At a quarter to four this morning Daisy arrives home in a taxi to find her stepfather stumbling around the kitchen with a sheet wrapped around him. Some time before that he returns home in a taxi (a different taxi) having spent some hours in a garden in Tooting with people he'd known on and off for forty years. Two birthday cakes, perfectly iced, one in white with the words 'Roche 60mg' on and the other in blue with the words 'Bayer 60mg' on mark the 60th birthday of Toxic Tom, a man whose dealer has an EPOS machine, Tom, ever a testament to the preserving powers of narcotics, recalls high times before falling over.. I recognise a man who disappeared from a tent in September 1995, not seen since, who was entirely unaware that two people in two tents a few yards away had met that very morning, fallen in love, married and had celebrated their sixteenth wedding anniversary the previous night by riding to Brighton. Another man who had flown from Philadelphia to be at the birthday party who gets to stay at hotels for free because some people call him Sir.
Some time before all that Susie, Des, Stephen and I on a train with a spy turned rocket scientist. He tells us that a spacecraft, weighing as much as a small car will hurtle toward Mars, slowed only by the world's largest (nay, the solar system's largest) supersonic parachute and small rockets pointing outward. The spacecraft will be lowered to the Red Planet's dusty surface by a special crane equipped with special string, and pictures will be beamed back to earth, giving Nick Park and his trusty team just seven minutes to get their plasticine in shape for the television cameras.
Some time before that a message arrives from Brighton Station. Southern Rail's Olympic Celebration Bike Ban is more spoken of than observed.
Earlier still, a boy with red hair rides up the Ditchling Beacon, accompanied by a man on a Colnago. The boy keeps pace with the man until he rounds a tandem and sprints for the top of the hill, cheered to the heavens by his many admirers.
In the preceding hours, sixty friends roll down wet roads enveloped in a feeling of well-being. The green, green lanes through Streat and Westmeston offer a novel view of the South Downs, but while water cascades across the road, none is falling on our heads....but it pours on Lindfield, where shop awnings, helpfully left out overnight, offer shelter as day breaks. We race down through Ardingly and pant up to Turners Hill, fuelled by tea, coffee, sandwiches and home-made cake laid out for us in an Edifice by Scouts who seem pleased to see us.
A while before the cyclists wend their way along a mud track, a gravel path and a tarmac lane through parts of Surrey that are barely travelled, a backland badland of albino wallabies, peacocks and greyhounds. They gather in a private road to pay their respects to some bungalows. And, a little while before that they streak down the smooth, sinuous tarmac of Lonesome Lane, lights ablaze, rocking from left to right across the road to clip the apex of bends best rounded at slower speeds, a snake of carbon, wire and lycra tipping their caps to teddy bears.
The Met directs traffic, and sixty lost souls turn left down a suburban street and then right across an ancient common. This comes as a considerable surprise to many in the herd, Daisy's stepfather inculded.
A crowd gathers in the centre of London. Some greet old acquaintances and some nervous newcomers ponder the significance of 'bollards, bungalows and grooves'.
A boy with a disease that nobody understands is given a bike because the doctors doesn't trust the new medicines. Bikes come and go, and the boy gets stronger by degrees, riding up the Ditchling Beacon for the first time in 1971 at the age of seventeen. Another boy rides up the Ditchling Beacon in 2011 at the age of nine, accompanied by the first boy, now the Ostap (Sulayman Berta Maria) Bender of Night Riding. There's every chance that the second boy, the boy with red hair will do so again in 2051. That's the way history is made.
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