LEJOG 2021 – Why?

The pandemic’s to blame.

Before that little bug turned up, cycling for me was like driving a car: purely functional. I only ever got on two wheels to go to the city centre and do a bit of shopping, or avoid parking hassles at a gig, or as a way of drinking without being pulled over by the rozzers on the way home.

Then, in that glorious spring of 2020, cycling became my ticket to freedom.

Remember how we had to pretend we were either shopping or taking exercise if we wanted to feel the sun on our faces and the wind in our hair? Thanks Boris…that was the only loophole I needed. It started with rides up to the downs in Bristol, then out to the ancient stone circle at Stanton Drew (closed due to Covid), and then, over a sweltering July weekend, a ride to London to visit my mum (the first time I’d seen her for months). After that it became a habit

A few things dawned: you can go very far on two wheels, not just down to the centre but into the next county, maybe even the next country. Just pack your panniers, fill your water bottles and pedal. And it was a fine way to travel, not just because you were making good use of aging muscles and lungs, but because you saw your home country in a completely new way – through the back door, on hidden lanes and tracks, at a pace that allowed you to soak in it and soak it in.

I loved it so much I soon had a yearning to go large. And in Britain, you don’t get larger than Land’s End to John O’Groats. The pandemic has closed down so many avenues to adventure, or littered them with tedious obstacles in the form of lateral flow tests, quarantining, hostile natives, red lists and the like. So going the furthest you could go without a passport appealed. And the phrase has a ring about it doesn’t it? ‘Land’s End to John O’Groats.’ A ring of craziness, of something memorable, of going large.

“In that glorious spring of 2020, cycling become a ticket to freedom.”

That ring is also useful if you want people to donate to a cause. There was little doubt what my chosen cause would be. I’d worked as a volunteer for Bristol Refugee Rights in 2018 for six months before work pressure gobbled up the one morning in the week I could spare. I was a ‘welcomer’, which meant I had to hang out at BRR’s Welcome Centre and talk to the members, who were all refugees and asylum seekers with various degrees of settled status. The work gave me the same pleasure you get when you travel and strike up conversations with complete strangers who tell you stories about places you’ve most likely never been to. The staff were kind-hearted and selfless. Good people. The impetus behind the whole operation was so simple: just welcome people who came from afar, often through unimaginable war and horror. Give them the treatment you’d want if you were in their shoes.

Then the idea occurred (maybe it was mine or my friend Jamie’s, I can’t remember) to take one of the members with us. It was all very well for us to gambol across the country, having a ball, going large, ostensibly just to ‘help’ a group of people who, through no fault of their own, couldn’t really dream of ever doing what we were doing. It seemed wrong somehow, lopsided. Many refugees and asylum seekers who come to this country end up in emergency government shelters, or on the floors of friends and relatives, or on the street. Most of them only see the less joojy parts of inner cities, or large towns. They never get a chance to really appreciate the country to which they’ve come to for refuge, in such dire circumstances, and see how beautiful it can be.

I mentioned this idea in a casual, maybe-maybe-not kind of way, to Asli Tatliadim, who was managing communications for BRR at the time. ‘I’ve got just the person,’ she said without missing a beat. Then she added, ‘but I don’t think he likes cycling…I’ll check.’ And so I went to meet Tim-Fred Jatto who was, as Asli had promised, ‘just the right person’: a very polite and personable young guy who’d come to the UK from Nigeria with his family in 2011 and spent nine long years fighting for the leave to remain. And he was a fitness instructor too!

Turns out that he wasn’t averse to cycling; he just hadn’t done much of it. That was remedied by cycling to Bath from Bristol along the cycle track five days a week, to work in gym there. No worries about Tim…he’ll pedal the rest of us off the map!

During one of my regular stoop gatherings at my neighbours Phil and Jackie, another valuable pressure valve for the soul over the past 18 months, I mentioned casually that I wanted to try LEJOG and Phil said ‘I’ll come with you.’ Simple as that. He’s a builder, born and bred, with a supernatural lung capacity and the biggest trove of stories and yarns I’ve ever known someone to have. In other words, the perfect LEJOG companion. Then Jules, one of my oldest friends, told me he like to come too, either part of the way or all the way, depending on his shifts with the South Western Ambulance Service. Always good to have a paramedic with you when you’re hauling 20kg and you’re own old bones up a hill on the back of bike.

So there you have it: the four pedalling musketeers. All geared up and ready for the off. T minus sixty two hours and counting.

Que sera sera…

ANDY MORGAN is a writer, journalist and part-time photographer living in Bristol, UK.