‘Pedalling Home’: That feeling of being homeward bound after a long slog, legs tight with fatigue, back stiff, hands raw, mind projecting forward to the warmth of home, a good meal, friends, family. Perhaps the wind is in your face, perhaps its heavy with rain, perhaps you’re wondering why you ever thought that riding bicycles would be fun. But you’re pedalling home and you know that soon, everything will be ok.
‘Pedalling Home: Because cycling allowed me to fall back in love with ‘home’–The West of England, and other parts of Britian. Like walking, cycling can do that because it allows you to take a slower look at places that you might have thought you never had to look at again. It gets to them through the back door and allows you to scurry through them ‘behind the skirting board’, on a hidden network of paths and lanes. You realise you never really knew them that well in the first place, that there was so much more to discover. And then there are the newer places, over the horizon, beyond your comfort zone, and you discover them with the same slowness, smelling the wet leaves as you ride through a forest or dry earth as you skirt a parched field. Your bubble is a bubble of thought, not a physical one. You notice, you stop, you look, you carry on. That’s the beauty of cycling.
‘Pedalling Home’: Because sometimes you feel like ‘pedalling’ your home for another place, bartering it for something fresh. That’s what I’m hoping to do here. I want to write about my adventures on two wheels, both in my homeland, and other places, if health and fitness and so many other things beyond my control allow. It’ll be a long love letter to the places I visit, and to cycling itself.
As I write, it’s hard to forget that I’ll be turning 60 in just over two months. Not a good age to start a blog about cycling. At the moment, the old banger’s working just about ok–a bit breathless on heavy climbs, a bit tense and stiff after a forty mile ride, a bit cranky when Komoot sends me into a brick wall, or an impassable gate. But there are times, when I’m coasting down a shallow incline, or even better on the flat, when the sun is out, the wind is gentle, and a bird zips out from the hedgerow and flies with me for a while, and then I feel like I’m a boy again, ageless. It’s a sweet delusion, and I wouldn’t miss it for the world.
That’s the magic of cycling. The feeling of ‘pedalling home’.
ANDY MORGAN is a writer, journalist and part-time photographer living in Bristol, UK.