As I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud.

As I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud.

Wednesday 12th February 2020

Great Ayton

Alone

Another lone ride for me, The Ginger One  having the misfortune to be attending a mandatory training day at work, eight hours of Powerpoint torture, the sort of tedium which makes counting raindrops on a window appealing (I know because I’ve done it).  The wind is still a bit too brisk to be fun but not enough to prevent me venturing to Guisborough Woods again, this time riding in from Great Ayton. Using the extra miles for training? No, so I could call at the butchers and stock up on delicious concoctions of animal flesh and pastry on the way home. In an attempt to offset the forthcoming pies and pasties, I rode up to Captain Cook’s Monument, the long way round via Kildale, which is a canny amount of climbing for a failed process operator, someone for whom standing up was merely a precursor to coffee and biscuits. 

It was nippy at the Monument, with patches of ice and snow here and there; a couple of photographs later, I was plummeting down the fire road to Gribdale, passing one-time Terra Trailblazer, The Cruncher who was strolling up. Or was he? Despite photographic evidence, he denies walking that route on this day, so we are either into serious doppelganger territory or someone is starting up a Cruncher tribute act. Both are very worrying. 

From the gate at Gribdale, another climb took me onto Newton Moor and across Percy Cross Rigg, from where I descended to Sleddale before climbing again (I know, I’m a machine) across Codhill Heights to reach Guisborough Forest. After a bit of a breather, I threw myself at some of Gizzy’s finest tracks, with all the style and grace of a walrus falling down an iceberg into the sea. Dance like nobody’s watching, sing like nobody’s listening, ride like you have no control of your limbs; my motto for life, although there probably ought to be something about clearing your internet search history too. Who needs to know how much time I spend looking at mountain bike sites? Here’s a true story; many years ago, when the internet first came became a thing - imagine even being old enough to write that sentence - the company, whichever incarnation it was at the time, gave us unlimited internet access, 24 blokes, long boring shifts, the whole online world at our fingertips. The results were entirely predictable, in our naivety we had no idea the usage would be, or even could be, monitored; after a few months the I.T. department sent a report to our manager. “ 23 people spending their shifts looking at hardcore pornography, 1 person looking at mountain bike sites.” What a pervert, mountain bike sites. 

Eventually hunger and tiredness overcame the urge to be muddier and wetter than the average person and I made my way over Roseberry Common back to Great Ayton and the welcoming portal of the butchers, where some of my hard-earned pension found its way into the till in return for meat-based comestibles, some of which didn’t even make it home, finding themselves the ideal accompaniment to the flask of coffee waiting in the car.