Author: chrisadmin

And today in 2017 in London has been a very cold, grey day, finishing with some rain.  In more personal terms it’s been mostly work on a fascinating paper I’m co-writing with two colleagues from former iron curtain countries.  The paper looks at psychometric data from one particular former communist country, Albania, comparing it with data from the same questionnaire also in non-clinical samples from Germany and the USA.  Albania had spectacularly awful and dictatorial communist era under Enver Hoxha, and its earlier history included nearly 500 years of Ottoman occupation to 1911 and then a 20th Century history which, even by Balkan standards, was spectacularly troubled.  It’s a fun paper to co-write but challenging: what rights do I have, with my personally priviledged history, and my country’s pretty priviledged history, to want to put a slightly different spin on some things my colleagues write from their own and their families’ and friends’ personal experiences?  (Oh, it’s one of the many countries in the world where the UK’s historical rôle was pretty grim and slimey.  One magnificent exception being the extraordinary Edith Durham (1863-1944) who is so famous there my colleague went to school at the Edith Durham school in Tirana.)  One interesting challenge is that it’s one of those papers where perhaps we all three care a bit too much and that can make it hard to write in a way that will be acceptable for an academic journal.  We’re getting there.

That’s all very different from what I was doing a year ago!

A year ago it was another beautiful sunny day and I got up and explored the cathedral at Beauvais.  I thought I had seen it before but I really don’t think I had.  It is a very odd shape as it’s essentially unfinished and a mix of gloriously ambitious middle to late gothic with some very plain earlier bits.  The sun was so strong many of my ‘photos were burned or flared out and I did question my decision to leave a good camera at home and rely on my ‘phone camera.  Some of the shots are OK but again I’ll try to find a way to do them more justice than just pasting some in here. The interior of the cathedral had a number of absolutely massive wooden internal bracing constructions clearly trying to prevent potentially catastrophic structural failure.

With some difficulty I eventually tore myself away and pointed Toto-to-be southwards aiming for Giverny and thinking I could see the Monet collection there.  This was not a good day cycling as it was a day when Google maps really messed me around.  I look at the GPX trail with its spikes of completely wasted cycling and remember ending up in a completely impassable farm field and, less well, some other lost kilometers and time.  I got to Giverny to find that this time there really was no room at the inn, though it took some time to establish that.  I don’t really understand how a hotel can be unsure whether it’s got room or not but that was what I hit: twice!

Eventually I realised I had two options: to cycle some way in one direction to the nearest camp site, or a similar distance in the other direction where there might be hotel or B&B space.  The camp site got dialled first and had space so, very tired now, with a good 75km already done on a hot day, and not yet really used to this rhythm, the warmth, the weight on the bike etc., I set off to find it.

Of course, that involved a couple more Google maps detours I really could have done without.  Then to cap that, the final few km. to the campsite were on a very potholed rough road where my ‘phone bounced off the bike without me realising it until a good kilometer later.  Fortunately I found it by retracing my steps.  Then the final bit of road to the camp site was absolutely lethal gravel track on which I managed to put the bike over when I failed to control a skid.  Why the skid you ask?  Just from turning a very slight angle to avoid a pothole.  I arrived very, very tired and a bit grazed to find the only really unfriendly and pretty horrid camp site of the trip, and to be told they no longer had any food on site, not what it had said on Google, and that I would probably have to go right back to Giverny to get anything.  Running that gravel gauntlet twice to do that: no way!

Oh and in all that, I hadn’t had time to see the Monet.  I promised myself I would come back another time, stay in the nice looking hotel near it, and savour it all at leisure.  I went off to sleep easily despite a grumbling stomach: physical tiredness does really help with any insomniac challenges.  Wow, two days a year apart with great satisfactions but also significant challenges but so, so different!  Oh boy, I have been a lucky man really.  Onward!

 

… and today (in 2017) started with me using up a few hours sleuthing WordPress plugins that handle maps.  Despite trying several, including one that clearly gets used by thousands of people to embed active maps from Google maps with routes and the locations of photos on them I hit only blanks.

Literally blanks: no damn luck at all, the place where the map should have been in yesterday’s post remained determinedly blank, varying only in whether it had a border round it or not, whatever I tried.  To add insult to injury, nothing even produced useful error messages and my attempts to follow debugging instructions on the web led nowhere.  Ah well, when I finally put that aside, (I hate to be beaten by an IT challenge) I did manage to finish my marking commitments, marking the near end of my relationship with Roehampton University, and I did get started on a final redraft of a paper. Meanwhile the England vs. South Africa test match commentary provided a bit of auditory background … which I’d never have listened to cycling in France or Spain!  And now here I am, trying to connect with last year.

6/8/16 started with me packing up the tent and a short cycle along the Somme into the centre of Amiens to find the cathedral.  Many years ago, probably 1979, I had cycled with my then girlfriend from Amiens round a necklace of gothic cathedrals that surroud Paris.  I think we had taken a train to Amiens and then cycled from there to Noyon, Soissons, Laon and Rheims before getting a train back to London.  That trip had had many glorious times and was some of the inspiration for this trip so it was a bit of a personal history marker to return to Amiens cathedral and one shock was how poorly I remembered it.  That was despite having visited it at least once more over the intervening years.  The last time was about 23 years ago.

There were things that came back and remembering that it is a glorious pile was undoubtedly right.  I could paste in lots of ‘photos here as I must have spent quite a few hours in the cathedral just doing the gawping, ‘phone camera pointing, tourist thing.  That had my own personal overlay of trying to remember my earlier visits.  However, I’m not going to do that today as I was a bit shocked yesterday by how bad the ‘photos I pasted in here looked so I want to do a bit more work on yet another aspect of WordPress technology so I can get things in formats that do their subjects more justice.  The system I used to start the photos section of the pelerinage web site last year worked OK though all I got to mount there back then was my (large) collection of ‘photos of Chartres. What I used for that allowed anyone browsing to see bigger copies of the ‘photos, but that system won’t embed here in blog posts.  More sleuthing to do.  No wonder I didn’t get the site or the blog anywhere near where I wanted it to be while I was also doing each day’s cycling, ho hum, and also coping with finding working internet and later with the malfunctioning keyboard! Interesting how much technology there is to sort out to do this travel blogging game well.

One technological trick I have learned in the last few days is to copy manually the latitude and longitude from the EXIF data in a ‘photo and paste that into Google maps. Something like this “49 42 34.2N 2 10 18.0E” works without the °, ‘ and ” units, which saves time.  That trick confirmed that this:

was lunch taken right next to the cathedral in Amiens and the EXIF data also told me that it was taken at 13.23.  That was leaving most of the day’s 70km still to do with nowhere booked to stay in Beauvais, camp site or other, assuming I made it there.  I think that explains that I have only two ‘photos from the journey in between.  Both are of a nice enough little church in the little town of Monsures.

It was a sunny day again: blue skies with lots of cumulus and light winds both making sure I didn’t fry.  I don’t remember the journey that well.  I think it was a day of frustration with my failure to get technology to do what I wanted, not unlike today.  Back then I was rueing not having better ways to find a good cycling route ahead.  I thought, I think rightly with hindsight, that I spent a lot of time failing to find the best ways to avoid (a) horrible busy roads with too many lorries going fast, (b) unnecessary detours and (c) unnecessary climbing.  The route I took doesn’t look too mad when I look at it in a GPX editor now but I think some of the road surfaces were pretty poor as I found myself unable to judge road quality from Google maps colour coding (you can’t: it’s hopeless) and also pretty poor at working out compromises between crows-flight directness versus rolling up and down the hills too much.

By the time I made into Beauvais it was pushing 19.00 and I found no camp site and that most cheap hotels I called or visited were full.  I was quite relieved when I think my fourth option turned out to have a very small room, with use of shared shower and loo on the landing.  The colour scheme was quite something.

However, Toto-to-be was happy enough locked up there on the ground floor below me, I think to that radiator.  I too was happy and hugely relieved to have somewhere to sleep for myself.  I went out to find a meal and got a beautiful one in the restaurant d’antan.  Hm, Google maps seems to have that as “Le palais bleu” with only ancient reviews, one of which says it had been renamed “Le palais d’antan”.  It was upmarket for me but they seemed unphased by a single diner in a clean but crumpled tee shirt and lycra cycling shorts.  It was just beside the cathedral, the food was beautiful and I was amused to be in somewhere “d’antan” as one of my mother’s long time favourite poems is the “Ballade des dames du temps jadis” or ballad of the ladies of times gone by (blame me for that approximation).  Here, from wikipedia it is:

Dictes moy où, n’en quel pays, Est Flora, la belle Romaine ; Archipiada, né Thaïs, Qui fut sa cousine germaine; Echo, parlant quand bruyt on maine Dessus rivière ou sus estan, Qui beauté eut trop plus qu’humaine? Mais où sont les neiges d’antan! Où est la très sage Heloïs, Pour qui fut chastré et puis moyne Pierre Esbaillart à Sainct-Denys? Pour son amour eut cest essoyne. Semblablement, où est la royne Qui commanda que Buridan Fust jetté en ung sac en Seine? Mais où sont les neiges d’antan! La royne Blanche comme ung lys, Qui chantoit à voix de sereine; Berthe au grand pied, Bietris, Allys; Harembourges qui tint le Mayne, Et Jehanne, la bonne Lorraine, Qu’Anglois bruslerent à Rouen; Où sont-ilz, Vierge souveraine ? Mais où sont les neiges d’antan! Prince, n’enquerez de sepmaine Où elles sont, ne de cest an, Qu’à ce refrain ne vous remaine: Mais où sont les neiges d’antan!

Tell me where, in which country Is Flora, the beautiful Roman; Archipiada (Alcibiades?), born Thaïs Who was her first cousin; Echo, speaking when one makes noise Over river or on pond, Who had a beauty too much more than human? Oh, where are the snows of yesteryear! Where is the very wise Heloise, For whom was castrated, and then (made) a monk, Pierre Esbaillart (Abelard) in Saint-Denis? For his love he suffered this sentence. Similarly, where is the Queen (Marguerite de Bourgogne) Who ordered that Buridan Were thrown in a sack into the Seine? Oh, where are the snows of yesteryear! The queen Blanche (white) as a lily (Blanche de Castille) Who sang with a Siren’s voice; Bertha of the Big Foot, Beatrix, Aelis; Erembourge who ruled over the Maine, And Joan (Joan of Arc), the good (woman from) Lorraine Whom the English burned in Rouen; Where are they, oh sovereign Virgin? Oh, where are the snows of yesteryear! Prince, do not ask me in the whole week Where they are – neither in this whole year, Lest I bring you back to this refrain: Oh, where are the snows of yesteryear!

See  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballade_des_dames_du_temps_jadis.  As it appears to have been written about 1461 I think no copyright issues are going to catch me up.

Mum has long used the refrain of “Mais où sont les neiges d’antan!” as a somewhat self-mocking plaint when she is nostalgic for times long gone.  She’s not alone in having loved the poem: have a look at the frankly stunning list of references to it, particularly to that refrain, in the wikipedia page.  Who collects these pearls to throw before internet skimming swine such as myself, capitalising on their work?! Well, hooray for them, it doesn’t beat cycling, but a quick tour of wikipedia rarely fails both to inform me and delight me.

On that note, and through it, encouraged to go on wrestling with technology tomorrow, I will stop for another night.  It’s a funny thing a virtual pilgrimage!

 

I am not sure if this is going to work, let’s see.  Day four was Montreuil to Amiens and I’m just going to paste in ‘photos from the day and see if my newly installed WordPress plugin will map them.  Montreuil is a lovely walled medieval town.  I’d checked into what was to be one of my more upmarket hotels just to the left out of shot if you follow the road in the shot below.  This gives a nice flavour of the town.

And this is the best external profile of the Abbey de St. Saulve.

And this is the worst: great, squat defensive monastic architecture but you can almost hear the building saying “you won’t use that shot in the promotional material will you, it’s not my best side”!

The inside is beautiful with lots of the early medieval stone carving that I love.  Here’s the roof of the nave.

And here’s just one of the capitals.  Definitely my sort of architectural art.

Hm, I must learn how to align ‘photos in posts.  I’m not so wild about saints’ tibias in silver settings but in case you go for that sort of thing, here it is.

And then Toto and I were off, first across huge fields with their modern wind turbine crops as well as the evidence that they still produce more conventional harvests.  There was a definite but easy cross wind on warm day that seemed just right for me and the turbines which were turning at a good steady rate.

And here’s the then unnamed Toto and the Garmin which was recording the route we took.  (I have no idea why I took this then):

And then I was again, as with the Great Stour, following a river slowly pulling nearer to Amiens and seeing lovely sights along the way.  That started, pretty well immediately I hit the river, with this rather grand ruined house.

And then this barge.  I imagine they would have been an important mode of bulk transportation well into the 20th Century.

Then there was this memorial to WWII.  The inscription says that it’s a propellor from a Lancaster (“ND 689 KMO”) and that it crashed on the 20th of May 1944 and “emerged”, I assume was dredged up from the river, on the 12th of September 1998.  I don’t know if the implication is that the thing below is a bomb from the plane.

And this was the earliest hydro-electric power station I’ve ever seen.  The battered sign was full of information.  It started generating electricity for the neighbouring town in 1903 and supplied another one from 1912 and was only decommissioned in 1974.

And finally, quite tired by then, I made it to Amiens town campsite where the pitches had their own power and water.

And a bit later I got a lovely sunset, not well caught by this but it’ll do.

And is this the map?

[wpgmza id="1"]

Ouch. That really, really didn’t work did it?!   In fact, it’s a pretty fine example of how things in WordPress can sometimes go very, very wrong.  Apart from just having a rather odd looking bit of code that is supposed to generate the map, it actually all looks reasonable in the editor.

OK.  I’ve got some more sleuthing to do but in the present day I must stop!

It really is quite an odd feeling revisiting such a once in a lifetime adventure a year on.  As with the adventure itself, it’s proving quite unpredictable: both lovely and a bit unsettling.

Day three a year ago was Calais to Montreuil and the first full day out of the UK.  It was quite a challenge with cool to cold headwinds and a constant roll up and down of little hills as I first headed off down the minor roads near the coast.  By late morning I decided there were no real gains in terms of views, as the sea was out of sight to my right, and I opted to turn sharply inland before hooking back onto a more major but still unthreatening road south.  I think this was the day that I started to be aware that I was going to need quite a lot of food (though the perhaps the pound shop chocolate was really the first acknowledgement of that).  That was a bit of a challenge as I had been more oriented to thinking of losing weight, or trying to avoid gaining it, for a few years by then.

I can remember two grub stops, one at a large hypermarket in the middle of nowhere where I stocked up with food, and the other in a tiny hamlet whose name I’d lost.  However, coming to 2017 and by the technlogical miracle that GPS in my ‘phone stamped the EXIF data in my ‘photos with latitude and longitude, and the complementary miracle that I can just type those into Google maps and, hey presto, I find that the lovely little church which persuaded me to stop and munch some more was at Le Wast

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Another nice trick means I can just paste that information in here so you can look at the location on Google maps if that appeals to you. I can see I am going to have to do some more sleuthing to get better at handling these images and going back to mapping things.

But what about today?   I think I can’t do this revisiting to the exclusion of the present day and perhaps I really need to bounce back and forward between last year and this to start to link the two into a more coordinated and fertile meld.  It helps that today was a bit of a pilgrimage day and it involved a bit of cycling too though only a 19.8km round trip from home to the British Museum.

This was another of my trips with my daughter.  I had persuaded her that she really should see the amazing exhibition of Hokusai’s work before it finishes Sunday week (13/8/17).  This was my visit and each time I’ve been it been absolutely packed, you crawl around in a long queue moving very, very slowly as everyone, or pretty much everyone, is locked into the amazing prints and paintings.  It’s that packed despite access for non-members, who are paying quite a lot (£12) to get in, being rationed to keep it from being unbearable.  It makes having paid for family membership at the BM a joy as we can just walk in and join the tail of the queue.

I’m not sure I’ve ever found myself getting round an exhibition so slowly, and in such a millipede of fellow gawpers.  Oddly it brings back memories from young teenage years in the very same museum going to the famous Tutankhamun exhibition (hm, bit of sleuthing: 1972, so I was 15).

I had warned daughter of the queue and she’d worried that she might kill someone as, like me, she doesn’t like people in her personal space nor being constrained by a crowd in what she can do.  I probably shouldn’t have worried but I was relieved that she was completely engrossed.  I guess we found ourselves talking about probably over 80% of the exhibits as we went around, mostly alongside each other.  Hokusai has a very high and sacred position in my odd pantheon of humans who have fundamentally changed my way of seeing and experiencing the world and its possibilities.  I think, perhaps hence the recollection of Tutankhamun, that probably goes back to around that time, perhaps earlier.  I know I went to a Ukiyoe exhibition (BM again I’m pretty sure) with my father at some point in my teens or student years, but I think that was bit later.

This huge exhibition seemed very well curated to me and I learned a lot I hadn’t known about my hero.  One thing was how often he had changed his name, ending up with Gakyo Rojin: “old man, crazy to paint” (and daughter suggests I should now be dubbed “old man, crazy to cycle”!)  I also learned for the first time just how deeply his particular Buddhist faith had influenced him and that a part of it was, or became, a deep belief that all things, animate and inanimate, have a spiritual meaning and connectedness. I wonder if something of that has always communicated to me from his works.  As I did a lot on the ride a year ago, I am pondering exactly what that means to me but boy it does hit a chord for me.  That’s something I was able to immerse myself in on the ride last year but something I find harder to touch and hold in the pressures and mundane artificialities that so easily become my life day to day when I don’t grasp opportunities as we did today.

If you can, and can bear the queue and have some hours in London between now and Sunday week: I’d recommend the exhibition.  Ouch, sold out: if you can afford it, buying BM membership will get you in, I honestly think it would be worth the money but clearly I’m hopelessly enamoured of Hokusai and his work.  If that’s not on, I can also recommend pointing a bike towards Santiago de Compostella, or any other reasonably distant, transcendent, target, or starting to plan that.  Electric bikes are fine by the way!

Wow, I have just looked over the “pelerinage” site, at my ‘photos and my route tracking and realised just how little I mounted.  OK, work to be done!

Hm, ain’t that always the way?  One very important part of the ride was stepping out of that framework and being able to say either “No there isn’t!” or “Yes there is: just turn the pedals and keep Toto heading roughly south!”.  To be honest, I never entirely stopped thinking there was work other than pedalling to be done.  Right from day one I was telling myself there was a site and blog to create/write (and how little of that I achieved!)  From about day three I continued to answer many work related Emails. That was a bit easier than it might have been as I no longer had a clinical Email address.  Assuming that the Out-of-Office message I had set the week before before dashing across the road to my leaving do (see One year on and where am I?!) worked, then that told people I had left and referred them to sensible others.  Other Email addresses I had also had OoO messages saying I was off on this pilgrimage, not working, and that I was unlikely to answer Emails.  In fact, I answered a fair few.  I think I helped finish at least one grant application and worked on some paper submissions.  I’d be quite amused to look at the sent folder for the period to see what I did do.

But day two was a new world.  I had had my first night in my little tent with food and beer, and tiredness and satisfaction, despite some set backs, perhaps because of some set backs, all helping me sleep.  I know I slept very well.  I woke feeling great, a bit to my surprise and I was amused to rise easily to an early alarm (while my ‘phone still had some battery).  I remember padding across wet grass in bare feet with a towel wrapped round my waist to shower and scrub my teeth.  I remember admiring the fixed teepees in the camp site and saying a warm good morning to some others, then I packed the tent up, which proved fairly easy, another relief, and off I went.

I remember the run in into Canterbury went through a lovely long phase following the river, “The Great Stour” I see is its proper name.  It’s great in aesthetic terms but in volume, width, grandeur, that’s a faintly strange name as it’s not a very big river at all.  Perhaps my scales are a bit distorted by living a few miles from the Thames!  As ever when you follow a mature river you are sweeping a fairly direct but generally sweeping set of curves as it meanders along and across its near flat flood plain, and that was certainly the case with the Great Stour.  I hoped to see kingfishers but didn’t, but there was a heron and the sun was out and the a true sky blue with lots of very white cumulus and not threatening any rain at all.  The Constable paintings of the cathedral came to mind long before I got a sight of the steeple.

Then the wonders of the cathedral.  I think I have seen it before but I struggle to think when.  Perhaps I really hadn’t.  Some things felt familiar, mostly the exterior and I really do wonder if that was from paintings and ‘photos.  It was truly glorious: it’s a town in itself really as so many of the great medieval cathedrals are with their accretions of buildings sort of flanking them and creating a barrier territory between the gloriously sacred and the boondocks around where the laity lived and working.  There’s a buffer or border zone of dwellings and offices for monks, nuns or others with sacred offices.  For me it was absolutely crowned by seeing that the cathedral had a nesting pair of peregrines on the main steeple.  My new binoculars, bought specially for the trip, came into play for the first time for them and all the gargoyles and other features up on high, inside and out.

In the town I managed to find a cheap pair of glasses to replace my expensive ones which had chosen, not for the first time, to snap with zero provocation somewhere on the downs the day before.  I had picked them up to read the map on the tablet and one of the arms had simply broken off in my hand, seemingly mocking me with the challenge of balancing them on my great big nose and just one of my big flappy ears if I wanted to be able to read anything.  Clearly planning to make the journey all the more interesting.  I was greatly amused and felt a rather vengeful satisfaction that two pounds bought their replacement (in a “pound shop” as I remember it: something nominally or arithmetically awry there but I wasn’t complaining!)  I think that was somewhere between 1 and 2% of the cost of the ones those were replacing!  I also stocked up with chocolate there (also more than a pound but absurdly cheap).  Then, despite a real urge to stay and soak up the cathedral until it went dark, I headed off for Dover.

Coming into the docks in Dover I joined another cyclist, probably a year or two older than me and more in denim/cotton than lycra.  He turned out to be Dutch and finishing a six week solitary camping and cycling trip around the UK which had been great apparently, though it had rained every single day!  He was impressive but made me feel a bit feeble.  He had a hub dynamo, like me, but also a solar panel on his bike and he said that he’d needed both to keep his old ‘phone working.  He said that the solar panel had worked usefully despite the grey weather.  As by now I had used up most of the power in my various batteries and discovered that he was quite right that the dynamo hub alone wasn’t going to charge everything, I took note.

And that really came back to bite me in Calais that evening as it went dark and Google maps first led me miles, OK, kilometres, away from my hotel, which was really very near the dock … and then in quick succession the tablet, computer and ‘phone all gave up on me. That left me exercising my very poor French asking for a hotel, way away from it, in by now a rather cold, dank, late evening.  It was clear that the trip was going to have its ups and downs!  I found it in the end and the big bouncer on the door let me despite the pre-paid automatic entry system failing.

I must stop.  I’ll add some of the ‘photos tomorrow.  Always work to be done eh?!

I hope this is going to be an interesting adventure to revisit the ride, day by day, one year on.

One immediate shock looking back at the blog was to realise that I didn’t actually manage to start it until I was over the border into Spain.  Some things fade with the vagaries of memory, others feel very clear. I’ve always had what seem to very different storage for different sensory modes and experiences, so some visual experiences seem to store and be recallable with great clarity, though not always to be recallable to order, and it can be odd what prompts assist recall.  Since the ride I’ve had this phenomenon of “positive anti-traumatic flashbacks”.  I think I’ve had them much of my adult life but perhaps been too busy or active with other things to notice.  What happens is that I’ll get a flashback image of something, almost always good, though sometimes it’ll be of a more difficult time, a slog up the mountain of O Cebrero heading into the cloud with gearing too high for my legs and the load.  Oddly, it happens mostly if I’m doing different, boring exercise (the last five or more years I’ve tried to do some exercise daily: anything to keep fit enough to do more long rides).

By contrast, remembering names was never my strong suit and has become much worse in recent years and I think it’s related to that, and my very different storage systems for the visual as opposed to the written, that I really had forgotten that the site stuttered into existence early(ish) in the ride, but that the blog was so much later.

Enough navel gazing!  What do I remember?  Well certainly a lot of excitement but also a definite frisson of anxiety as I headed out the door and onto the South London roads.  I know it had taken me hours longer than planned for me to feel that I had everything I really needed properly aboard Toto … who wasn’t Toto back then.  Even then I was pretty sure some of the deliberations about what I really needed, about what was unnecessary weight and what was vital, were probably more about putting off the precise moment of departure than any make or break decisions. I remember well that it was a damp day, not unlike today, though it never poured as it did here this evening.

Off I went and gradually hit a good enough rhythm.  However, there were some early warning fights with Google maps.  I remember a spectacular one where she took me into a tiny dead end off a side street above a bit of motorway (M25?) or a very busy dual carriage way.  That was particularly surreal though fairly easy to resolve with a bit of common sense.  I remember a bit of panic in the early evening as I realised I had no chance of making it to Canterbury, let alone doing the cathedral and getting on the ferry and away.  (That had gone as a realistic prospect by the time I belatedly left home in all honesty.)

I did a bit of a dog’s hind leg off the sensible route to Canterbury in order to find a camp site that had space.  I remember that the owner seemed grumpy and unwelcoming but his daughter was compensatorily friendly. The site had no mains power so my ‘phone, garmin and tablet were doomed to die on me the next day.  The site was up a nasty, steep little hill from the pub which was the only option to find now rather badly needed calories.  I know that the food was very much “UK pub so-so” but it was meat and two veg and a couple of beers so it ticked carbohydrates, fats and protein and certainly ticked calories.  Probably even ticked precautionary analgesia though not, I suspect, many vitamins.

The publican, his wife the cook, and the student who was doing her holiday job there behind the bar were all friendly and a relief compared to some rather smug, public school sounding teenagers (including some Americans?) who seemed to be doing some falconry related training near by who left mid evening.  I remember good chats with both the publican and student: about their pasts and their plans for the future.  By now I am sure he must have moved on to a different pub (in Ryde?), much more where he’d always want to be, as I remember it.  I think he had the purchase of that pub (tenancy?) and the sale of the one we were in fixed.  She wasn’t sure where she was going but was clear that that village location, where she’d lived for some years before going to university, wasn’t a long term option, now she had seen the lights of the city.  Where was she at university?  Lost that.  She was reading psychology at least as part of her degree and was interested to hear a bit about clinical work.

Funny what you remember and what you don’t.  Or let’s be honest, that should be, “funny what I remember and what I don’t”.

Enough.  Oddly both reassuring, but also a bit disturbing, to resurrect this.  Tomorrow was another day, if you see what I mean, and it was warmer and … but that’s for tomorrow!

The last month or so brought an enriching new experience into my life, and guess what: it involved cycling!

What’s been interesting about this though is that it’s been a sort of vicarious experience, and the vicarious bit has been scary and sobering: seeing London cycling through another’s eyes.

This all started when my 23 year old daughter decided that she really should start cycling everywhere she reasonably can in London.  She’s back home and entering the final year of a four year degree at University College London (UCL), about 11km from home by bike.  She’s always been a stalwart user of public transport and passionately politically aware, socialist and particularly focused on gender, sexuality and disability equity issues.  I think she’s always sympathised with one of my arguments for cycling here in London: that my doing it frees one more space on London’s often horrifically overcrowded public transport for others who don’t have the choice to cycle.  However, until now she has said it seemed too dangerous and unattractive.

I’m not sure what changed her mind, perhaps her younger brother cycling quite a bit in London, though his cycling is almost all just around where we live.  Maybe him cycling pretty much everywhere he needs to when he’s at university up in Glasgow changed things.  I know it was partly that it was a way to get steps onto her fitbit and get around town while saving herself money!

Anyway, she asked if I’d lead her on some of the main trips she could do. We worked out that could take over the bike I’d had in Nottingham when my weeks were split between there and here and it, as luck would have it, it turns out that she likes it and that it can fit her pretty well.

So I’ve been sort of learning to cycle in London for a second time.  However, this time through the eyes of a very fit, risk and conflict averse, 23 year old, not a battered 60 year old who has been cycling most places he could for much of his life, certainly for most of the last 50 years.  It’s been an interesting experience as it has really brought home to me how desperately unfriendly to cycling London still is, and just how bizarrely incoherent much of the cycling provision has been.

One example is the cycle track on the Vauxhall Bridge Road to the north of the river.  This is one of the genuinely protected bits of cycle track in London.  That’s to say that there’s a kerb between the cycle track and the road. That’s great in principle as it’s so much safer than sharing the road with motor traffic.  This particular track is also “contraflow”: the track is two way to one side of the road so if you’re cycling north here, as we were, you are on the right hand side of the road with the motor traffic going the opposite way just across that kerbing on your left.  (International readers remember that in the UK we ride/drive on the left hand side of the road, the opposite side to most of the rest of the world).  I don’t much like contraflow cycle lanes as they almost always involve a point where you have to stop and cross the motor traffic and you’re usually waiting some time to be given permission to do that.  Because of this, though it’s been there for a couple of years, I’ve always stuck to the usual road going north on this route, eschewing the cycle track.  However, with my daughter’s safety in mind, I took the cycle track this time and we bowled along toward Victoria … and suddenly, with what seemed to both of us almost no warning, the track stopped.  There was a turning to the right up a side street, definitely not where we wanted to go, and the alternative was to haul on the brakes, shuffle up to the pedestrian crossing and hit the button and wait for that to stop the traffic on the main road and give us a chance to cross that and regain our northbound journey, now with no cycle track or protection at all.

Going the other way on that cycle track you have another daftness: the irritation of being stopped for minutes at at least two crossroads with minor side roads.  Cycling in the cycle lane you’re forced to wait when cars, and you had you chosen to eschew the cycle lane, could zoom on with the full priority of the main road.  Why so?  Because the road planners have correctly decided to protect cyclists from one of the principle killers of our kind: the “left hook without looking properly” death blow.  Great!  I love it when planners look after my hide.  I love it infinitely more, if the mathematical/obsessional among you will forgive the hyperbole, when they protect my daughter’s life.  However, why should cyclists wait minutes at each junction to stay safe?  It’s the same in the cycle lane on Blackfriar’s Road going north, another road I know well.  I’m losing minutes of my life every time I take these routes.

(I know, I know, I should slow down, be less impatient, get a life … and yet sometimes you really are in a hurry and, hey, the same can be said to the car and lorry drivers: if they just looked before hooking left in a hurry no-one would die and we wouldn’t need this daftness.  And while you’re on at me with this “slow down, get a life” stuff, yes, I notice that I lied there: we would all still die but not from the famous hook left, motor vehicle squashes human flesh, death blow.)

There is a very simple answer, far, far better in the long run than these infuriating lights that hold cyclists back for minutes while almost no motor vehicle actually does turn left around us: give onward traffic automatic priority even if that onward traffic happens to be a bicycle on your inside.  That doesn’t stop idiots hanging a left too fast, without looking and hence squashing and killing us, but it makes it far, far harder for them to get away without being charged with anything less than causing manslaughter by careless driving and, in the long run, it would change priorities and thinking.  All it takes is a small change in the law, one other countries have already adopted, see https://www.britishcycling.org.uk/campaigning/article/20170627-campaigning-news-Highway-Code-rule-changes-could-cut-traffic-queues-by-almost-half-0.

Now that brings me to my wider pondering: this really is an issue that kills people. I won’t put the factual links here but just remember two junctions I used to cycle across regularly on the way to my old job: Bank and the huge one on Whitechapel High Street by the Aldgate East tube station.  Within months of each other, both junctions gained photocopied pages in those A4 plastic wallets with photos of heart rendingly lively, smiling young women who died there cycling.   It took weeks before, in the harsh way of human adaptation, the lights might stop me there and me not feel nauseous thinking of the numbers of their family members and friends who had lost so much. Aye there’s the rub: it’s not for me I really fear, or rather it is: it’s my fear of my losing my daughter, my son, my wife (if she decides to cycle more), a friend, a colleague.

So poor provision for cycling in London kills and regularly, and the evidence that we can make it safer is there.  Certainly London with its pre-20th Century roads (and the largely awful, motor traffic oriented 20th Century ones that were cut into it) poses challenges but they’re not insuperable.  The evidence that increasing cycling makes everyone who cycles leaner, fitter, happier is strong. It’s clear it would free up public transport for others who can’t.  It’s crystal clear that it would reduce carbon emissions and global climate change, not to mention reducing other pollution.  So our politicians and civil servants will be getting on and fixing this, yes?

Well, yes, a little, and yes, I do thank you all for that.  Oh but so much of it, as I’ve been seeing through younger, less innured eyes, has been done oh so badly.  Now that’s because to do things well, you really have to change the way people think, not just do quick, and often flagrantly the cheapest, things.  To do things well needs real thought, experience, experimenting, and yes, it costs money, though still a fraction of what you will go on spending on motor traffic provision.  If you don’t know about doing it well you really have to assume that others (probably in the Netherlands, Denmark and some other countries) do know how to do it, and you have to go and learn from them.   Have a look at:

https://waronthemotorist.wordpress.com/2017/07/30/lambeth-bridge-shows-us-that-tfl-still-needs-a-fundamental-shift-in-design-philosophy/amp/

(Wow, that’s the second huge URL in this now rather long post.  I plead that it does warn you what you’re in for, and the whole post isn’t that much longer than the URL, … OK, I lied about that, it’s about an old fashioned page of A4 I’d guess, but it’s shorter than this post!)

Somewhere between every week and every month I get alerted to a “public consultation” like the one he’s referring to in that post.  I think I probably average over a hour a week digesting the plans, looking at the options, and replying.  I’d looked at that one already and given up trying to give detailed criticism as it seemed almost hopeless.  I was relieved to see that someone who clearly knows far more than I do about accumulated, collective experience on these things, had had exactly the reaction I had had: “great, real commitment … but wait a minute, this is rubbish!”

How do we get things to change?  Despite my obsession with cycling, I’m not really talking about cycling provision here, it’s just an exemplar, one of hundreds, of how collectively, but perhaps particularly in the UK and US at the moment, we seem to be making terrible decisions and failing to think things out slowly and carefully, and failing to think for the far distant future.  Another example of how we are abusing future generations, like this daughter of mine, who is continuing, courageously, to cycle, and beyond her, to the centuries and generations to come? How can we start making decisions that will leave them a less damaged world, fewer unnecessarily dead people, fewer bitter, bereft relatives, some real hope?

Answers on postcard … or, if you’re impressively 21st Century, you can sign up and leave comments!

What’s that awful ‘photo got to do with anything?  Well, yesterday was my first non-clinical birthday. That’s to say, on the 27th of July a year ago in 2016 I was in that building scrambling to finish my final work in the NHS and my final work as a clinician.  I didn’t quite get everything done and had to offload making sure a couple of letters went off to a kindly trainee psychiatrist but, looking back on it, rather remarkably, everything else was done and I crossed the road from that small psychotherapy unit in which I had been working to the pub directly opposite for my leaving do.

That’s the rather lovely Adam & Eve pub, a picture I took a year before during the pub’s 100th birthday year.  Look at this for an glorious piece of decorative glazed brickwork.  I wonder how being in the first or second year of “the great war” affected building something like that?

Enough of that, well, not quite.  It was a lovely pub and had the unusual distinction of having an L-shaped pool table.  I was a bit overfaced by the evening which was had a mixed sample of my fellow staff from the Trust: a good number of psychiatrists in training and a good number of older colleagues, mostly but not all from that little building across the road.  I think I’ve always found myself two not completely miscible groups of friends, acquaintances, peers, colleagues throughout my life.  Hm, topic for a post there some time thinking on how true that has been.

Anyway, where has the year gone?  Where has it got me?  Where have I got myself?  Do I miss clinical work?  What have I achieved?

Aye, there’s the rub! But interesting questions.  Well of course, the year seems to have raced by.  It started with the cycle ride, my pilgrimage, that created this blog/site and it’s been hard for anything to compete with the pleasures, and the challenges, of that.  However, I’ve seen some fantastic theatre and exhibitions.  I’ve had great work trips to Portugal, Albania, Italy and Spain.  I’ve had great family holiday trips to Glasgow, the French Alps and to Lefkada (Greece). I’ve done some teaching of various sorts in Roehampton to some great students, and some of that went satisfyingly well and some of it was OK but good in helping see things to improve.  I have done a lot of number crunching and I’m a lot more familiar with R (https://www.r-project.org/) and a few of my methodological ideas have developed a bit.  However, I’ve got very few papers out, only one so far in fact (Psychometric Properties of the Finnish Version of the Young Person’s Clinical Outcomes in Routine Evaluation (YP-CORE) Questionnaire). Last year wasn’t great for paper output either and I’m aware of feeling quite unproductive and frustrated with that.

My intention was to make more time for pleasure: art, theatre and reading and for exercise and I’m probably about halfway to the increased hours in the week that I was hoping to have for those things and I know that can be changed.  I wanted to be able to cycle pretty much everywhere I needed to within London and I really have done that.  I guess I’m not quite where I wanted to be but it’s not bad really.  So why do I feel so unproductive and dissatisfied with that?

The last few weeks as I became aware that the year was nearly up I have wondered more about missing clinical work and I had a short run of nightmares or horrible dreams all of which were about me being in some sort of clinical situation or other and failing to do all things that were necessary and getting sickly scared of what would happen.  Some were definitely psychiatric in setting but the focus was on physical health things I should have been doing and some had me back in pure physical health settings I hadn’t been in for 32 years.  I’ve thought a little bit more about ex-colleagues (not the ones I keep in touch with, they’re always floating around my mind!).  I’ve wondered about getting back in touch with some people but so far it’s felt wrong, I’m not sure why.  I’ve thought a bit more about ex-clients and that’s surprisingly often about the same really very small percentage of them and almost entirely either about poeple I saw very early in my career or ones I saw in my last job (behind that inauspicious gate onto Homerton High Street).  I remain completely convinced that I made the right decision to stop and also intrigued by how little I’ve overtly missed the rôle and the work.  However, I think some of the dissatisfaction with my productivity is because it’s so hard to replace that you were really pretty important to people: to colleagues as well as to clients.  That’s a funny one to digest.  I think I was careful not to let that get out of hand or be too important to me but it undoubtedly patches thin bits and frank holes in your confidence to find that you matter.  One year on I can feel that I do miss that, that it has given me some work to do on those exposed holes and fraying threads in my ego.  The challenge is to work on them by things other than just working hard and trying to output a lot.  Work in progress!  Starting next week, on the 2nd, the anniversary of that grey, damp morning that I pointed a well laden Toto off towards Compostella, I intend to review each of those days and to see if I can upload more things here and blog each day, mostly reliving the pleasures and challenges, but also using it to help the movement on.

Fun ahead I hope!

 

It’s a funny thing trying to write a blog.  I was never any good at keeping a diary despite trying several times in my adolescence and young adulthood.  I started this back in August last year, very excited, and a little bit fearful, both at the change of giving up clinical work and at the attempt to cycle to Compostella and Finisterre.  Then it was much more a technological challenge than a psychological one to get posts out.  Now, it’s a psychological challenge and there’s something, having passed 60, about a much more general reflection on, and reshaping of, my relationship with the world.

In my last post I noted, a bit slyly, that we have had a momentous general election here.  I read someone, a journalist, saying that a colleague of his in Albania (it was actually Kosovo I suspect), reporting an election there, commented that the British were odd: how come the winners of our election looked so glum and the losers so happy?  Good point.  Well, as a lifelong socialist (whatever that means), the result was the best I’d allowed myself to hope might happen, even though it left the Conservatives in power.  In the event, with whatever the deal is that they have struck with the DUP, it’s perhaps simultaneously even better than I’d allowed myself to hope for, and a bit worse.  The “worse” bit, for those outside the UK, is that there’s very little (anything?) in the DUP’s manifesto and political position with which I can have any sympathy, so perhaps this will be grim.  However, it feels hard to see it lasting very long or enacting that much that is worse than May would have done without the DUP so I am trying to stay happy and hopeful.

However, this week there is a real and gross hurt in London and, I suspect, most of the UK.  The Grenfell tower fire has come hard on the heels of the London Bridge/Borough Market atrocity.  A week ago I found myself cycling past the wall covered with post it notes and overlooking hundreds and hundreds of bouquets of flowers at London Bridge. I’d just been to a truly glorious photography exhibition and had a lovely end of exhibition experience meeting the curator and the director of a brilliant film that had been part of the show. (Another post about that soon I hope.) Cycling along slowly, in beautiful sunshine, glowing inwardly from that good experience, I had almost forgetten where my route would take me and it was sobering to see the wall and the carpet of flowers, and I was immediately aware that not so many weeks ago I’d been cycling over Westminster Bridge a few days after the atrocity there.  Suddenly, human hatred, and the lost lives, blighted survivors’ and relatives’ and friends’ lives all felt so horrifically palpable.

Each time these horrors have hit London, one of my overseas friends and colleagues has Emailed me asking if I and my family are OK and each time I’ve been deeply touched.  Westminster and London Bridge both happened while I was out of London and that added an odd distance to the news, a dissociated feeling.

Now we have Grenfell tower and so, so many more deaths and I woke up on Wednesday in South London immediately thinking that I must have seen the tower many times though it’s an area of London, unlike Westminster & London Bridges, that I don’t know very well.  I don’t know why but this particular horror seemed to hit me hard and I felt pretty shaken all Wednesday.

Last night J and I met up with two younger friends, an ex-colleague from my last clinical job, and his wife.  We had been to the Tate Modern, very near London Bridge, it was nearing 23.00 and suddenly there were enormous bangs but no visible flashes in the sky from where we were.  A year or so ago we’d all have just thought “wonder what those fireworks are about?” but last night was very different and I immediately thought, though my medical competence is probably about that of a member of the general public who did a first aid course, that I should perhaps move in the direction of the noise.  It was hard to locate and J clearly felt I should move too, and Hugh I think felt the same (he’s a much younger and still GMC registered psychiatrist and probably a lot of real help in a mess).  So and I walked awkwardly, a bit faster than sauntering but embarrassed perhaps to move really fast.  We headed to the river to get a view of the sky, increasingly aware that realistically the continuation of the noise meant it had to be fireworks but somehow still unable to relax, I could even now see a small bit of smoke but still no flashes of light.  Suddenly we could see them and the relief was huge.

While we were (until then) having a lovely time, we learned later that earlier in the day people had been protesting about Grenfell tower and not just in the borough but outside BBC headquarters and Downing Street.  That’s the key thought driving this post: surely we in the UK are on the swing of the pendulum?  Surely a new political climate might emerge from this that could be about valuing lives, valuing people, finding bonds, not putting wealth and achievement above gentleness, generosity and empathy for everyone?

It really feels as if we are on that swing here.  Now how to help that be a really good and sustainable change away from greed and contempt driven discourses?  Of course I don’t know, sure but perhaps nailing my longing to a little blog is a useful bit of movement, at least for me.  I’ve realised over the last year that the grotesque excesses of “free market” worshipping capitalism, and the hatred and contempt for other people that I think is one of its covert drivers, has to be fought.  I’ve realised that I was quiet and polite for too long and that many of us being that way helped it grow and grow.

However, the fight mustn’t just be about anger but also about positives.  Knowing that I have come to know an extremely diverse group of people, worked with so many remarkable people, mostly in the UK but really all over the world too, people who believe in helping other people; that’s been an incredible gift.  It meant that when a tower block fire in London was seen in Shanghai, I got an Email from there and that I’ve gone on to discover that my friend there lost friends in a similar fire there some years ago and that, of course, that still matters to her.  Having these connections, locally, with people I can meet, and nearly half the world away, is a privilege but in our global world, with Email & so many audio & video chat options, perhaps such webs of connectedness are ones we can all have.  I believe we’re a species always longing for people who empathise and care, on good days, I think we’re a species that really can try not to let hurt and sorrow turn to hate.  These days are ones for action  and change though, not stasis and complicity.