Free From The Tyranny Of The Garmin.

Free from the tyranny of the GPS

Monday 10th February 

Pinchinthorpe

The Youth

Now here’s a first, forgot the GPS, free from the tyranny of mph and Strava segments, it is surprisingly liberating to amble about the forest like a sloth with knee pads. Happy New Year to The Youth, who finally turns out for a ride, forty one days into 2020, muttering something about a dislocated shoulder. Any excuse to stay on the settee, kids nowadays. Today was the aftermath of Storm Ciara which battered the country over the weekend, although, as usual, it failed to live up to the media scaremongering. Just imagine the Daily Express if we lived in a country that had proper storms, pensioners would be having coronaries just glancing at the front page. Fifty miles per hour gusts of wind have been forecast for the first half of this week, so where better to go riding than a nice,sheltered forest? Some people may disagree with this, convinced trees are being flung about like skittles in a strike, seeking victims to land on like a WWE wrestler pinning an opponent to the canvas. Cows and petrol tankers circling in the sky, carried up by the twister, sounds like an idea for a Hollywood script. I look at it this way, a million trees, two cyclists, similar to the odds of me riding the Red Bull Rampage or one of The Ginger One’s bets coming good. Out on the moors, where the wind is at its strongest, there is much more chance of being blown off track or even off the bike, been there, done that. Let’s face it, the chance of agonising death or critical injury is all part of the fun. Or is that just me? 

We made our way on fire roads through creaking trees, climbing and descending, cherry-picking trails as we went, choosing the least muddy until we reached the top of The Unsuitables. The Youth has never had the pleasure of The Forgotten Path, so we took ourselves down, at one point, a steep slope leads to a wooden bridge over a gully. I rode down the slippery slope, stopping at the bridge to clear fallen branches courtesy of Storm Ciara, it became apparent the wood, wet and muddy, was slicker than a well lubed eel slithering through a bucket of slime. Discretion being the better part of sexagenarianism and all that, I walked across and got the GoPro set up, ready for The Youth to play his part in an upcoming viral video. 

He didn’t disappoint, a double dose of falls, the latter a spectacular Superman as his bike slid sideways into the abyss. Some less treacherous riding took us to the far end of the forest, approaching the concrete road, where we had a ride down some of the ‘one man and his dog’ trails, meeting one man and his dog part of the way down, the trail builder himself. I’m sure he will not mind me telling the world (well, the two or three people who read this rubbish) that he is seventy eight years old, still building, overjoyed that people enjoy riding his trails and he had Max the saluki, who features in so many trail names, with him. We chatted for a while, rode a few of his trails but soon our fun had to end because The Youth still indulges in an arcane practice known as work. 

Work? I can recall it in fleeting fragments, obscure memories like in a dream which disappear on waking. Seriously though, after almost eighteen months of retirement, I keep dreaming that employment still has me in its grasp and I’m rushing about trying to get there for the start of the shift. Maybe it is Imposter Syndrome and I can’t consider myself a proper pensioner until there is wardrobe full of beige clothes in the bedroom and a Hyundai i10 in the garage. A Hyundai i10 specially modified to be only capable of two thirds of the speed limit of whatever road it is driving along, where any gears in advance of third are an optional extra and is usually followed by a procession of motorists sending mental death rays to the front.

Spring is coming...