Something to Declare by Cyclist

Chapter 36

This is the last one for a few days. I am off to dance and play and drink ALE.

What’s to tell about the Summer? It became a nice steady routine as we counted down to August 21st. Each weekend, Geoff would be off doing some monstrous distance, and if I was off shift I would pitch up somewhere on route. If there was a festival on, Geoff would try and find an audax or a perm* nearby and there we would be, the Woodruff clan, tired and shagged out (oops, Dead Parrot, I promised) after a long dancing and playing session, sitting around at 2 am waiting to serve him pasta and rice pudding. What really pleased me were the festival organisers; almost to a woman/man they understood what was going on and let him in without a ticket.

I used up a lot of my leave to get extra time off at weekends. With no Summer holiday really possible due to PBP, I made the most of what I could get off. Often, would end up in the strangest of places. Stainsby Festival, for example, in a field looking across to Hardwick Hall, and a long drag up from the scruffy town of Chesterfield, overlooked, of all things, the M1 Motorway, which seemed to be humming along to the music with the sound of the car tyres.

I even got chatted up a few times by some very nice men, as well as by some consummate tossers, but it all added to my still-growing confidence and confirmation in my new role. Work continued along the same route, with the only limitation placed on me being that of not being allowed to do searches of person. The other girls had moved from an often hostile stance to a viciously protective one after the hen night, and then just eased into banality. In my circumstances, that was wonderful. Even Vanessa seemed to be forgetting my origins, ether tactfully or because I was just seen as another female Officer, which was quite a leap of perception for such a fan of Greer.

Geoff was pushing me to ride along with him on something a little further than the Friday Night Ride to the Coast we did once from Hyde Park out to Bognor, and I agreed to do the Dun Run that July with him. The Dunwich Dynamo is an overnight event run from Hackney in East London to the coastal village of Dunwich in Suffolk, 120 miles away and conveniently near the Adnams brewery in Southwold. Dunwich was a major town in the Middle Ages, till a Great Storm (it needs the capitals) washed most of it away in a night. Now, as the cliffs erode back, graves are exposed one by one and drop out into the open air like some old horror film.

I found an internet group who were organising a coach back to London with a lorry to carry bikes, and booked my place. The alternative would have been to carry full camping gear for 120 miles on the tourer….not this time. Geoff, of course, intended to ride home. So, one Saturday evening in July we made our way out by train and crowded metropolitan street to London Fields, where we took on some carbohydrates and plenty of liquid (from a pub) and wandered round the park looking at all sorts of bikes, tandems, trikes as well as all sorts of people, from crusties to lycra-clad racing snakes. People started drifting away at about eight o’clock, as the slower or less confident took an early bite at the route. I slipped away to the ladies’ and smeared a certain babies’ nappy** rash cream all over my rear, collected Geoff and headed North-East.

The first part of the ride is through East London, which a climbing guide book would call “interesting”, or perhaps “amusing”, which are both synonyms for terrifying. Clapton is not a place I would ever want to live, and here we were riding through it on a Saturday evening. Heads down, ignore the pedestrians, dodge the drivers, swear at the cabbies….we were still in a solid mass of bikes, so it didn’t feel quite as bad as it could have done.

Out of London and into Epping Forest, and the Barry Boys were out in their tiny underpowered cars with the wide wheels and oversize exhaust pipes, sitting outside garishly lit pubs that all seemed to be re-enacting the hen party. It was darkening now, and starting to get cooler. Both Geoff and I had our Carradice saddle bags, with extra clothes, batteries and food, and I slipped on a light top against the chill as we rode through what were now small villages and the odd dormitory town. I had read of the ribbon of light, and here it was, a snake of red flashing rear lights leading us on to the coast.

And then the first of what I had been looking around for, the small glass jars every so often along the side of the road, each with a little candle burning inside. You are not lost, you are not alone, here in a tunnel of blinking and flickering light with the land around invisible in the gloom.

There were feeding stations, church halls and similar, where Geoff and I clocked around in our shoes trying not to blink too much in the sudden burst of brightness, and to avoid eating too much or too little. Getting back out into an astonishingly cold night was hard, but on with a hat and the long gloves, taking a while for the body to accept that it still has miles to go.

We were eventually in Suffolk. It may be flat, but there were watercourses across the route and each demanded a steep but short little climb that broke our rhythm and left us unsettled, and then another, and another. The horizon was glowing, and light was slowly leaching greyly into the world. Soon I could read the road signs. There was a bit of a head wind and, without a word, for I at least was beyond that, we settled into a miniature chain gang, taking turns at the front to take its bite and give the other a rest. There were strangers riding with us again, people whose faces we were only now seeing, and they started taking their own turns at pulling us along.

Single digits on the road signs, and the pace was getting quick. There were now many doing the odd head shake where a drop of sweat hangs irritatingly off the end of the nose and you can’t spare a hand to wipe it away, and then we were in Dunwich

There s a car park, and a shingle beach, and a salty meadow heading off towards Southwold and Adnams. It was six o’clock n the morning. Various support vehicles from friends had turned up, and there looked like a huge group in club shirts surrounding a tiny brunette with an impressive array of food. Next year, we set Jan and Kelly the job, was our thought, but this year we made the best of it and attempted to eat the café out of food.

One tradition is apparently the swim, and I was determined I was going public in my new costume. I had already found, post-nads, that I could now tuck Mr Floppy away so as to look reasonably normal down there. I changed in the ladies, ran over the shingle in the sandals I had packed and foolishly dived headfirst into a wave.

I thought my heart was going to stop, it was unbelievably cold. At first. As I swam frantically, breathing like a train, the shock eased and I began to enjoy the surge and lift of the waves, as well as the simple pleasure of no longer having my arse welded to a small piece of unsprung leather. Others were swimming, some running in wearing their cycling clothes, some not.

By that, I mean “not wearing their cycling clothes” and by that I mean “anything at all”

There is something consummately absurd about a running naked man, the way it flops and shakes, slaps and bangs, and I was forced to avert my eyes to stifle a fit of the giggles. In the end, I had to get out as I was losing feeling in my extremities, and Geoff had to head back. I dried off and piled on all my warm stuff, we packed my bike, I kissed him goodbye and I settled into my seat for the journey back. I would have time to sleep for a bit then a pig out meal of Nice Things when he arrived, a bottle of wine ,a bath together (if he wasn’t already asleep) and then into our bed.

Bliss.

*perm: permanent, a set route for an audax ride. Riders present timed evidence for control points on the way, such as timed and dated receipts, and they can be ridden at any time rather than as part of an event

** nappy: diaper.