Middle England

Next up on the Frank Turner CD … “I was born in middle England and not in Nashville, Tennessee, and the only person in this band is me”. I know how he feels. He's a discrepancy, something which came about but doesn't quite fit the accepted norm. I'm middle class. It's something I feel down in my gut, although, if you're only considering parents, their vocations and level of qualifications and income, then yes, there's a working class background there somewhere. Except my parents on paper were different beings to the real folk who were really middle class in outlook in a way which again is hard to put on paper. I think they valued education, and in some way appearances. They didn't want to be looked down on. Actually, I'm not sure about education, because they were surprised by both me and my sister's ambitions to go a step further than A level. It wasn't by that memory something they actively encouraged, they were surprised. Hmm.

It does summon up the question where do I fit, where does the 44 year old nomad who has quit her job and normal life fit in? Is there a category for me, I wonder?

Post Pyrenees I have been busy. Had a hectic two and a half days turnaround to get my shit together for the next skirmish with travel. With hindsight, maybe it wasn't enough of a turnaround, it certainly felt like a sprint effort. The Monday appeared to be spent on faff, paperwork, things which somehow still need to be done even in a life of no plans and ultimate flexibility, because Monday afternoon I was walking with friends from Edale, where we went up Grindbrook in the pouring rain, walking on and on and on in the effort to find a safe crossing point. Tuesday I was up early to take the road bike into Alf Jones in Wrexham where it was due it's six week service. Six weeks, eh? I have done a few miles … and then Wednesday was financial adviser day (yeay, I am solvent) followed by a rapid exit up to Scotland. Simples.

Scotland was up to Dalraddy, a holiday park near to Aviemore where my friends Lilian and Alan have a static caravan. There are showers and a laundry and all in all it's a gentle start. Alan, bless that man for his creativity, foresight, his knowledge of the area, his versatility and his determination to “get things done” had many plans, all of which could change at a moment's notice. I'm in safe hands with A & L, and we're currently planning next year's holiday in the Alps …

Anyway, it was superb. Day one we got on the road bikes and pedalled from Dalraddy up to the Cairngorn ski station. It was a fab road ride up there, followed by an immense descent, although somehow neither felt anything like the steepness or duration of France where I'd done worse on the MTB which was good because it was low effort on the whole. Ride home included a cafe stop for cake and coffee. Near obligatory on the road bike I'd say. Day two was a “rest day” when we walked 20K, although on the flat. Average kilometre speeds being 11 minute to 14 minute. Alan was no so happy with mine and Lilian's take on a gentle amble. Third day was a wash out. No other way to describe it. It should have been a two Munro bagging day but was kind of a car journey followed by some sea cliff bouldering / big boots soloing. And all was well. Fourth and final day saw us at Wolftrax giving the mountain bikes some exercise. We like to keep moving ...

Best Years

I have never been much of a sit and listen to music person, in fact, I'm not really a sit down person at all, which perhaps explains the lack of the ability to simply chill, doing nothing, just soaking up lyrics, rhythm and tune. It's not that I don't like music. Get me to a music festival and I will embrace the sit down on the grass and listen thing in absolute contentment, no impatience or irritation at it being all I'm doing, because it's what I'm there to do. Listening is in itself a purpose.

I don't have music on as a soundtrack to my life either. It's not in the background while I wash up or while I iron or do anything around the house. I'm kind of happy in my own head with my own thoughts. I generally phase any background music out; bewildering for anyone who talks to me about the music playing on a car stereo or in the pub, bar or anywhere else. I won't be listening, I'll be inside my head, doing something completely different. It's the Quaker in me; I learned at a really quite young age how to be still and silent and sift through thoughts, allowing in threads of thinking and inspiration which don't always tangibly seem to stem from inside me, but of course must. It's this ability which makes me comfortable in my own company. A good thing really as it's going to be largely my own company I will be keeping for the next fortnight, and I'm OK with that, really OK with it.

There is, however, a selection of music in Shazza the campervan. Carefully chosen and the favourite travelling up to Scotland and today around the lanes as I made my way to Knochan Crag Car Park, where, by the way, Campervans are permitted to stay overnight, is Frank Turner. Frank is a singer I first heard maybe three or four years ago, with one of my friends who felt he is a true guru of rock & roll. To me, Frank is simply a more current Billy Bragg. Like Billy, if you listen critically you could also reach the conclusion he cannot sing. But check him out and see if you agree for yourself. Linking is too difficult on the move!!!

Anyway, today's Frank song I'm mulling over is him singing about the commonish experience of waking up, not knowing where you are, feeling slightly ashamed, wanting to be in clean clothes, elsewhere and with a charger for your phone. The theme running through the song is of waste, being halfway through the best years of his life.

The song is "The Real Damage" and try as I might this internet connection is having nothing of it when I try to connect to you tube.

“I started out with all my friends and ended up alone, you know I started out so happy now I'm hungover ….”

So, when do those best years start do you think, when do they finish, what are they, and crucially, when indeed are you halfway? I like to think mine started in my twenties and will cruise on until the end of my life. So, am I halfway yet I wonder ...

A Holiday

It is somehow typical of me that the start of my life as a lady of leisure began with … a holiday. I mean, start as you mean to go on. But it was, in fact, an actual holiday, involving flights and a hotel. Something in fact, not typical of me. My life hasn't really been one with standard type holidays; sometimes I wonder if, in fact, anything about my life has ever really been standard. I aspire to standard. Holidays for me have normally involved a tent, and seldom included a flight. I'm either unadventurous or a cheapskate or perhaps just someone who genuinely has never felt the need to pamper herself. Anyway, this was a holiday with a difference. Because we took mountain bikes. It was a guided mountain biking holiday (boot camp) in the Pyrenees.

As is normal for me, I was the slowest in the group, but with a bonus prize of having company at the back of the group from someone who started the holiday as a stranger, but by the end of the third day of riding became a partner in crime, a fellow giggler, and indeed someone with whom I had developed bizarre in jokes with in a very short time. Who knows what the others made of us? As with any cliquey association, shared phrases began to crop up. The language which excludes other people, even if only in simple ways. “it'll be fine”, “we can do this” and the one which made me chuckle so I could hardly breathe was “we're better than this”. And we laughed our way around the trails.

The Pyrenees are high, and there are a lot of them. Gradients steeper and longer than anything I've ever ridden in the UK. Climbs which took what seemed like hours, descents which took more, much much more time than ten minutes, rocks which were in the places the landscape had put them, not man. I rode for longer and I rode closer to my limit for longer than I ever have before. Then, and I was not alone, after three days riding I got sick. Proper sick. The entire hotel was filled with the chorus of vomiting, spewing, hurling and retching. Instead of a rest day, the Wednesday became a sick day, with Thursday a rest day to recover. Yet strangely by Friday, despite being as bloated as a jellyfish and as unable to digest anything as an acid worm bin, I not only managed to ride, but actually felt good, bouncy, in fact. Even though, after much serious consideration over what the hell my body could actually try to digest, I spent the day on chocolate brioche. When in France …

I've been back now for … over a week, I guess. Already life outside work is peculiarly affecting my ability to distinguish days from each other. I felt hugely fit on my return, only to crash myself back to earth with a lacklustre circuit of Llandegla trail centre. But this week, I've been in Scotland and things have changed …

We started

It's been a tremendously lovely two weeks since I left the world of the employed and started my meanderings on foot not just on paper. In a fortnight of two halves I have experimented with living in Shazza, the camper van.  I think for her and me it's the start of something meaningful, potentially with me needing to learn some rudiments of plumbing and electrics, but no matter, it's part of the road to discovery we'll be driving together. 

I am a cautious soul, or at least, I believe I am.  So the first few days with Shazza saw me within my comfort zone of North Wales, safe in the knowledge that if it all went wrong resolution was only a phone call away.  The van surprised me by offering me even more freedom than I've been used to when camping.  Instead of leaving a tent where it is because of the whole horror of picking up a bunch of wet canvas, attempting to stuff it in a bag, worrying about when to air / dry it or the next night's experience of finding the wet nylon (it's really not canvas these days is it?) affectionately wrapping it's clammy lips around your legs, you just drive off.  That's it, no fuss, you drive off.  This meant I went to places I  hadn't known I was going, simply following the mountain weather forecast for the Snowdon area and rejigging plans accordingly.  Three days walking took me up Cnicht (day one), day 2 Moel Hebog (kind of, most of the way until rain and visibility definitely stopped play), and day 3 a walk from Ybygy Ifan most days seeing me with a 700m plus height gain with 3 to 6 hours walking a day.  Just starting out on assessing where exactly my walking fitness lies after the "summer" of building up to the Mary Towneley two days on the bike.  Oooh, and isn't Cnicht a pretty hill?

And then finally ... I left the country ...

Typing this while listening to The Boss singing

"We sit in the car outside your house
I can feel the heat coming 'round"

Instamatic Camera

This weekend I did what's been a long term dream of mine; completed the Mary Towneley loop on the mountain bike.  It's a two day circular ride through the Pennines, and for whatever reason, it has been one of those things which instantly had me yearning to complete it.  Some desires aren't logical, and this was one of those which just resonated with me without having to have a rational drive to do it.  Just something that lit a flame which kept alight.  When I tentatively posted it as a facebook event three months ago I wasn't sure what to expect, and in reality I was so set on it, I would have done it without company.  When this weekend came, the group was a compact threesome, me, Viv & Jason, with Viv's dad joining us on the Sunday, and the weekend couldn't have been more perfect.  After a summer with no summer, the sun shone on us all day Saturday and most of Sunday, interrupted only by brief but heavy rain showers to provide a welcome cooling effect.  It was just a glorious glorious two days at leisurely pace, riding through the landscape, being part of the hills not just an onlooker.  I don't really do onlooker.

I was in the unusual position of being the one with the camera, having been reminded to bring it beforehand.  Normally I don't really bother with pictures; so many friends with photo addiction and so many mobile phones around that I haven't ever felt I've missed anything not taking a camera with me.  But I did as I was told.  Having had cause to reflect on the purpose of photographs, I confess I'm pretty much a non photo person.  When I cleared out Dave's old photo albums they were meaningless to me, lots of landscapes which could have been anywhere, where I didn't know what the background was, what kind of day they formed part of, nothing, just mental blanks because they weren't part of my life or my set of memories.  Looking at my own pictures, I realise that when I take pictures of landscapes or surroundings the impact is equally meaningless. It's just not the way my brain works, I don't remember things through photographs of hills or trees or skies or beaches, I remember things about people.  Yet I don't need photos to remember what's important, there's a whole catalogue stored in my head and it doesn't require a photo to trigger it.  So I don't really take photos.  Words, however, there's a different matter.  Words can conjure up entire scenes, days, moments, everything really, much more so than photos.  That's why I write. Words are my pictures, and if I can't express things right then the memory becomes clouded not crisp and jagged, pointy even.

But yes, I was made to take charge of the camera, although thankfully others did take on the burden occasionally, particularly when I was otherwise engaged ...

And today was brought to you by BabyBird

"You took an instamatic camera
And pulled my sleeves around my heart"

No End

So here we are, the eve of my last day of work after 14 years of being the go to person for the GB Cycling Team.  I suppose it's some kind of an ending, but it really doesn't feel that way.  In many ways, for me, it's a beginning, and because my life is now so wrapped up in cycling, I don't really feel I can ever leave it.  Because cycling is not just an adjunct to my life, it's there, it's with me, and I expect it to stay.

It's a huge beginning, and I anticipate even more reflection than usual as I look at life events and realise that actually, I can't shy away from it, this is a big life event.  At least I more than think it is, I really hope it is.  It's not about change though.  I'm not looking to change me, who I am, what I do, more to embrace my own sense of me-ness.  I know who I am, and I like me.  This is all about me.  Ha, it is, after all, it seems, all about me.  Excellent.

Facebook allows for you to note (and publicise to anyone who cares to read) your life events.  You can put all kinds of crap down there, dates you met friends, dates your first pea crop ripened.  Whatever really.  As planned life events go, this is clearly one.  That's weird, isn't it, a planned life event.  It seems to me most of the biggies are pretty much unplanned.  I didn't plan the day I met my husband or the day that he died.  I didn't expect the day I walked up Tryfan with my friend Tim to turn into what, for me, was a big life event.  For some people things like marriages, christenings, first this, first that, last this, last that are all part of a plan, all events to be celebrated, but somehow they don't really turn out to be the biggest of your life events.  I wouldn't classify many of those traditional moments as my life events, it's other things which make a life event.  Remember doing half of Offa's Dyke Path with Sue, when we took forever to climb up into the Black Mountains and the minute we sat down to eat sandwiches the cloud came and surrounded us so thickly we could hardly see each other, up there on the dark peat pathway, all bleak nothingness for miles which wasn't nothingness, it was Sue and it was me and it was good.

So, all in all, will the planned departure be, in fact, a life event?  Who knows.

And the original of Love is All Around was brought to you by the Troggs.  I googled it so I know it must be true.

"My mind's made up by the way that I feel
There's no beginning, there'll be no end"

Good Girl

Last week at work, and I'm sorting out CDs for the van, and also books.  I've given myself restrictions which wouldn't exist in a world where I owned a Kindle and an i-pod.  It's kind of fun this way, forces me to make proper real decisions in Desert Island discs style, to really consider carefully what works for every occasion.  There's a book basket with interesting contents, it has mountain bike guides, walking guides, climbing guides, a bike haynes manual, just one book of poetry, one book of fiction, one cook book, and it probably speaks volumes about me to anyone who cares to attempt that analysis.

Equally the CD collection is interesting, a mix of old and new and it becomes clear to all that I'm a lyrics girl.  I like edgy twisty songs, I don't like romantic love songs, I like things that make me think.  Equally I love a good rhythm and I quite like a folky tune, and enjoy a beautiful voice, either male or female.  Billy Bragg is not making the cut because he only ticks four out of five boxes, that's how picky I've had to become.  Train's California 37 looks like making the cut, as does Fort Minor, but so too will Bruce Springstein.  Finding something to suit every mood is interesting, will anything classical make it in or perhaps for that there's the radio.  Chumbawamba as a voice from my past might just squeeze in, who knows, and maybe I'll start to breach the rules on just how much space I use to accommodate music.  Because even self imposed rules are there to be broken. No more "ought", "should", "have to" here.

I'm loving my last weeks of handover from one life until the next.  It's been about appreciating what I have and what will stay with me, it's about acknowledging and loving the people who make up my life, my friends who give me joy.  It's about climbing in the sunshine with a lovely lady from Manchester Uni, it's about planning a road ride and having a meal cooked for me with a friend only made in the last year, it's about giggling with a friend of 20 years duration as we organise a weekend, it's about good friends where contact is easy and life is laughter.

And because I'm nostalgic, I bring you Chumbawamba's bad dog.  I still have ticket stubs from the very early 1990s when I first became transfixed by this band.

"This is heaven This is hell This is living This is tale to tell"