Hello friends,
I write to you from the middle of what we’re calling Fool’s Spring – it’s only the middle of February, but the air is warm, the sun’s shining, and all of a sudden there are snowdrops and crocuses bursting out of the ground. There’s almost certainly more of winter to come, but this feels like a welcome interlude (or a worrying indicator of climate change – take your pick), and meant that a lot of yesterday’s final Northern Creative ride in the Peak District could be conducted without gloves on.
This time we were joined by Stefan Amato of Pannier, who brought along mini watercolour sets, and much to my delight, I managed to produce this.
I’ve really enjoyed this six-week course, and although my main intention was to facilitate other people’s creativity, I’ve ended up getting a lot more out of the programme personally than I ever expected to. I’m sure we’ll be running it again - and we’ll also consider doing it at different times of year, and in different parts of the country. Thank you to everyone who signed up, for smiling through the muddiest of January rides, for covering the Rapha clubhouse in multi-coloured post-its, and for being so generous with your time, company and inspiration.
It was good to be reminded that you can often get far more out of a bike ride if you slow down, stop frequently, and focus on taking in your surroundings rather than just getting to the end as quickly as possible.
Which leads me to this week’s musings:
Naively, I never believed this would happen to me, but I’m slowing down. You know this already, of course, if you’ve been reading for any length of time. My energy, my lung capacity, and my ability to basically keep riding my bike for as long as I want to haven’t been the same since I caught COVID in summer 2022, though I’m still optimistic they’ll return eventually.
I’m far less dismayed by this than I would ever have expected to be – so perhaps this came at the right moment, because for most of the time I’ve been a cyclist, the thought of having to do less of it struck horror into my mind. I just wouldn’t cope with life, I thought, if for whatever reason I had to subtract the time I spend on the bike. This meant I was increasing cautious about injuries (a good thing), but also, I would suspect, that I often cycled far more than I needed to, partly with the flawed logic that, if a thing was good for me, then the more I did of it the better, and partly because riding myself to exhaustion was a good way of holding my problems at arm’s length for a while. I didn’t know I was doing any of this at the time, but I’m now interested to note that doing less cycling has not had the devastating effect on my mood that I thought it would.
In fact, I’m more contented than I’ve felt for years.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Unfinished Journeys to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.