Left to My Own Devizes (Saturday 05/05/2018)

The omens were good.

The cycle path from Bristol to Reading was open and Harts Bakery was overflowing with high calorie cycle fodder. The bikes gleamed in the benevolent bank holiday sunshine and National Cycle Route 4 (NCR4) beckoned. Everyone came who said they would, barring a few eleventh hour excuses. No one was crushed by a falling piano or succumbed to recurrent plumbago but a couple, quite honestly, declined in favour of better offers.

A bad excuse is always better than a simple no show and in the end there were four of us. My brother John came from Ross, Mika from Reading; Paul and I made it to the start line from the next post code.

And then, when all seemed to be going so smoothly, fate shoved an unwelcome stick into our collective spokes. The splintering crunch was punctual departure face-planting onto the tarmac of best laid plans.

Distracted by the breakfast of champions, John developed a flat tyre somewhere between tucking into a hectare of Danish pastry and washing down its remnants with an espresso. Inexplicably, the flat became a split which rapidly deteriorated into a gaping tear, all while his bike was propped against the bakery door.

A woman looks on in disbelief.

On discovering this, John stood for a moment in hip handed disbelief before surrendering to the dark side. He immediately blamed his predicament on sabotage by a malicious pensioner while he had been carb-loading.

Dabbing sugary crumbs from our lycra, we watched anger give way to despondency and finally truculent acceptance; perhaps the senior citizen had been unfairly maligned; maybe the tyre was past its best.  In a quiet voice there was even talk of an earlier puncture.

The old folk were off the hook.

After that, it took a brave man to concede that he had also forgotten to pack any spares and, as derision filled the air, he trundled off in search of a replacement.

And so began our 2 hour delayed start, further aggravated by the error of leaving our choice of route to those unfamiliar with the route of choice.

Stolid locals, Paul and I followed the alpha male tourists, tutting and pausing pointedly at every junction in the forlorn hope that sense would prevail and U's would be turned but our pleas fell on deaf ears. The out of towners pressed on but ironically, not out of town.

I first began to doubt Mika's directions when, with a conspiratorial wink, he offered me a swig of his Minttu. Not budget mouthwash, as the name might suggest, but a 50% proof peppermint liqueur.  The industrial strength fun-gargle was developed by top Finnish scientists to give Scandinavian adolescents the twin benefits of fresh breathed confidence supercharged with a Brexit busting shot of Dutch courage. The first sip offered a bouquet of methylated spirits infused with a generous dollop of Colgate. The second ushered me into the arms of minty oblivion. Unsurprisingly, the label was silent as to the risk of blindness.

I drank deeply, coughed toothpaste fumes and about thirteen seconds later, Mika's directional instincts inexplicably seemed to make much more sense.

John, on the other hand, having eventually located a replacement inner tube and re-inflated both his flat tyre and his messianic self-belief, was determined to navigate using the sun. Between the two of them, I am starting to realise why, for much of the next three days, we cycled in large circles.

After a dispiriting loop of east Bristol's light industrial zone , we finally forsook all hope of being reunited with NCR4 and, instead, settled for the more direct but severely pot-holed Avon & Kennett canal path.

My suspension free, hard-tyred hybrid, that seemed such a good idea on the tarmac commute, crashed through the canal side bomb craters like a polystyrene Panzer. After a short while pieces started to violently detach. First, the panier cartwheeled into the nettles, followed by a fractured third of the rear mud guard. Eventually, disabling numbness began to creep into my hands and gusset, kept at bay by vigorous waggling of the affected parts. Only with hindsight do I now understand the alarmed expression of canal-siders as I approached whilst unwittingly simulating something horridly sexual.

After a brief but restorative lunch stop at the Bird in Hand, we finally made progress, stopping again only when we reached the stupefyingly picturesque Dundas aqueduct.

All the major food groups.

Dundas aqueduct.

Finally, after eight and a half hours in the saddle, having travelled a paltry 37 miles as the crow flies, we limped into Devizes, stricken and road soiled after a journey twice that length. 

John departed for home, ostensibly by prior arrangement but really because he was broken and traumatised by day one. Three pairs of Minttu glazed eyes watched him enviously as he wobbled off toward the train station with not a hill, puncture or pothole between him and his quinoa salad and marinated chicken breasts.

The Castle Hotel beckoned the rest of us and after parking our bikes at the rear in an Olympic accumulation of pigeon turds, we showered, put on different dirty clothes and shuffled into the throbbing metropolis.

Should you contemplate visiting Devizes, you will discover a fine town with much to recommend it. 

Devizes.

If, however, you arrive in a state of feverish incontinence you may feel the offerings of a Saturday night on Maryport Street a tad meagre. Only after a detailed  and not entirely helpful rundown of the culinary possibilities from a man rooting through a rubbish bin, did we select the Three Crowns. It turned out to be a surprisingly good steak and a few pints from the Wadworth brewery next store.

Discussion of our distressing odyssey dwindled to the occasional grunt as we replenished the day's calorie deficit. And that is how it should have stayed; until somebody consulted Strava for tomorrow's terrain gradient. 

Heart attack at mile 10.

I know I shouldn't have looked but I did and it was terrible.

Imagine a graphic representation of all your worst fears. It could have been an earthquake, a flash crash or the audio feed from some brutal torture session. Then, with prescient terror, I realised it was a heart rate monitor and the patient was not well.

Not at all well.