something else.

But. It’s a big but, because it’s almost exactly a year since this illness, condition, whatever, struck. It was a strike too, a sudden, nasty, vicious and painful whack to my system. I recently looked back at a WhatsApp thread, I was trying to find an address. But I came across the exchange of messages I’d had during the first week, and on my part they had become the virtual equivalent of monosyllabic. I was clearly less than my normal garrulous state. I remembered how frightening it had been to suddenly lose function, to be overwhelmed by unusual and unexpectedly severe pain, not knowing what it was or where it was going. Or going to end.

I hope it never comes back. I hope none of you ever get this. But, and this is the but, I consider myself very fortunate to have made as much of a recovery as I have. Even if I made no more progress at all, I could live with it. Barring putting on pullover fleeces, and reaching for things on high shelves, (no jokes about short people please) I can do just about everything I need to, and the cycling seems to be OK.  I mean, 200km, done very slowly I’ll grant you, but I never thought I’d get back to that, puncture or no puncture.

This year I have three simple aims. First, stay alive. Second, stay healthy. Third, enjoy myself as much as possible. That’s it. 

I do have other plans, some of which involve bikes, bikes with friends in France, bikes in Devon, other places. Also, learning how to have a real laugh, telling a story, or at least the research for one. And learning to listen better, no not the empathic caring about others stuff, actually getting hearing aids that don’t give me an allergic reaction. 

One of the sayings I like to trot out on a regular basis is this. Most of the things we ever worry about don’t turn out to be as bad as we first fear. So why focus on the worry, when you could focus on better things?

I don’t really know how this shoulder thing is going to end, but I do know this. There have been a lot of people rooting for me in the last twelve months, and a lot of people who have supported me in ways big and small, and in ways they didn’t have to. I’m very grateful and thankful to everyone that has helped speed me on the path to recovery. Even those who let me down have help, in a funny kind of way. That’s my focus, the people who help, not the worry and the people who don’t. Really.

We can all recover. We may be changed, hurt, impaired, damaged, but, and this is the big but, recovery is always possible.

I’ll be Summer sun for you forever

 I am pretty sure that I have become Winscombe’s biggest Taylor Swift fan. I was in her top 0.5% of listeners worldwide this year. Judging by my annual review from Spotify anyway. Could anyone have spent more time listening to Pensylvania’s finest in this locality in 2021? I doubt it.

It’s all the rage. Annual reviews from your apps. Strava of course. Garmin, well yes naturally. Then there’s the annual Nectar summary, and all the commercial sites flooding my inbox with reminders, Christmas offers and such. It’s funny because I’m always pretty scathing about annual reviews, round-robin circulars, essentially saying “my life is “better than yours” or “my humblebrag is more downbeat than anything you could construct”. Which of course are the same thing.

I’m also all about how arbitrary all these artificial gateways are. Birthdays, New Year, football seasons. Just markers on the journey from B to D. True progress and change comes from constant review, reflection and action. Jeez, sounds like a Training course.

But 2021. Wow. Just glad my resilience was at an all-time high last January, that’s all I can say. Even the boys in claret blue seem to have got to the end of their resources. Stumbling towards the transfer window, hoping it doesn’t end up like the defenestration of Prague, where they landed in a heap of trouble. So to speak.

All the individual members of the Mendip Rouleur household have had significant health issues, thankfully going in the right direction, albeit slowly in fits and starts. Friends have had tough times too, all of the cycling group in this part of Somerset deeply miss our friend and colossus of the peloton, who unexpectedly died at the beginning of November. Other friends continue to struggle and I feel powerless to help, beyond kind wishes and occasional coffees. It just doesn’t seem enough.

As for the wider world, I have never seen anything quite like it. Quite how the reason and pragmatism has disappeared from the thinking of so many supposedly intelligent people, I will never know. When I was a child I imagined that the world would become more liberal, less idiotic and kinder as time passed. It’s almost as if the Internet and continuing culture wars seem to be feeding narcissism and conspiracy, rather than exposing them for the fools they are.

The age-old cry - what’s to be done? Right now, for me, it’s to find an echo chamber where people agree with me, do their shouting in unison, and celebrate what is still joyful in the world. It’s just easier. This Sunday we get a chance to ride out in the cool of a December day, Solstice-style. A chance for us to come together and forget about the rubbish that’s been going on and just ride, laugh and enjoy ourselves. Let’s hope for more of that in 2022. Because as I keep saying, it’s people that keep us all going, and to those who’ve supported me and my family for the past year, this is for you.

Which brings us back to Taylor again.

This is not a rehearsal

 The greatest cultural event in the history of humanity happened on 18th November 1991. I remember the day as if it were yesterday. I was working as an Assistant Manager at Lloyds Bank in Catford at the time. The branch is not there anymore, and I played a big part in that as I was running the project to close it down. The early 90s, on the back of the Lawson bubble, was not kind to the fortunes of financial institutions, and we were busy closing branches all over the country.

In a way it was a bit of a metaphor for my life at the time. After the heady days of my Graduate training scheme in the West End of a London buoyant with credit, I’d headed over to the fringes of the City of London and my first proper job selling Asset Finance to big organisations. My personal life was going well too and I’d bought my first flat, and thought I had life sussed. 

Then the economy went pop, and I was lucky to survive a raft of redundancies, and found myself running this project in Catford. My flat, down in the South London suburbs, was now the proud owner of lots of negative equity, and meanwhile my girlfriend decided I was not the one for her after all. In the space of a few short months, the heady optimism of excess of the 80s had turned into the cold, hard reality of 1990s Britain. Think of it as a warm-up act for the 2020s.

Just in case you are wondering, I have nothing against Catford specifically. A combination of circumstances had placed it slap-bang on the route of the South Circular road, which was always congested, and meant it was hard for a real vibrant community to form. It tended to be overshadowed by Lewisham to the North, and Bromley to the South, and the wealth of Dulwich to the West. It was in decline already and judging by the news reports I’ve just looked at, not a lot has improved in the last 30 years. But the people I worked with were great, hard-working, sparky, and I kept in contact with many of them for a long time after I left London.

November 18th was a very drizzly, nondescript kind of a day. Damp, a bit cold, with nothing special about it. Like Catford, like my life, and especially like the way that Britain was shaping up in the early 90s. At lunchtime I plodded over the road to the Catford Shopping centre, which imaginatively had a huge statue of a cat perching over its entrance.

There being no record shops in the centre I wandered into WH Smith’s and bought it. It was one of the very first CDs that I ever owned, as being a late-adopter (generally) I had only recently acquired my first CD player. I had been worried about artwork, sleeve notes and the like, but I needn’t have been, for it was replete with a 32-page booklet. Images galore, lyrics, and all the amazing, confusing and diametrically-opposed direction of something quite revolutionary.

Of course, my Fiat Uno 1.3 only had the ability to play tapes, so I had to wait till the evening when I got back to my flat to listen to it. What came out of the speakers figuratively blew me away. What was that sound? It sounded like a cross between someone tapping on a metal pipe and an industrial drill rhythmically blasting out a melody. Then came the distorted guitars, the pounding bass, and finally the voice. 

“Time is a train, Makes the future the past, Leaves you standing in the station, Your face pressed up against the glass”

Out in the wider world of course, beyond Catford, beyond Britain and beyond me, seismic shifts were happening. Two years before the Berlin Wall had finally tumbled. It seems strange to think of, but back then I thought it would never happen. I thought Apartheid would never end, and I thought the “Troubles” would go on for ever. That aside, this opening salvo of a track was the harbinger of a new sound, as well as of a new age. Unification was in the air, not just Germany, but the whole of Europe seemed to be optimistically heading for fresh horizons.

“Well my heart is where it’s always been, My head is somewhere in between”

Not content with blowing away the sound, now all that earnestness of celebrity was being mocked too, the very essence of consumerism - “the real thing” - placed at the heart of the song, celebrity is a job. With slide guitars and slide-on-downs, they were making a statement. The Joshua tree was being chopped down.

“Did I ask too much? More than a lot, You gave me nothing now it’s all I got, We’re one, but we’re not the same, Well we hurt each other then we do it again”

The thing I actually like best about this song is that it is actually about breaking up, or conflict, or grudging acceptance. It is not about being in doe-eyed love, or pulling together for some corporate purpose, and no amount of playing it at your conference will make it so. A song that kindled their re-birth none the same, but with warts and all, it will be played at my funeral, mixing as it does equal amounts of misery and joy, struggle and success. But don’t feel guilty.

“In my dream I was drowning my sorrows, But my sorrows they learned to swim”

The tour that followed the album, was all glitz and pastiche, irony and glitter. The earnestness of yesteryear, and the seriousness of their cause had been abandoned hadn’t it? Look carefully under the surface and you’ll see the faith, coated in a layer of coruscating guitar and clothed in shiny leather, the ego may be at the wheel but his God is always around. But of course the story of betrayal and redemption is broader than one narrow religion isn’t it?

“Took a drive in the dirty rain, To palace where the wind knows your name, Under the trees, the river laughing at you and me.”

Another break-up song? Perhaps. For a few years I had this on wrap-around, misery on misery, all spun out in an operatic yet incisive melody. A tale of regret, bitterness, and longing. A bit like “The winner takes it all” only with real anguish and guitars.

What was next? In the old days it would have been “Side two”, and on my 30th commemorative vinyl it will be. Is it better? Who cares. This track, the opening single, announced the revolution in advance of the album, so I’d heard it before. I’m listening to it as I type, and it stills feels new. Lyrically outstanding, visually, when performed live, it has no peer in the history or future of music. The solo is the best minute of guitar work ever. Fact. 

It’s no secret.

Into the dancing one, the one that brought joy to the man whose break-up inspired so much of this album. Of course it’s great, but less of a favourite, there’s too much optimism in it for me. It’s great live though, for obvious and spiritual reasons.

To touch is to heal, to hurt is to steal, If you want to kiss the sky, better learn how to kneel.

Probably the weakest track, and it is all relative, deals with all the big issues. I even named my first blog after one of the key, plagiarised lines. To my knowledge it has rarely been reprised live after the 90s.

Sunrise like a nose-bleed, Your head hurts and you can't breathe.

 

Wonderfully the album takes a much-welcomed darker turn for the last three tracks. First up of the bleak trinity is one of my very favourites, illuminated by lasers in 2009, conflating the suit of lights with the sombre nature of the story held by the lyrics. There is a story that before this album, the band forbid the use of the word “Baby” in their lyrics. To underline the different direction, there are dozens of them in the album, not least the title of course. But this song had about half of them.

There is a silence that comes to a house

Where no one can sleep

I guess it's the price of love

I know it's not cheap

 Until the 2018 tour, the second of the three of these last group had never been performed live. For years fans and disciples clamoured for its inclusion, even recording snippets of the acoustic version used at a sound check, deposited  on YouTube, but not doing the song justice. In 2018 it was finally let out into the world, all the swirling, self-obsessive, introspective mess of it, the one we all carry around in our tortured souls. You don’t? Maybe just me then. Rumours were that the song had been just too personal up till that point, for the now soft, flabby and bloated singer to let rip. He needn’t have worried, the guitar solo was aptly described by my wonderful brother as the noise of the inside of his head.

No, nothing makes sense

Nothing seems to fit

I know you'd hit out

If you only knew who to hit

The story concludes with the darkest of them all. Unlike many bands they tend to conclude live performances with slower more introspective songs. This effectively brought the house down on the 1992-93 Tour, immortalised of course on video, now DVD sadly. The misery of love, the inevitability of break-ups, and the only option of the way-out. Or the compromise, the accommodation and disillusion. The perfect antidote to all the sickly, soppy love songs you’ve ever vomited to.

Love is drowning

In a deep well

All the secrets

And no one to tell

Take the money

Honey

Blindness

Imagine being only 31 and knowing your best work was behind you. For that is the truth, they had produced a work of art that could never, ever be bettered. Whereas you and I know our greatest achievements are still to come, and we get better and better with every passing working day, with our bright futures ahead of us, they were effectively finished as a creative force. Not that it matters, they leave the world richer, and the creators of the GOAT. But there must be a little bit of sadness there.

Not for me though. I was inspired, especially after I went to the live concert at Wembley. The old Wembley. Inspired by all this angst I started to turn my life around to become the person I am. It only took 30 years, but it started in 1991. It also started the country’s shift away from the Tories, Blair’s 1997 victory can be directly attributed to the rise in consciousness brought by this album. As can every good thing that ever happened to anyone. Jeez, if I was religious I might even say it was divine intervention.

So tomorrow, on Achtung Baby Day, cast your mind back to those times, when music really did change the world, challenge our thinking, and enable me to end up with a wonderful family, a successful career and a marvellous circle of friends. Celebrate the fact you have the opportunity to listen to this fantastic music. Immerse yourself in Zoo TV, the whole delicious and caustic irony of it. And don’t worry about that sad Bank Manager in Catford. He’ll be fine.

Decisions, decisions

 Recently I’ve been talking a lot about how people make decisions. Partly because I’ve been wrestling with one or two of my own. But mainly because I have spent much of the last month conducting psychometric debriefs with some of my colleagues. It’s an interesting exercise in and of itself, most people like talking about themselves, and when combined with a contextual knowledge and the wisdom that comes from staying alive for 57 years, it can be quite useful.

Immediately before both my latest bike rides I had to decide if I even wanted to go out on two wheels at all. On Friday it was hammering with rain, I was a bit down in the dumps and I did consider calling my friend and calling it off. But I was on annual leave from work, hadn’t been particularly active of late, and knew I needed to get used to riding the steel bike in preparation for the Winter. My heart said “no” but my head told me to shift my butt and get outside into the deluge. I was so glad I did of course, for the rain soon abated, my friend and I toddled over to a great cafe in Baltonsborough, and I felt suitably virtuous as I lolled on the sofa that evening.

This morning it was a similar story, although this time it was the prospect of the wind blowing me to kingdom come. The overnight gales had blown though at pace, leaving gallons of water in voluminous puddles on most of the roads, so whilst there was the prospect of a soaking, it was more the wall of wind resistance that was putting me off. But my friend today was keen to get out and faced with his determination I too battened down the hatches and sailed into the Autumn gales. 

Yet again I was rewarded with a thoroughly enjoyable morning, interesting navigation of the roads, or rivers as they seemed today, along with insightful conversation and an educational stop at the cafe at the Avalon Marshes Centre. A good decision, made on the basis of logic not emotion, which leaves me with positive feelings none the less.

I’ve also had a few interesting encounters with cars lately, necessitating more video uploads to Avon and Somerset Police. After my court appearance last December I thought I’d be unlikely to do much reporting in the future for two reasons. Partly because it’s one extra thing to do at the end of a ride, but also because I was becoming a bit immune to the feelings of danger all around me. I felt that if I was not actually scared, or in fear for my safety, then it was wrong to report it. But after attending a Bristol cycling campaign Zoom meeting, talking to a  local Twitter contact who uploads, as well as hearing from the Police themselves, I started to examine my values and logic around the whole issue.

Occasionally I do encounter an overtly aggressive and malicious piece of driving, but in truth it’s very rare. Even the Court case could be argued to be born of frustration rather than psychosis. The real danger out there on the roads comes from everyday carelessness and judgement, coupled with a complete lack of understanding of the potential harm that poor driving can cause. The truth is that people make decisions about their driving all the time, and because most people never experience catastrophic consequences, and don’t empathise with vulnerable road users they just don’t appreciate the constant danger their decisions deliver to others.

So I’m now reporting examples of dangerous and careless driving to the Police on a regular basis, and so far they have taken action against almost all of the drivers where I’ve submitted video evidence. Even where they haven’t they check for evidence of VED, insurance and MOT, so that too has an impact.

It’s interesting to see reactions to this on social media, words like “snitch”, “grass” and “vigilante” being thrown around by people clearly unhappy with increased accountability on their driving. My hope is that this will change and that effort and energy will instead be focussed on taking more care on the roads. As many are fond of pointing out, the great Peelian principle that established the Metropolitan Police in 1829:

“The police are the public and the public are the police."

Which brings me to my big decision. My Great-great-great Grandfather, Thomas Andrew Camroux was one of the very first Police officers to be appointed under that principle, and he made a very emotional decision to help a woman he found in the street, sick with cholera in 1832. It was a decision that cost him his life, and left my Great-great Grandfather an orphan. Thomas was descended from Daniel and Simon Camroux who I’ve mentioned before, and who decided to flee the  Cevennes in the 1680s in the face of religious persecution. 

I want to tell the story of my family and that will probably take the form of a book. I don’t have high expectations that anyone else will read it, although of course I hope to make it an entertaining and informative read. I just think it will be a fun thing to do, and I’ll enjoy the process of creating the book and telling the tales.

It’s going to take a while to get everything set up to get the project moving. But I have a lot of information and knowledge already, and the internet keeps throwing more at me. Critically, the decision I’ve finally made, and it was a very close-run and balanced one to make, will make it more likely that I finally get it off the ground. Sadly, I am not at liberty to tell you the circumstances of that decision. All I can say is that after examining  and understanding my values and emotions, an objective and logical approach prevailed.

A dangerous idea that almost makes sense

 I love music streaming, it has enabled me to visit so much more available, without the hassle of trailing round record shops, or buying albums on spec, like in the old days. I was recently trying to explain to my son how the small town I grew up in had 3-4 shops designated to selling only records. Well, first, he has little conception of what a record is, but the idea that everything ever recorded wasn’t instantly accessible was incomprehensible to him.

So tonight, I open up Spotify, find an algorithm-generated playlist, and the first two songs on it are the two that had bookended my first post about my illness, back in early February. It’s strange how these things happen, or maybe not.

“Grey November, I’ve been down since July”

How someone raised in a small town in Pennsylvania can write something so perfectly tailored for me is beyond me, but that’s music and art isn’t it? Regular readers (both of you, I’m grateful, really!) will be bored to tears of my lifelong obsession with U2, so we will have to see how things go with Taylor, but the early signs are good, and once she hits 40 I’m sure things will pick up even more. Her last two albums have been masterpieces in my view, some real melancholically-infused art, with just that small amount of optimism and hope to keep me clinging on.

I’ve had a small setback on the road to recovery, or rather the road to recovery is taking a slight detour into the marshes. Differential recovery has caused a problem with my right shoulder to add to the ongoing problems with the left. I could tell you all about it, but it’s tedious, a small setback, and we have a plan to get through the swamp and onto firmer ground. It’s just taking longer and the pace of recuperation has stalled. But I’ll get there.

In the meantime, we have October, and thanks to climate change, the trees are no longer stripped bare. But there is less light, Summer has gone, and the Spring seems a long way away. I never do well at this time of year, Lockdown 2 was horrible for me, far worse that 1 or 3, although as ever I caveat that with the usual comments about my relative good fortune. 

I’ve done my best to stop watching the news, it’s too depressing, and I’ve stopped posting on Facebook, mostly. Ironically I got 7/7 on the quiz on the BBC News website today for the first time ever, and I’ve been doing it for years. So it would seem there is no escape even if you try. Only one thing for it, I’ll have to run away.

On Sunday I’m going to attempt my first 200km ride since January, I’m counting no chickens so we will see how it goes. It’s a mark of real progress to even contemplate it, even if I can’t reach the top of the fridge or carry a suitcase to the car. But where there’s a dynamo and a power meter there’s a way. In any case, it’s the only antidote right now, that green hill not so far away.