Tuesday, January 08, 2013

Day 47 - rare 30 minute bike ride to darkness and beyond


Oh, "radio mast".   There's an interesting sign I should investigate.  I left the hotel on my bike and put on full beam.
With in a few hundred metres it went out. Back to the car to get a lock so I could lock up outside the post office shop of course.

Closed.

I decided to check out the lane to the radio mast until my light went dead then descend back down a route already known. I could do laps of the village until my allotted 30 minutes was up.

On lower beam, the light kept on going and going until the track had passed the uninteresting radio station and gone back down the other side of the hill again. Perhaps it will last...

Back on tarmac I turned left, figuring that if I keep turning left... blip... no light. Now the times between blips off got shorter and shorter until finally I gave up turning it on.

I told myself, "I'll get to the top of this hill and I'll see Overstrand and the radio mast and the distant lights of Cromer.

At the top of the hill I saw the distant lights of the radio mast. Still, I continued on the theory of the perpetual left turn eventually making a circle.

I was riding very slow. Expecting every decipherable shadow to be a pothole. There was reflected light off Cromer bouncing from the cloud but it was lost in the deep hedgerows.

I struggled along, my confidence improving as the hedges thinned and a silver strip of tarmac was continually visible. I arrived at a village. Hard to tell which one. The pub was not familiar.  There was a turn, but Right to follow the main route or left with the program?

Without my light I didn't know if left was even a dead end.

Time to dig out Gloria. If I was to be fucked up by my light, I wasn't going to be alone or lost while being fuckedup.

Gloria is the only good thing about being old school and owning a Nokia phone - smart as it is - she is a mostly accurate, perfectly well spoken, high clarity satnav voice who has calmly got me out of sticky audax dilemmas and into meetings on time. She sits in my pocket, talks me to my destination clearly and the only problem this time was I was considerably off course.

A lot of chatting in my pocket was required and when she mentioned 2 km I knew she was right about me being off route.

A proper English thicket scared me senseless when I was plunged into complete darkness. It just felt like it would be bumpy. In desperation I gave lighty one more try and it had at least regenerated just enough to get me past the only potholes my wheel might have been genuinely drawn to... though I suspect if I drove the roads tomorrow I would conclude I was feckin' lucky.

Out of the trees I turned the light back off to let it regenerate again. I started to enjoy the night riding though I suspect my mood would have changed considerably had I hit a pothole.

Finally I saw the lights of Overstrand and I burned the last few electrons of energy on getting drivers to dip their headlights and the approach roads to the hotel. I know it was daft but in a new year culture of having no excuses I couldn't be drawn on the point where I should've declared it daft.

When I think of the number of cars I actually saw (1) was it so stupid? Or was it just natural?

I'm not in a hurry to try it again...and I'm saying that for TSK's benefit but if we love the things we do, isn't it healthy to enjoy them in their simplest forms?

Now I shall demonstrate the fine art of sleeping...in its simplest form.

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