Challenge Accepted

Seeing as how I haven't been to work in some months, I might have found my 6:05am alarm confronting. Instead I was wide awake, waiting for it. In Peckham Rye, the hour between six and seven is when the town wakes. Typically, anecdotes about waking hours are littered with reference to birdsong and dawn's lights on dewdrop. In Peckham this same daily waking is denoted by more harried bus activity, and a sudden violent exchange of the orange light of the street lamps for the faceless grey of the creeping dawn. It has the same effect. 

Up. Tea. Tears. Hugs. Departure. 

As you can probably tell from this picture where I look like I've just been electrocuted, I had stage fright. You know, that feeling where someone puts a lid on your guts, you can't catch a single thought & then directly before you're due on stage you're certain that you need to wee so badly you think you're about to burst... but you don't. Yeah. Just like that. Can I do this? Is this happening? What have I forgotten? 

Part of what made this (probably mental but I'm doing it anyway) ride feel possible was my occasional commute to my old work: I figured, if I could do 20kms before breakfast, I could probably do 80kms in a day. Seriously. My logic was that advanced. Aptly, this was how we started, along the deathpath from Peckham to Cricklewood, via Vauxhall, Victoria, Hyde Park Corner, Marble Arch and the Edgware Rd. So many opportunities to die. So many ponies in Central London (including mine). 

Along the way I bored the shit out of Jai with such remembrances as 'that's where I first met Franchester' (my beloved football team of yore), where I'd had dinner with my desertwife's parents some years ago & found the carvers lacking (always an interesting observation from a non-meat eater), the neighbourhood where she & I went  antiques shopping on Bargain Hunt... She's really good at smiling & nodding. Lucky.

We met some legends for breakfast (thanks for meeting us, legends!), made some bike adjustments and set off into the great unknown. Unfortunately, one of these adjustments involved me resetting my bike computer. Like a boss. At this point though, we'd done roughly 20kms. 

As predicted, navigating out of London was tough. It involved the grim underpass of a giant ring road & playing peek-a-boo with a railway line. And it was thankless - I don't mean to say that Jamie was ungrateful for my map reading efforts. To the contrary, in fact. But even in my kindest hour, I say that North West London could best be described in one word: pebbledash. Acres & acres of it. Pebbeldash! Why?? why, dear architects from the past, did you wish for us to live in villages of regurgitated gravel? And how, by what dark magic, by what insidious marketing beast, did you convince us to comply? When I imagine the pebbledash mogul (there must be one, surely?), I imagine a leathery, bleach haired, parachute track suit-wearing hermaphrodite, rolling in gravel, laughing maniacally, shrieking each time a frontage is painted or demolished.

Enough. Here the highlights package frontage rest of the day:

Seeing the underside of the M25 & being so dwarfed as to feel as though I was in Gulliver's travels. 

Cute half pint at roadside pub.

Delightful waypointing stranger outside Chesham. 

Riding up a gorge in the Chilterns with farmland all around. 

Gaining a true appreciation of how ridiculous the Metropolitan Line is - seriously? Amersham??

Arriving at the days end having done 60.2kms since breakfast, inhaling a beer & some chips & starting to feel like this might actually happen (Note: I thought the same about Scotland...) 

Look out, Belfast - I'm on my way. Slowly.