My Eighth Week as a Budding Author

Anyone who read last week’s list of dismal failings will know that week eight had a hell of a lot to live up to if the previous week’s investments were to bear fruit. This week had a single objective, to ride a long and tricky route that as far as I am aware has not been placed firmly upon the cycling map.

The Greenwich Meridian.

For those of you who were as bored and inattentive as I was in geography lessons, here’s a quick recap. The Greenwich (or Prime) Meridian is the line of zero longitude from which other lines of longitude are measured. It runs from the north to south poles and luckily for me spends a short period of time striding boldly through England. I’d always thought it would make a great cycle route, much more ambitious than a simple coast to coast as it heads right through the centre of London due to the fact that it was derived from the position of the Royal Observatory at Greenwich.

Helen and the kids were roped into this plan and we decided to stage an attempt at half term, me riding the bike, the family looking on sympathetically from the camper van. On Saturday we drove to Newhaven and stayed on what I can only politely describe as the biggest shit hole of a campsite ever. It was so bad that we did the washing up in their sink, and then took everything back to the van for a good going over with anti-bacterial surface wipes. Drinking water was dispensed from blue hoses that I am convinced were connected straight to the gutters and we made the mistake of plugging our fridge into the mains, which tripped the entire site’s electricity supply.

So, I was pretty happy to leave the place at 7am on Sunday on my bike for a short trip over to Peacehaven to begin the ride. As has become customary, I couldn’t find the Meridian monument at the cliff top. It took a couple of miles of riding up and down the dodgy cliff path to eventually locate it and take a picture. I then pedaled north following a route that stuck as close as possible to the true line of zero degrees, only deviating for motorways or lack of roads.

Within five miles my careful planning of the previous week had unravelled completely. Using Google Earth I had found a small tarmac road that followed the line out of Peacehaven, this looked totally rideable and even had cars on it, so it went into the plan. The problem is that Google had imaged this road in summer, I was riding it in winter when it was raining. Cyclocross riders would have got off and walked it. The track would be well described as “have a little bit of the Somme about it” and after I’d finally negotiated the last crater and made it to tarmac road the new Ti road bike was beautifully decorated in brown.

Luckily the next fifty miles up to London passed without incident and as I summited the North Downs at Titsey I met a set of roadies having a go at timing themselves up Titsey Hill, a classic and steep hill climb. My cheery “Hello” was met with looks of hatred mixed with bits of lung, they weren’t very talkative for some reason so I left them to it and went on to do battle with the centre of London.

My urban route planning was spot on all the way up to the Greenwich foot tunnel and I actually really enjoyed hacking through the suburbs, shouting at cars and inventing new obscene finger gestures for the drivers who thought Sunday was a good day to “door” a passing cyclist. I now have utmost respect for those riders who do this every day through the rush hour as I found it challenging enough on a quiet Sunday. The worst offenders appeared to be the buses whose drivers have been fitted with a special set of contact lenses that render cyclists invisible. I lost count of the number of times they calmly attempted to kill me, the only strategy for survival is to assume that without exception they mean to harm you.

I even had a tussle with a mountain biker. A “dude” pulled up next to me on a full suspension rig at a set of lights at the bottom of the hill. He did not return my “Hello” at all, but shot off at speed on green. Sadly his legs and gears failed him and I casually span past halfway up the hill with a further doff of the helmet. This went on for miles, he’d catch me at the lights, stare straight ahead, sprint on green then enter lactic threshold as I’d amble past and practice my sardonic yet brotherly smile. To be honest I felt bad for him as I was pretty shagged out and not really trying, his problem was that he was genuinely unfit and had forgotten to lock out his 160mm forks. Eventually I got to a traffic light and sat there on my own, he’d disappeared and I mourned his cheery banter.

The plan was to cross the river at the Greenwich Foot Tunnel, but like the vast majority of British infrastructure, it was broken and so I had to take a diversion through the Rotherhithe road tunnel. I don’t recommend this for cyclists, quite simply because it does not contain any oxygen. The next few miles were equally fraught as I dashed from cycle path to street to bridge to street to path to shopping mall, to back out of shopping mall to street to try and get past the A13 and on to Walthamstove.

In short, I made it. Nearly thirty miles of really hectic London riding without a rest. I was completely shagged out. At around about 3pm I dragged my sorry self onto a campsite in Hertford with 105 miles in the legs. I then had to wash the bike in near sub zero conditions at which point Helen took this photo.

I look about three hundred and fifty years old in it. The picture really does convey the utter shaggedoutness that I was feeling at this point. Normally I look like one of Take That so you can clearly see the damage the ride and cold water had done.

On Monday I got up even earlier and left the campsite with the dawn chorus in full swing. Monday’s ride was another epic of 120 miles all the way up to Boston. However, it benefitted from a characteristic that the day before was sadly lacking. Flatness.

The route headed north over the fens and once past Royston was completely and utterly flat. In fact I’ve never ridden flatness like it, seeing as I come from Wiltshire and even the flat bits have hills. My legs were pretty wasted after the day before but even the smallest of efforts saw the GPS shouting 18mph. So you’d think the day was set to be pretty easy, well it was until I tangled with the A14.

I cannot for the life of me think what moment of madness caused me to plot a three mile section on the A14, a dual carriageway. However, the “utter utter” madness was in carrying on down the slip road into the maelstrom, just to see if it would get better later on. The simplest and most polite description of the next few miles is that I completely and utterly shat myself. Lorries thundered past blasting their horns, cars came within inches of me at eighty miles an hour their drivers glued to their iPhones. I groveled my way along the hard shoulder nearly disappearing into bushes in a vain attempt to hide from the traffic, it was hell.

Luckily a B road saved me and a short diversion saw me back on route and into country lanes again. The rest of the ride chuntered on across the fens without major incident. I spotted a few windmills, nearly rode into some fecking huge ditches and wondered where all of the cars had gone. It was my longest day in the saddle this year, the mileage for the day stopped the clock at 122.

Day three was a mere sprint of fifty miles up to Cleethorpes. The roads started flat but went sharply upwards after twenty miles. This was a bit of a shock after nearly ninety miles of flat but strangely I enjoyed a bit of a tussle with gravity it made a refreshing change from roads that actually did go from A to B in as short a distance as possible.

The ride finished as it had started, nearly thirty minutes riding up and down the promenade looking for the Meridian marker. Eventually I found it and claimed the Greenwich Meridian as “ridden”.

Now, the pedants amongst you will be saying “Hang on a minute Dave, there’s still a little more land to go to truly finish the job, what about the bit to the right of Hull?”. Well, I spent some time looking at this section at it suffers from two issues; it’s pointless, and it’s grim. The ride to get to these final few miles is a huge diversion and includes a traverse of Grimsby and then Hull. My view is that the spirit of the ride is a straight line North sticking as close to the Meridian as possible. If there were a Humber ferry, I’d add the last bit in, but for the moment the Meridian ride ends at Cleethorpes.

So with the ride done, I spent the rest of the week with my wonderful family who had supported me over the three days of riding. We travelled about in the van, went to the odd castle, did a bit of Go Ape, drank some wine, cooked in a Remoska and smelled quite a lot after a lax hygiene regime.

I’ve got a big writing week next ahead of me now, with six chapters that need to be brought properly to life. The week after I’m doing something really exciting photography wise, but you’ll have to wait and see for that one ;-) 

Dave

25th February 2011

WEEK NINE >>>>>