On Your Bike...

As part of my no doubt doomed bid not to be forced to use the car for absolutely everything while out here in the sticks, the other half and I cycled up to our nearest GPs today to register with the practice. Rural cycling is not at all like London cycling. It’s much more pleasant, on the whole, or at least the hazards are different. There are fewer cars, but the cars that there are are either going fast or are quarry trucks. The road surface displays what I can only describe as a certain rustic charm, that is when you can see it through the cow poo. There are more bugs – and more hills, so any advice to cycle with my mouth shut just isn’t going to happen. And there’s the view, which is lovely, and distracting, and comprises mostly of even more hills up ahead, with your intended road snaking ominously through them. In fact, through a quirk of topography round here, every destination, including going back the way you came, appears to be uphill. And the hills themselves, which look like lovely gently rolling countryside from the front seat of a car, turn into the foothills of the Pyrennees once you’re on the bike. You know that profile they show of the route through the Alps during the mountain stages of the Tour de France? That was our ride to the doctors’ today exactly, only ours was more pointy. It helped when the other half gave my bike the once over and corrected the fact that the back brakes were basically on all the time while I was riding. You can get away with that sort of thing in flat-as-a-pancake Lambeth. Not so easy here in gravity land.

And I think there might be some hazards with the local drivers, once we actually encounter some. We were sitting outside the surgery cooling off from the ride, answering all the impertinent questions on their forms, when a doddery old gent passed us on the way in. Shortly afterwards, he doddered out again and into his car. I thought maybe a great-grandchild might have driven him there, or at least someone who seemed a bit less confused, but no, he was driving himself. And now he had to turn around. ‘It’s a tricky turn that,’ said a passing local dryly, as we watched him do a seventeen-point turn around the local mini-roundabout. ‘Indeed,’ we said and waited until he was well on his way before getting back on our bikes. Still, at least he wasn’t reading his book…

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