The Accidental Charity Cycle Ride Part Two

Me looking in peak condition the night before. I look like I've passed the 

difficult second album and moved onto the obsolete jazz odyssey 

self-published phase.

Any exercise I get is incidental. I'm not unfit, but I'm more of a larker than a lunger. Even when I go for a very occasional run, I take on the challenge rather like an initially reluctant but then quickly overenthusiastic Labrador. And rightly so perhaps. People don't expect a hairy man to be physically active. Very rarely I play football in the park and then stroll around with the football under my arm to try and look like George Best. Onlookers don't think I look like George Best. They think I look like a man who's stolen a football.


Initially, the team plan was to cycle to Paris. Everybody I told said "Wow". And then Will, whose birthday it was, said "What about Newton Abbott" and people said "Why?" so then we changed the destination back to Paris and people said "Wow" again, and then they looked me up and down and said "Really?"

 I was going to wear this, but had to remove it 

under the Obscene Publications Act.

My main concern on the Cycloteam (as we christened ourselves) journey was that I didn't look too shit. I knew that Will and Charlie had racers and knew about things like gears, and wheels, and pedals (bikes basically), while I have a squeaky mountain bike with a light gaffer-taped to the front of the handlebars which makes a noise like an upset mule when you break. (I know it's 'brake', but 'break is more apt.) I thus opted to borrow my brother's touring bike...which he purchased for one hundred quid from a man outside a pub. A superior choice. The amazing thing is that he actually agreed to loan me his bike, which is a bit like letting your only blonde haired child go and play at the sinister old bachelor's gingerbread council flat. However, there was a reluctant moment when he finally parted with his bike...

Ed O:
"I'll take good care of her. She – she won't get a scratch. All right?"

Pip SoLow:
"Right." [pause] "I got your promise now. Not a scratch."

Ed O:
"Can she do the Kessel Run in under 12 parsecs?"

Pip SoLow: 
"Eh?"


Marble Arch to the Devil's Punchbowl

View Day One: Marble Arch to the Devil's Punchbowl in a larger map

Once I'd shaken off the beery fumes and the souls of a hundred angry, Portuguese chickens from the night before (I'm not sure if the chickens were actually Portuguese, but twas the manner of their burial) I hotfooted it down to Marble Arch. 


Weirdly, everything was going strangely smoothly. I had stopped off at Halfords to buy some biking gloves (they made me feel like I was a cyber punk in a Cindi Lauper video...if that ever happened) and a stupidly expensive adapter for my phone charger (for some reason I now forget). By the time I got to Marble Arch, it was midday, blazing hot and, of course, neither Will and Charlie were there. Thus I 'took advantage' (i.e. paid too much) for a meal deal at Sainsburys and then sat on a bench forgetting that I was eating prawn cocktail crisps with my cycling gloves on. I had only learnt one thing: Heavy panniers on bikes are for cycling along with, not wheeling your bicycle around. Any time I stopped the bike when I wasn't on it, one of the panniers would make a break for the ground, making my whole bike topple over in a complex break-dancing move. (Or is it brake-dancing? Imagine that. You know. Bikes and err gangs of Halford and. Forget it.)

The Romans were great believers in augurs and omens. Apparently when lightning struck something, that was a bad thing. When eagles dropped lambs into laps that was a good thing. Except if it was the Ides of February during a religious festival or a Wednesday. It was all very confusing. Nevertheless, if Caesar's Legions had been bike-based, there's no way they would have invaded Gaul after a broken valve before they'd even left. Fortunately, the Cycloteam were made of sterner stuff and the Romans weren't actually bike based. Which is a damn shame as they made some smashing cycle paths.


After going "Ooh" and "aah" a bit after cycling through Richmond Park and passed Hampton Court, the countryside 'opened up' (as they say). It felt great to be at the rudder of a touring bike whipping along the open road. My legs were pumping, my head down, the wind at my back. Even the semi-digested prawn cocktail crisps were aiding my forward momentum through some pretty lethal propellant farts (NB: The whole trip was farty. This is because Charlie's bowels are the result of a Nazi research project to build a mobile gas chamber. That man can bring down whole flocks of migrating gannets with his projectile methane.) If it wasn't for my panniers, which kept trying to climb off my bike rack, we would have been flying. Things changed a little as we headed further into Surrey. So far everything I'd seen had been the typical tasteful yet grand Richmond/ Surrey display of "Ha ha! We're rich and you're not." Strangely though, as you head South, something happens...

That's right. Garden gnomes. Everywhere. Like Terracotta Warriors of the Suburbs. Like the tribal totem poles of the Native Americans, the garden gnome says "Welcome to suburbia...that's right. We've relocated it in glorious Surrey countryside? Why? Well, Croydon got too full." Somehow a prime bit of Surrey land round East Horsley suddenly becomes Essex: Crappy 1970s bungalows, mock Tudor houses, 500 year old pubs gutted and turned into a Harvesters. It's a no-man's land. It's a fucking crime. There should be a mock olde worlde sign up: "Abandon Taste All Ye Who Enter here." Even though it's the middle of the countryside, people who live in the area have to pretend they live in the countryside without actually knowing how to. They all have individually named houses that sounds like they have been made up by a committee of Japanese computer programmers: 'Hay Meadows', 'The Farlings', 'Green Hills', 'Ye Newe Builde Unauthenticke Coachinge Housee'. The old suburban notion of a rural idyll is so strongly held that it has been supplanted onto the actual countryside!


"Wouldn't it be great to live on the countryside? We like to think of '7 The Butterflies' as out little piece of countryside."
"But you live in the countryside."
"Oh, we'd love to, but it's so hard to get property."
"But you do."
"Who's up for the Harvester? Methinks an olde Englishe foaming tankard of John Smiths forsooth."


It's like an American businessman buying Windsor Castle, leveling it, and then rebuilding it to look like Cinderella Castle. Don't smirk. It'll happen.


In England, there is one golden rule: Good area? Good pub. East Horsley. Shitty area deserving of...

Apparently, the building in the background is 

where they refuel their Shire Horses.

I don't need to great detail about the 'Duke of Wellington'. If you like an old pub destroyed by fruit machines, Sky Sports memorabilia; if you like your selection of ales to be like dusty, flat lucozade; if you like your food in a basket with a side salad which resembles green packaging material then this is the place for you. Over the blaring racket of commercial radio, one of the barmaids served someone four cheese pizzas, even though they'd  actually asked for a four-cheese pizza!

"We don't do a four-cheese pizza"

"Yes you do."

"Where? Where on the menu does it say that?"

"There."

"Oh yeah."


My fork handle was broken, but I decided not to bring it up.

English country pubs are one of my very greatest loves. The fact that this was the first pub stop on our tour was heartbreaking. For me, the very existence of this place felt as tasteless and sacrilegious as opening a rib house in Mecca. So, after a couple more pints of brown puddle and a quick cry, we were back on the road. Charlie seemed happy with his bean burger, which subsequently caused the plastic chair he was sitting on to melt under his gaseous onslaught. Incidentally, Charlie is a vegetarian. Vegetarians make compost smells. Meat eaters have decomposing animal sweat. Life on earth is pretty grim whichever way you look at it.


Around the 8th hour of cycling, my legs started to give way. Obviously they had previously been tired, but only warning shot tired. Now they were much more like "Right, look, listen, this is getting silly now. So can we just bloody stop it, okay?" Fortunately, we were approaching the Youth Hostel in an area called the Devil's Punchbowl - which sounds rather like a venereal disease but is actually just a wooded hollow (wahey) in the Surrey countryside. I've noticed that whenever there's a very slight anomaly in the countryside, it's blamed on the 'Devil'.


"Ere, Syrus. Moi Nokia's not gettin none reception, loik."
"That'll be the Devil's no network coverage."


In case you're interested though...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/england/sevenwonders/south/devils_punchbowl/


"The Punchbowl has a long history and tradition. Legend has it that the devil spent his time tormenting the god Thor by pelting him with enormous handfuls of earth, leaving the great bowl that visitors can see today."


It's not really torment is it? It's more ASBO. Given that the devil is supposed to 'torment' people in hell. If all it amounts to is having a brown snowball thrown at you I reckon I'm going to pop off now and covet me an ass. Funnily enough, the BBC are very keen to point out that this isn't what actually happened...


"In reality the large depression was created by erosion"


All right then. Killjoys.


After finding our strange little Youth Hostel at the very bottom of the Punchbowl, we went out to a curry house in Hindhead. The only thing worth saying about that is that cycling for 9 hours a day makes liquid, any liquid, tastes like fucking nectar. Imagine being aged 7 on a hot day coming back after school and gunning squash by the beaker. Drinking so hard and fast that breathing becomes a secondary concern. That's how good it tastes. 


Hindhead itself isn't up to much. We went to a pub. It was a Saturday night. The party people of Hindhead were there: a group of lads drinking shots and bullying each other in the name of mateship, a small group of roll up smoking alternative types, a middle aged couple and an R&B combo playing to no one but acting like they were tearing the place up. Hindhead: a large depression created by total erosion of fun.