Back on the bike

At first, the train edged gracefully away from platform 2 at London Paddington, a stately roll-out befitting a grand express service heading out onto an iconic route. Gradually it sped up as it glided through West London, and accelerated a little more, and more, imperceptibly, until you couldn’t avoid the fact this thing was absolutely flying! The whole carriage, the whole train, recklessly shooting along the narrow iron tracks below at an insane speed. Could they contain this bullet? Was this safe?

Down the years, I’d been on too many high-speed trains to count. If I’d ever even noticed how fast they were going it was only as subconscious reassurance that I’d be getting to where I was going in good time. Today, I needed reacquaintance with the experience. Over the last five months, I had only been taking suburban train journeys. And there had only been ten of them. All in the last two months. One long car journey, and maybe one bus. The rest of my world, suddenly constrained to the three or four miles I could comfortably walk until I could turn back and make for the safety of my own home, a refuge from an outside world that had suddenly, shockingly, turned deadly…

As I write this, it may still be too early to definitively assess how the Covid-19 pandemic has broken our world. We can count the bodies, think of the millions still struggling with the disease and its aftermath, feel for the millions more who have been ruined financially and psychologically, the lost businesses, the lost futures. But we are currently still in the middle of this thing. And it even seems trivial to fuss about travel and blogging while a global catastrophe continues to unfold, especially as the world of travel itself lies in ashes. We should at this point and in this place consider above all, what is going to become of all those fabulous tour guides, hotel staff, bar staff, etc, without whom none of us could meet the world with such ease and joy, without whom none of these posts could exist.

For now, the best we can do is rehearse the old lesson; take nothing, nothing, for granted. And look with a keener eye at those fundamental components of your life when they eventually reappear. What had you missed before through overfamiliarity, what had you overlooked, like the dawn chorus you never noticed on the way to work until the competition from the daily hubbub was taken away?

One thing I had become overfamiliar with, was Britain. In the summer of 2020, the pandemic had essentially made foreign travel impossible or impractical. As much as I could have sat the whole thing out at home, home was virtually the only place I’d been for months and it was time for a change of scenery. But if I was going anywhere I would have to take on the risk I had gone out of my way to avoid before, that I would find myself somewhere that felt too much like home, while all around was grey and bucketing down with rain.

I knew, of course, that I lived on a stunning island, with an almost unmatched resource of rich green landscape, tumultuous seascape, and a place that was a witness to centuries of stories that shape and shake the world. And now, with nowhere else to go, I had the opportunity to explore some of it. So off I went to Paddington, on my way to the West Country. And why not join me, socially-distanced of course, just grab your face mask, find your seat..there you go, strap yourself in nice and tight please – these things are fast!