my most acute memories, not necessarily the most precious, but the most crystalline are from the first night.
As far as I know Susie and I were the only two to have ridden the road in real time, and we knew how challenging, but, also, how strange this hejira was. The noise, light and smell of the shisha bars, the smooth facades of St. John's Wood, the mansion pubs of Edgware, the crossing of the North Circ, that odd moment where, at a small roundabout, the road diminishes and the lights stop, before we get back to crossing motorways, and then, after Elstree and the rather odd sideways look at St. Albans, the moment, the exact moment when I knew that this was, after six months planning, a real thing, the turn northwest along the former A5, the smooth sinuous almost silky tarmac following the River Ver, heading toward daylight and our first stop. Everything from that moment on was not 'the start' but, rather 'the ride'. And, whatever the limitations of MaccyDs, the first occasion of our sitting down together was where we really started to be a club rather than a collection of nervous individuals contemplating giving the bald twat a slap for being so completely stupid.
Over the next couple of days strategies unfolded and unravelled. The ride became adaptable, forming and re-forming to work it's way north to York. The van became part of the ride rather than some distant cousin. Looked at from outer space a collection of dots sometimes together, sometimes spread over miles, took on, thanks to these adaptions, a kind of organic quality that subsumed personal concerns and became a happy, successful, achieving kind of thing. The Saturday and Sunday were our salad days, the FNRttCers rolling along and discovering that, yes, Teresa and her friends in Tesco had got up at five o'clock on our account, and that people were going to appear and set out lunch by a lake in a place none of us had heard of and only charge us a fiver. It all feels like a long time back now, a kind of elysian delusion beyond the tougher reality of hills and rain, but those were the days in which LonJoG really came in to being as a thing made of smiles and tired legs rather than a pipedream. Those days, the days of becoming are, then, the days I treasure.
As far as I know Susie and I were the only two to have ridden the road in real time, and we knew how challenging, but, also, how strange this hejira was. The noise, light and smell of the shisha bars, the smooth facades of St. John's Wood, the mansion pubs of Edgware, the crossing of the North Circ, that odd moment where, at a small roundabout, the road diminishes and the lights stop, before we get back to crossing motorways, and then, after Elstree and the rather odd sideways look at St. Albans, the moment, the exact moment when I knew that this was, after six months planning, a real thing, the turn northwest along the former A5, the smooth sinuous almost silky tarmac following the River Ver, heading toward daylight and our first stop. Everything from that moment on was not 'the start' but, rather 'the ride'. And, whatever the limitations of MaccyDs, the first occasion of our sitting down together was where we really started to be a club rather than a collection of nervous individuals contemplating giving the bald twat a slap for being so completely stupid.
Over the next couple of days strategies unfolded and unravelled. The ride became adaptable, forming and re-forming to work it's way north to York. The van became part of the ride rather than some distant cousin. Looked at from outer space a collection of dots sometimes together, sometimes spread over miles, took on, thanks to these adaptions, a kind of organic quality that subsumed personal concerns and became a happy, successful, achieving kind of thing. The Saturday and Sunday were our salad days, the FNRttCers rolling along and discovering that, yes, Teresa and her friends in Tesco had got up at five o'clock on our account, and that people were going to appear and set out lunch by a lake in a place none of us had heard of and only charge us a fiver. It all feels like a long time back now, a kind of elysian delusion beyond the tougher reality of hills and rain, but those were the days in which LonJoG really came in to being as a thing made of smiles and tired legs rather than a pipedream. Those days, the days of becoming are, then, the days I treasure.
Best of luck with the Dun Run this weekend!
well done for toughing it out with the middle ring! It was lovely to have met you.
)
). I still use the hybrid for shopping, and I'm as fond of it as you are of yours, but you'll love your new bike when you get it.
