Step carefully into the darkness. Grope for a frosty door guarding the entrance to the hard transport option. Shiver and fumble, with cold fingers, for riding gear. Add an extra layer and wheel out into the pre-dawn light. Clip in and fire shotgun audio – bang, bang – into the still of an icy world.
Crank carefully on white roads. Imagine a painful future through squirming tyres. Feel the freezing sizzle of 23c of slick on nature’s glass. Then, carefully risk upping the power needed to heat freezing extremities. Watch a crescent of fiery orange imperceptibly ascend over the low hills. Marvel as the layers of primary colours – reds and blues – push back the night.
Frozen water from autumnal storms forms winter crop circles. Long shadows are cast from bovinely stupid but contextually perfect cattle. Stop, dismount, abandon the bike to spiders busily icing Mandelbrot patterns. Marvel at this planetary show of fire and ice, until freezing hands and leaving trains drive you on.
Snick a couple of gears. Pity those unknowing stuck behind airbags and fiddling with heater controls. Sweep into the station and catch a little slide on untreated tarmac. Ignore the warmth of a stuffy waiting room. Grin at a hundred identical city coats and useless patent gloves.
Feel the morning blues. And reds – freezing fingers and hot blood mirror the colours of the sky. Stand on the platform now, savour the feelings of being warm and worthy. Remember why you ride a bike. Smile.
Ooh, get him and his romanticism. Nearly made me want to trundle 20 miles each way across deepest fenland and fight with the tractors and sugar beet lorries. Nearly.
And I’d like to say that I like the look of your wanga, but that might be misconstrued.
I knew I shouldn’t have sent you that picture 😉
I can (unromantically) summarise my ride this morning.
Cold, dark, breezy, cold, clammy, cold, unpleasant, cold, face not working, cold —- warm train — cold, near death experience, bored, cold and, er, cold.
So not nearly as good 🙁
My ride to work this morning was:-
“wanker”, “twat”, “kob head”, “wanker”, “nice breasts”, “idiot”, “wanker”, “wanker”
Why can’t people demist BEFORE driving off the drive onto the school run.
I enjoyed the smutty proximity of “wanker” and “nice breasts” in your post there Dave 🙂
Not as much as I enjoyed the nice breasts