We've got it all wrong, this work thing. It breeds no end of resentment. It's enough, as someone might have already remarked, to drive you crazy if you let it. A new Working Time Directive organised according to the weather is admittedly a risky proposition for someone who lives in South Wales, but in a landscape whose character is so markedly transformed by the elements, the tedious regularity of the working day has an obliviousness about it that borders on the unhinged. What kind of animal are we, whose daily purpose refuses to be swayed by the clearest signals Nature can send us? Even our cats are smarter (though not always inclined to truthfulness). Not even British holidaymakers in Sharm El-Sheikh are this unresponsive to the world around them.
"Duvet Days" won't cut it – they're essentially a sweetener; a sugar coating on the pill of the longest working hours in the EU. And worst of all, they are rationed. You could run out of them, just when the wind drops to the merest whisper or the drizzle finally drifts to the East (where the English remain most ungrateful for it, despite the fact that we'll probably have to sell them water before long). Some days are simply too good for work, and entitlement to them should be absolute.
Cyclists see the weather differently to other folk – our wish-list is a modest one and our tolerances are high. The sort of days we like are various, and we ask little more of our gods than that the clues they give us in the morning are honest ones, that the wind favours us for just a little more time than it frowns upon us, and that they will reward every lung-bursting climb with a stupendous descent.
With changeability being the week's weather watchword, Monday had little going for it on paper, except that it was a better bet than the rest of the week. Well, that and a liberating tradition of worker absenteeism. Work had stolen a glorious Saturday from me, and I wanted it back. Monday morning was grey and the temperature was sub-zero, but it was also (and readers from the South East will not pick up on the tone of reverence with which I type the following words) dry and almost still. The clouds, I fancied, had an of promise rather than of threat.
There's a direct train to Abergavenny. For reasons not understood anywhere, it takes an hour and a half to get there, and over two hours to get back. Which at least meant that even anomalies were operating in the right direction. Anyone determined to rely on the little blue signs with the red numbers to point them the right way out of town for the Old Hereford Road would end up in a hell of endless deferral of meaning that would make Jacques Derrida blanch. One circuitous acquaintance with the town-centre traffic-flow system and I trusted to a hunch about direction and and a half-memory that Pen-y-Pound sounded like the right road. In a bristlier mood I'd have found the reappearance of the little blue signs insulting, having taken a punt on a longish climb out of town while they played their mysterious self-referential game back in the centre, but they were now going where I was, so I accepted their reassurance and found myself glad of their company, even though they were no longer needed. One conspicuous left turn put me on the Llanthony Road, and from then on directions are superfluous for twenty-something miles.
Some cyclists are bimbling sightseers, for whom the bicycle is a means of getting to places, or finding cake. Others are motion addicts, oblivious to everything but the rhythm of the road and the steady passing of things. I'm caught in the middle, and it niggled me to pass the contorted church of St Martin at Cwmyoy, with its weeping chancel and leaning tower – but not as much as would have pained me just then to pause. There's a peculiar satisfaction in roads that follow rivers. Travel upstream and you climb imperceptibly, travel downstream and you race the river. But for all the joy of motion, daughters that visit their mothers' favourite places and make no souvenir bring censure upon themselves, and it is a rare person anyway who can pass Llanthony Priory without stopping to drink it in. One might easily stop to drink in so much that one never makes it any farther North, for the vaults are home to an enticing pub. Readers may therefore put my further progress upstream down to willpower, or to uncivilised opening hours, as they choose.
As far as Capel-Y-Ffin (an unlikely Mecca for Font Nerds and Connoisseurs of Depravity) I've been complacent about ice. The sun is warming my back, and the road, and it hasn't rained for days. Someone more alert would glance at the looming ridge to the left, remember the temperature, and think "run-off!". Someone in an advanced stage of cycling smugness, however, would probably bowl along blithely until the sight of a spreading death-trap before them snapped them out of their reverie just in time to slam on the anchors and skid to a (now distinctly unsmug) halt. If there's a way to look cool crossing a twelve-foot ice-sheet in cleats with 23mm tyres, then I'm convinced I would have found it, for the road ahead gave me at least eight further chances to refine the technique.
Gospel Pass is the only tough climb, with a cattle-grid placed at optimum insult-to-injury location on the gradient. It's worth it. The climb is only slightly tougher than the choice you have to make again at the top. One of the joys of hills (you read that right) is the brief moment at the summit where the effort ceases and you hang in the air for an instant before the wheels start to roll again. The full enjoyment of this instant demands that the transition to downhill is uninterrupted, and sits uneasily with touristy fumbling for cameras and flapjacks, or hasty rethinking of your layering system. On the other hand, the transience troubles you, and you have a desperate need to fix the moment, capture it, commit it to memory. And despite the fact that no-one is watching, failing to stop makes you feel slightly guilty – is there something fundamental about the association between stillness and reverence?
Plummetting down on the drops and worrying that your hands, which you can no longer feel at all, are no longer capable of operating the brakes, it is hard to believe that only minutes ago you were berating yourself for failing to remember the sunblock. It's a descent to die for, but an unromantic and doubtless terribly middle-class preference for survival led me to coax just enough movement out of my freezing hands to avoid freefall. Though North-facing, the slope is just gentle enough to catch the afternoon sun, so ice fears could rest until one treacherously shady dip, which I deemed too dangerous even for the mincing routine I'd perfected. A brief homage to cyclocross was the only option, and the only interruption to the long descent into Hay-on-Wye.
It's only fair to spare any cycling nutrition purists the details of the lunch stop. Suffice it to say that Kilvert's Inn does not appear to serve space gels and blue drinks, and I won't be writing to them to suggest that they start. Not that I'd pretend that there was no connection between what might have been consumed that afternoon at Kilvert's and the choice of the gratifyingly flat Peterchurch Road out of Hay, and a small loop into England. At Dorstone one can leave the pleasant but unremarkable B4348 and travel through the village on a more picturesque parallel minor road. It's fast and flat, but indupitably minor, and (one would have thought) an unlikely place to meet an oncoming convoy of a bus, two coaches and about six minibuses. Parents considering a move to the border country might note that Fairfield High School is clearly the most happening place for miles around.
The Golden Valley is apparently so named thanks to a Norman misunderstanding of the more prosaic Welsh "dŵr", but heading South with the late afternoon sun to starboard, it seemed a serendipitous mistake. After the breathtaking view from the Gospel Pass everything seemed subdued, but the conditions for making contented progress couldn't have been better, and I thought idle thoughts. I found myself perhaps unduly preoccupied with the pronunciation of Ewyas Harold (the Ewyas bit, not the Harold), and forgot to notice very much else about it.
If it's all about speed, you could leave the River Dore behind, and take the A465, which follows the Monnow back to Abergavenny. But you need to be in the right frame of mind for trunk roads. If there's anything left in your hill legs, the more inviting road follows the Dore a little further, crosses it at Kentchurch, and then a right at Grosmont will take you up once again, not steeply but relentlessly. The reward, as dusk approaches, is to descend with the ominous outline of Ysgyryd Fawr to your left, and the distant prospect of Pen-Y-Fan against the setting sun ahead of you. Spurn the dubious charms of the A465 as you meet it once again, and take the dog-leg into Llanfihangel Crucorney on the other side, where it would be churlish to spurn the venerable charms of the Skirrid Mountain Inn. Bicyclists of a Marxist persuasion will of course hope that the pub keeps a copy of Culture and Society behind the bar in honour of the village's most notable son. They will be disappointed, but in fairness the ancient Skirrid has bloodier and eerier claims to fame which are admittedly a little more marketable.
The wiser route back into town for a slightly tipsy cyclist on a dark and freezing night is probably the one without the HGVs and the high-speed traffic. The faster one, however, is the now-suddenly-attractive A465. Now is probably the worst time of the day to have a (rear) puncture caused by hedge-trimming, and to discover that your phone has been busy exhausting its battery making repeated attempts (in areas with no signal) to send multimedia messages about Lord Hereford's Knob looking magnificent in the sunlight to a friend with a similarly childish sense of humour. But at least he was suitably delighted when it finally got through. And with an irrepressible good-humour which I realise verges once again on self-satisfaction, I am pleased to report that the Lezyne Road Drive Mini Pump is worth every penny. After a puncture-free year on GP4000s, I thought I'd never get the chance to test the bloody thing. Mods! Can someone move this to "Accessories, Kit and Clothing"?
"Duvet Days" won't cut it – they're essentially a sweetener; a sugar coating on the pill of the longest working hours in the EU. And worst of all, they are rationed. You could run out of them, just when the wind drops to the merest whisper or the drizzle finally drifts to the East (where the English remain most ungrateful for it, despite the fact that we'll probably have to sell them water before long). Some days are simply too good for work, and entitlement to them should be absolute.
Cyclists see the weather differently to other folk – our wish-list is a modest one and our tolerances are high. The sort of days we like are various, and we ask little more of our gods than that the clues they give us in the morning are honest ones, that the wind favours us for just a little more time than it frowns upon us, and that they will reward every lung-bursting climb with a stupendous descent.
With changeability being the week's weather watchword, Monday had little going for it on paper, except that it was a better bet than the rest of the week. Well, that and a liberating tradition of worker absenteeism. Work had stolen a glorious Saturday from me, and I wanted it back. Monday morning was grey and the temperature was sub-zero, but it was also (and readers from the South East will not pick up on the tone of reverence with which I type the following words) dry and almost still. The clouds, I fancied, had an of promise rather than of threat.
There's a direct train to Abergavenny. For reasons not understood anywhere, it takes an hour and a half to get there, and over two hours to get back. Which at least meant that even anomalies were operating in the right direction. Anyone determined to rely on the little blue signs with the red numbers to point them the right way out of town for the Old Hereford Road would end up in a hell of endless deferral of meaning that would make Jacques Derrida blanch. One circuitous acquaintance with the town-centre traffic-flow system and I trusted to a hunch about direction and and a half-memory that Pen-y-Pound sounded like the right road. In a bristlier mood I'd have found the reappearance of the little blue signs insulting, having taken a punt on a longish climb out of town while they played their mysterious self-referential game back in the centre, but they were now going where I was, so I accepted their reassurance and found myself glad of their company, even though they were no longer needed. One conspicuous left turn put me on the Llanthony Road, and from then on directions are superfluous for twenty-something miles.
Some cyclists are bimbling sightseers, for whom the bicycle is a means of getting to places, or finding cake. Others are motion addicts, oblivious to everything but the rhythm of the road and the steady passing of things. I'm caught in the middle, and it niggled me to pass the contorted church of St Martin at Cwmyoy, with its weeping chancel and leaning tower – but not as much as would have pained me just then to pause. There's a peculiar satisfaction in roads that follow rivers. Travel upstream and you climb imperceptibly, travel downstream and you race the river. But for all the joy of motion, daughters that visit their mothers' favourite places and make no souvenir bring censure upon themselves, and it is a rare person anyway who can pass Llanthony Priory without stopping to drink it in. One might easily stop to drink in so much that one never makes it any farther North, for the vaults are home to an enticing pub. Readers may therefore put my further progress upstream down to willpower, or to uncivilised opening hours, as they choose.
As far as Capel-Y-Ffin (an unlikely Mecca for Font Nerds and Connoisseurs of Depravity) I've been complacent about ice. The sun is warming my back, and the road, and it hasn't rained for days. Someone more alert would glance at the looming ridge to the left, remember the temperature, and think "run-off!". Someone in an advanced stage of cycling smugness, however, would probably bowl along blithely until the sight of a spreading death-trap before them snapped them out of their reverie just in time to slam on the anchors and skid to a (now distinctly unsmug) halt. If there's a way to look cool crossing a twelve-foot ice-sheet in cleats with 23mm tyres, then I'm convinced I would have found it, for the road ahead gave me at least eight further chances to refine the technique.
Gospel Pass is the only tough climb, with a cattle-grid placed at optimum insult-to-injury location on the gradient. It's worth it. The climb is only slightly tougher than the choice you have to make again at the top. One of the joys of hills (you read that right) is the brief moment at the summit where the effort ceases and you hang in the air for an instant before the wheels start to roll again. The full enjoyment of this instant demands that the transition to downhill is uninterrupted, and sits uneasily with touristy fumbling for cameras and flapjacks, or hasty rethinking of your layering system. On the other hand, the transience troubles you, and you have a desperate need to fix the moment, capture it, commit it to memory. And despite the fact that no-one is watching, failing to stop makes you feel slightly guilty – is there something fundamental about the association between stillness and reverence?
Plummetting down on the drops and worrying that your hands, which you can no longer feel at all, are no longer capable of operating the brakes, it is hard to believe that only minutes ago you were berating yourself for failing to remember the sunblock. It's a descent to die for, but an unromantic and doubtless terribly middle-class preference for survival led me to coax just enough movement out of my freezing hands to avoid freefall. Though North-facing, the slope is just gentle enough to catch the afternoon sun, so ice fears could rest until one treacherously shady dip, which I deemed too dangerous even for the mincing routine I'd perfected. A brief homage to cyclocross was the only option, and the only interruption to the long descent into Hay-on-Wye.
It's only fair to spare any cycling nutrition purists the details of the lunch stop. Suffice it to say that Kilvert's Inn does not appear to serve space gels and blue drinks, and I won't be writing to them to suggest that they start. Not that I'd pretend that there was no connection between what might have been consumed that afternoon at Kilvert's and the choice of the gratifyingly flat Peterchurch Road out of Hay, and a small loop into England. At Dorstone one can leave the pleasant but unremarkable B4348 and travel through the village on a more picturesque parallel minor road. It's fast and flat, but indupitably minor, and (one would have thought) an unlikely place to meet an oncoming convoy of a bus, two coaches and about six minibuses. Parents considering a move to the border country might note that Fairfield High School is clearly the most happening place for miles around.
The Golden Valley is apparently so named thanks to a Norman misunderstanding of the more prosaic Welsh "dŵr", but heading South with the late afternoon sun to starboard, it seemed a serendipitous mistake. After the breathtaking view from the Gospel Pass everything seemed subdued, but the conditions for making contented progress couldn't have been better, and I thought idle thoughts. I found myself perhaps unduly preoccupied with the pronunciation of Ewyas Harold (the Ewyas bit, not the Harold), and forgot to notice very much else about it.
If it's all about speed, you could leave the River Dore behind, and take the A465, which follows the Monnow back to Abergavenny. But you need to be in the right frame of mind for trunk roads. If there's anything left in your hill legs, the more inviting road follows the Dore a little further, crosses it at Kentchurch, and then a right at Grosmont will take you up once again, not steeply but relentlessly. The reward, as dusk approaches, is to descend with the ominous outline of Ysgyryd Fawr to your left, and the distant prospect of Pen-Y-Fan against the setting sun ahead of you. Spurn the dubious charms of the A465 as you meet it once again, and take the dog-leg into Llanfihangel Crucorney on the other side, where it would be churlish to spurn the venerable charms of the Skirrid Mountain Inn. Bicyclists of a Marxist persuasion will of course hope that the pub keeps a copy of Culture and Society behind the bar in honour of the village's most notable son. They will be disappointed, but in fairness the ancient Skirrid has bloodier and eerier claims to fame which are admittedly a little more marketable.
The wiser route back into town for a slightly tipsy cyclist on a dark and freezing night is probably the one without the HGVs and the high-speed traffic. The faster one, however, is the now-suddenly-attractive A465. Now is probably the worst time of the day to have a (rear) puncture caused by hedge-trimming, and to discover that your phone has been busy exhausting its battery making repeated attempts (in areas with no signal) to send multimedia messages about Lord Hereford's Knob looking magnificent in the sunlight to a friend with a similarly childish sense of humour. But at least he was suitably delighted when it finally got through. And with an irrepressible good-humour which I realise verges once again on self-satisfaction, I am pleased to report that the Lezyne Road Drive Mini Pump is worth every penny. After a puncture-free year on GP4000s, I thought I'd never get the chance to test the bloody thing. Mods! Can someone move this to "Accessories, Kit and Clothing"?
