Sometimes a place can just ‘feel’ different, and for no immediately obvious reason.

The road looks familiar, the countryside still farmland and leafy. But there is a difference.

I don’t want to fall into the trap of thinking that ‘city = bad, country = good’; they are not binary moral opposites, and it is easy to imagine both of them through my own cultural lens, and to do so nostalgically. I am from Cornwall and have lived in London, Portsmouth, Plymouth and Jeddah. So, I carry baggage when nearing the cities.

So, as we left King’s Lynn and headed south, the nearer we got to Essex and Greater London, the more we felt we had entered a different country from the one we have been exploring. The North-South gap has often been written about, but I now think there is a West-East gap, but it’s not a clean divide. If I was pushed, I would draw a line somewhere around the home counties from Essex and over down through Hampshire.

This feeling, I think, was triggered by our riding on busier roads when the gaps between vehicles become smaller, as drivers like to fill in the comfort and safety gap I create around my bike. All the vehicles seem to have somewhere to go, and in a hurry. At one point, a driver joined the carriageway from a slip road on my left, oblivious to the fact that I was already in that space. We develop a sixth sense and can often tell when this is going to happen; I had already spotted the potential for infringement, and so I had taken precautions.

I could easily say that in this leg of the journey people became less friendly, but that would be unfair. What changed, I think, was the culture and the social environment we now had entered. There is a slower Britain of small towns, ports, valleys, mountains and cafés, places where conversation, talking with strangers, perhaps is more common. That was behind us. I could now feel the pull of London, a high-cost, high-speed, high-pressure England.

This is Mordor, and we had left the Shire.

On a 125, you feel this change through the handlebars. There is more congestion manifesting as ill-mannered driving. London is no longer an abstraction far away; the city and its environs are that white van at speed, six feet from your back wheel. I yearned for the serenity of the Wye Valley, of Glen Coe, of the Northumberland Moors.

Is this only my perception? Am I making this up? I think not. We all know that the London–South East hub is a more pressurised, metropolitan, high-density, high-cost, high-mobility environment. It is the wealth-creating core of the country where ambition comes to flourish and where individualism reigns. I felt the oppression of the capital looming ahead of us, made worse by the heatwave that had also turned up. There are good reasons, though, for our feelings. We are not just country bumpkins ‘up country’ for the first time.

We know London is one of the most congested driving cities in the United Kingdom, but after looking up some figures…we should include Europe as well. Data from TomTom puts average congestion at about fifty per cent, with a 6-mile trip taking 36 minutes 22 seconds on average. Think about that…six minutes to go one mile! My geriatric flea-bitten donkey urinates faster than that. Depending on your age, you could do the same mile in 15-18 minutes. It gets worse in the evening rush hour when your dinner is getting cold; speeds drop to around 8 mph.

These road conditions create impatience, the tightening of vehicles, tailgating, swift lane switching, and constant tactical driving. On a 125cc motorcycle, we can feel all of that as we are not protected by the car’s comfort box.

If you take an evening stroll down to Baripper Harbour, or linger in Penponds Woods, or stop in the doorway of the Camborne Spoons, you will come across characters who may stop to talk. They are statistically more likely to trust you than the scally in Southwark, or the suit in South Kensington. Those of us who know both country and city will have experienced how high-density, high-turnover urban life changes the ordinary rules of social lives. I have heard people say that in St Ives and Cornwall, for example, people are less guarded, less time-defensive, and more likely to enter casual interaction with strangers, than where they currently live. We found easy conversation in previous days ‘up north’.

Greater London, and the home counties, is a commuter belt, characterised by being a high-value property market, and transport/finance/innovation hub. It is harder for me to think of it as a ‘place’ for community, but of course many communities do exist and thrive within its borders. That’s my prejudice, and I have many more.

But it ain’t just me. I’ve read about Doreen Massey’s book ‘World City’. London is not only the capital city but also a global city. Its wealth, finance, property markets and governance (public and private) reshape the rest of the country. Massey suggests that London’s global role produces uneven flows of money, labour, property speculation and symbolic power that alter the texture of life both inside and beyond the capital. As we ride from King’s Lynn into the world city’s orbit, perhaps that is also what I am feeling.

We left slower, more understandable, more recognisable, often more locally rooted towns and villages and rode into a high-pressure social, economic, and cultural environment. We felt all of that while riding towards ‘Mordor’ on the A12, which sometimes resembled a motorway rather than the rural A470 in Wales. The 125s do not dominate a space; few motorcycles do. That physicality and compression on the road, as delivery vans and trucks come into close contact, the impatience and transactional nature of the drivers became felt more immediately.

And yet.

Arriving at Biggin Hill airport cafe for a well-earned coffee (and the hope of seeing a Spitfire), we met a man who, upon seeing our bikes, struck up a conversation and immediately put his hand in his pocket to donate. A spontaneous act of stranger generosity not normally associated with London city dwellers, is my prejudiced opinion.

After a welcome rest day, we headed off in the heatwave towards the Kent countryside and down to the South Coast to Hastings before turning towards Brighton. To my fleeting notice as I ride through, Brighton and Hastings are not merely ‘chalk and cheese’. As I have already felt in Morecambe and Bridlington, they are two seaside towns that have been developed or forgotten by the flow of capital decided often in the Capital. Brighton looks smart and affluent, and has been pulled into the London lifestyle economy; Hastings still carries more visible signs of decline, low wages, insecure work and underinvestment. Brighton is what happens when the seaside becomes an asset class. Hastings is what happens when the seaside is left to make do. Why this difference? I don’t know. Perhaps there is room and cash for only one ‘Brighton’ on the south coast? However, I suspect that it comes down to history, connectivity and myth. Brighton has the road and rail connections, higher education, a famous brand and a labour market to reinvent a seaside decline into a metropolitan destination. Hastings had a battle (a long time ago), it had Victorian and Edwardian grandeur, its Norman history and culture, but also not as strong a transport link to London than Brighton. It also inherited more deprivation. So Brighton has been gentrified into confidence, while Hastings was only partially gentrified into a contradiction.

This is a story all over the country: development and neglect, the uneven twin daughters of social, political, technological and economic changes, of forces beyond ordinary people’s control. This is something which I see all too often in Cornwall. It is irritating and patronising to blame people, or even to praise people, for where they live, as most of them are the beneficiaries or otherwise of luck, of their accident of birth, of past family decisions, of decisions made in far away places.

Perhaps this is one reason why the country feels less united, more fragmented, more resentful? It is a paradox. Stand well back, and the big picture of the United Kingdom’s built environment shows us an increasingly ugly scene; once grand buildings falling into disrepair and ruin, road surfaces dangerously disintegrating, ugly town centres sucking hope from struggling communities. Socially, there is a disunity, as wealth ignores poverty even when living side by side. It is a picture with a dirty, damaged frame with just the remnants of gold leaf still visible.

Close up, however, and you will still see warmth, generosity and honesty of ordinary people living ordinary lives. You will see landscapes of great beauty untouched by the ravages of modernity, and you will see repair to road surfaces for which our little tyres give thanks; you will see some town centres rebuilding and offering hope, passion and connection.

Meanwhile we continue mile after mile, into the setting sun, we continue to travel west to bypass Portsmouth and Southampton and on towards Portland.

And, as we head towards the South West, the feelings begin to change.

next….

This is England.

In 1980, I found myself in South East London, listening to the older generation talking about “London ain’t what it used to be, it’s changed”, said with a tone of disappointment and nostalgia. I have remembered that conversation for the following forty years, and today I not only remember it, but I also hear it again. This time substitute ‘London’ for ‘England’ or ‘my country’.

We have crossed Wales and circumnavigated Scotland and have ridden down the east coast of England, through the Northumberland Moors to County Durham, to the rise of the North York Moors ahead and on towards the Yorkshire coast; through the rolling farmland of the Lincolnshire Wolds and on into flatlands and into Norfolk, Suffolk and the rurality of Essex and then the creeping conurbations of Greater London. Throughout this time over the past five days, I have noticed something different in the eastern part of the country.

Flags.

Specifically, flags on lamp posts and at roundabouts.

There are plenty of flags in Wales and Scotland, but there always have been. So, specifically, it is the flag of St George and the Union Flag in small English towns and villages. Not all of course, but enough to attract attention.

In other foreign contexts, the cloth fluttered on its post in the evening breeze high above the gathered heads below. The waning rays of a hot tropical sun illuminated the patchwork of blue, red and white from behind it, bestowing a strange spiritual form in contradistinction to its humble origins as a piece of hand-stitched woven fabric in a small factory in a small English town in Buckinghamshire. The clink of the rope as it touches the flagpole tinkles over the air, evoking melancholy in the hardest of hearts, as for the very last time this hallowed cloth is lowered into the hands of misty–eyed celebrants. No more shall it flutter imperiously over the ships and barracks of a faraway island nation.

Shall we see it’s like again? Upstart colonists burned it, European rivals shot at it, and indigenous peoples did not recognise it. A flag is without honour except in its home, at the cricket club, at the village fête, above the village church tower or high over the Thames as Victoria Tower casts its long historical and physical shadow in the fading light of evening.

There are those for whom “This is England”. A symbol of majesty, and military might with the power to make a sergeant major’s chest burst with pride, or to keep a boot-strapped, shaven-headed racist warm as he drapes it around his shoulders before kicking in the head a descendant of a country once raped for its diamonds, silver, tea and opium. But let not its history be forgotten, or its colours deceive. For every symbolic moment of an Olympic gold medal won, there was a gold medallion stolen. Other things were stolen; the food from an Irish peasant’s mouth, the life of a Punjabi child at prayer, and the freedom of an African slave to dream.

This was the price of progress and of wealth accumulation. One cannot build Liverpool, London or Bristol without enterprise, courage, dreams, innovation and blood.

Red is its cross. For many, it was the crucifixion of dreams; it was the blood-soaked stain of Empire. Blue is its background, the sea of drowned dreams and the bearer of pirate plunder. White is its virginity, declaring innocence of its penetration into the moist tropical interiors of foreign lands to dispossess and to govern.

But, I hear you say, history was then, this is now. Rejoice, rejoice in our newfound freedom from tyranny and the taking back of sovereignty. We shall again ‘rule the waves’, albeit they are merely the ripples on the Serpentine or of the gentle wind-flecked village pond in Hampshire.

For many, putting flags on lamp posts - is this what it means? You have to ask them, or listen to their political mouthpieces.

Flags are just pieces of cloth, but they carry multiple meanings for multiple groups within a nation. Those scaling lamposts put them up to send a message, as that is the point. They are in effect saying “This is England”, but I have to ask why they feel it necessary to declare it in this manner?

Cornwall has its flag, and for a minority, it stands for independence from England, and independence not based on ethnicity but on location. I have never read or heard the pro-independence party of Cornwall, ‘Mebyon Kernow’, state that Cornwall should ‘remain a white Christian nation’.

Today, the flag is a Cornish brand and can be seen to sell everything from pasties to porcelain, from Porthcurno to Padstow. No one minds or cares that the flag flies in just about every town and village from the Lizard to Bude. Everyone, except the curmudgeon old Trevaskis in Redruth (who still remembers the horrors of Trelawney’s army), knows what it means - the taste of a cream tea, rugby, and thieving seagulls.

“This is England”.

What England? I hear people say that ‘our’ culture is being eradicated. The claim is that England has been stolen by elites, migrants, multiculturalism, secular liberalism and weak government; the “real people” must recover it through patriotism, Christian-coded identity, hard borders and electoral mobilisation. Some have explicitly argued, “Are you ready for the Battle of Britain?” and “we are going to lose our country forever” (if you are not). They also say immigration is changing the moral and cultural ownership of the country.

This latter claim may indeed be true in small pockets of larger cities, but immigration has always changed the moral and cultural context of the United Kingdom, and it has done so for several centuries now. Few of us relish change, and we tend to cling to what we know, so we feel the changes viscerally.

We have ridden through country towns and villages with greens, Anglican churches, and traditional pubs serving beer and cider. Some even have a post office. Everywhere, ‘The Full English’ (and its Welsh and Scottish variants) still serves sausages (Lincolnshire, Cumberland and Oxford), with bacon, stornoway back pudding, eggs, beans, mushrooms and hash browns. Menus up and down the country offered pies, fish and chips and steak. We have seen Indian, Chinese, and Italian restaurants that have existed for over fifty years.

The only flags we have seen are the Welsh Red Dragon, the Saltire, the St George and the Union. I have not seen any other flag. At tourist hotspots, we have seen families from non-white backgrounds who sound and dress just like us (but without the layer of dust from days of motorcycling upon them). I have not seen a mosque, a gurudwara, or a synagogue anywhere. English is spoken everywhere by everybody, always. The church is open, picnics by the rivers are still available, and cricket is still being played. You can watch Songs of Praise, The Antiques Roadshow, and ‘Bangers and Cash’. Dominoes, Darts and Cheese and Onion crisps are still staples. We have met and spoken to many people from Lands End to John o’Groats and back down to Bromley. Most, if not all of them, were white, spoke English either with a regional accent or ‘Standard British English’.

You can say anything you like, and have your views amplified by very well-funded TV channels, national newspapers and online forums; the only restriction (that has existed for decades) is inciting hate and violence, but even that gets past the ‘censors’ when spoken with a dog whistle code. We have never been able to say what we like without consequences, as Oswald Mosley found out.

And that is why some fly a flag - because it symbolises in a piece of cloth petty nationalism and not patriotism, ethnic purity and not diversity, exclusion and not inclusion, and all things that most people in England would see as very un-British.

While I accept the claims that some flag flyers make about elite capture and dispossession of once proud towns and of political parties, and the denigration of ordinary working-class culture, England is not being lost. The country changes, and always has done. The more outrageous claims are just that. As far as I am aware, the law of England and Wales is based upon the wishes of Parliament; it is a matter of statute. Nothing else has legal authority.

George Orwell defined the "English genius" as a unique blend of liberty, hypocrisy, mildness, and deeply ingrained tradition. I think we are still seeing those characteristics in the material and social fabric of the country we pass through today. And yet, in 2026, a flag-waving crowd in London was told that they looked “for the first time in a very long time like the place that I remember” and “a place that we can all call home.” It was code for white, ‘christian’ and ethnically pure.

I see a very different divide, one visible in Bridlington and Richmond -upon-Thames, in Redruth and the Roseland, in Hull and Harrogate. It is a divide that has always existed and one that serves some very well indeed. You can see it at Waitrose, in white teeth and in houses in the cities, towns, suburbs and villages. This divide is everywhere, all across the United Kingdom.

We have only touched upon this divide in passing with the people we have met. Most are warm-hearted, generous, and interested in the ride. A very few have hinted at the wider sense of ‘loss’, but overall, nothing but generosity and acceptance. Of course, I have to admit our sample of the country is not scientific, and that we both look and sound “English’, that is a design flaw in my analysis of our culture experienced now over 2,300 miles.

When the cultural theorist Raymond Williams wrote "Culture is ordinary," he meant that culture is not a luxury reserved for the elite, but a lived, everyday experience shared by all people. As such, when everyday habits change, the culture changes. It always has and always will. Just as my generation thought tea dances quaint, future generations will look upon the Rave culture of the 80’s and 90’s as passé.

I should perhaps give the last word to George Orwell:

He wrote about England as a unique, living entity defined by a specific culture and a paradoxical, dysfunctional family structure (he meant class). In The Lion and the Unicorn, he describes the country as a “family with the wrong members in control”—deeply divided by class, yet united by a “private language and its common memories” that closes ranks in times of danger. He also wrote that Englishness lies in native, non-official traditions like the pub, football, and the “nice cup of tea”. What about a Tikka Masala? Orwell did not see English identity as a fixed historical artefact, but as a living, evolving culture (just as Raymond Williams argues) that constantly absorbs new influences while maintaining its distinct "flavour." He emphasised that English culture is held together by the private habits of ordinary people rather than any official state ideology. Orwell was a fierce critic of rigid, exclusionary nationalism and would probably accept Chicken Tikka Masala as a quintessentially English phenomenon.

I agree.

Both Orwell and Williams looked at post-war Britain and realised that the true identity of the nation was found in the habits of its ordinary citizens (like drinking tea or going to the pub), rather than in the grand speeches of its politicians or the tastes of high society. I’d add that well-funded grifters who sell division and fear and a past that never existed, although feeding into the habits of some ordinary people, are thoroughly un-English.

There is no need to put up a flag on a lamp post.

Calm down and have a nice cup of tea (or coffee, or chai, or an oat milk skinny latte), you are not ‘being replaced’.

In the distance, we see a dark curtain of cloud lazily dumping water. The road into Bridlington, in the sunshine, is taking us straight towards it.

“Shall we stop and put our rain gear on?”

“Nah, we are nearly there; that rain is a few more miles away”

Sure enough, we enter Bridlington’s outskirts in the dry. Overcast, yes, but dry. An hour or so earlier, we had traversed Scarborough. There was no Fair; there was no parsley, sage, rosemary or thyme either. One parade of ‘shops’ we rode through looked more like inner-city deprivation instead of a holiday destination. Nothing says ‘Welcome to Scarborough’ like peeling paint, rotting wooden balconies and vape shops. Bridlington similarly presented itself, and evidence of neglect and abandonment was to be seen even down to the town centre and harbour, where one would expect most prosperity to be found.

We parked the bikes outside a barber’s, and I counted the raindrops falling into a mucky kerbside puddle. Behind me was a “JOKE SHOP” with ‘kiss me quick hats’ and a notice saying “Adult Toys Inside”. It wasn’t remotely funny, and it was also closed. Across the street was a ‘pub’, selling cheap lager and ennui. It is the sort of pub that was once something, but today can’t afford to paint the windows.

Seaside towns such as Bridlington would hold memories for many, it would have had fun, beauty and possibility. Today, it is tired. It looks arthritic and sclerotic, and if it were a patient, it would need urgent assessment and immediate care rather than being left home alone to despair and rot. St George’s and the Union flag flutter in defiance from lamposts, but these are often looking wind-stripped and ragged.

As we have travelled, we have seen similar evidence everywhere, with a few exceptions that are doing well. Bridlington is not unique, so there is something else going on across the United Kingdom…something else sits underneath the surface. Some reach for answers to that ‘something’ that focuses on the victims as cause rather than as effect, but they are completely missing the point. In part because many of them benefit from the very structures and processes that have brought Bridlington down.

When I ride, I don’t only see the surface - the landscape, the pothole, the beauty and the deprivation, I also see the sort of society that creates that surface experience. A pothole is not just evidence of failure - it is evidence of a much wider malaise, a malaise born of many factors a local authority has no control over.

Camborne, Chepstow, Llandrindod Wells, Morecambe, Scarborough, and Bridlington are communities affected over several decades, and some people place the start of major changes with the loss of key industries (coal, tin, engineering, tourism), in which we see once busy sites with highly skilled jobs now turned into retail parks with lower wages. We have all seen huge technological changes that have allowed ease of access online, planning that facilitated the shift to out-of-town centres, where the car is king and footfall follows. EasyJet and Ryanair fly us to Greece and Spain cheaply, rather than a B and B in Bridlington, which offers a rain-soaked bag of fish and chips. Private investment turns to places where it can still extract profit, such as London and the Affluent South East, the Waitrose centres of the Universe, such as Richmond Upon Thames. Housing for low-income people was sold off, has become more expensive and less secure. Property ownership is fragmented and often absentee.

What looks like, on the surface, a town where people do not care and have given up, is more to do with the social forces they have no control over. Bridlington makes these forces visible. I don’t think it is a coincidence that wealth and capital coagulate around places like Cambridge, London, Bristol, Manchester, and York. Capital has not flown away from the UK, but it is highly selective. Where there is a university, skilled labour, heritage, transport links, branding power and obvious returns, then capital will flow. Places outside that circuit are left to bid, plead, decline or reinvent themselves on scraps. The problem is not that Britain has no money. The problem is that money has a map, and many seaside towns are not on it. Britain does not have a simple national economy; it has a core-periphery economy. London and the South East act as the command centre, while many coastal, rural and post-industrial places function as economic margins

“Things ain’t like they used to be”.

“This place has changed…”

“I remember when…”

These cliches are used too often, and some carry a loaded meaning. The speaker (usually older) appears to wear rose-tinted spectacles, but misremembers the poverty, cold housing, seasonal work, the class system, the narrow-mindedness and boredom.

Within the nuance, there is truth to looking back. Places used to have a function; the town centre meant something. It was a place to see and be seen. to meet neighbours and colleagues for gossip. It was a place for public service, somewhere teenagers could hang out and make friends. It had banks, post offices, cafes, libraries, buses and spaces for the older persons’ routines and chance meetings. Shops were painted, roads were swept, and weeds were got rid of.

We have lost not just retail spaces, but civic life as well. There is a case for arguing that society in many places has suffered a dramatic decline in "social capital", in places where the networks of trust, civic engagement, and community connection that bind people together.

I see a couple walking towards us in the rain. They have been shopping and are carrying two carrier bags. He is dressed in trainers designed for Sunset Boulevard, not a rain-soaked, litter-stained street. They are both soaked to the core, his hair hanging lank wet against his forehead, their ‘coats’ are as flimsy as a spider’s web in a force ten gale. They have that air of defeat about them: the overcast dark sky matching their hopes. Perhaps I am wrong, perhaps they are living their best lives and have chosen Bridlington to Benidorm?

So, how did Bridlington get to this place? One factor is the move to the digital marketplace. Our phones are retail spaces; banks, travel agents, the newsagents, and a social network in our homes and into our pockets. We are trading efficiency and a frictionless service for community and meeting real people in slow, inefficient time. Queue at the Post Office? No thanks. The cost of convenience is increasing isolation and boarded-up shops.

In addition, instead of walking (walk?) through a town centre and passing local shops, cafés and public buildings, we drive to the out-of-town retail park, buy what we need, and leave. Some have argued that car culture has created a dependency that has radically reshaped our society. Our love affair with the car fosters social isolation, deepens inequalities by marginalising non-drivers, and occupies a disproportionate amount of public space with private infrastructure.

Places like Bridlington have an additional difficulty because they were developed to meet patterns of leisure that have now changed. The arrival of a railway station used to mean prosperity and tourism. People enjoyed fish and chips on the prom, amusement arcades and the fun fair. Hotels and BnBs sprung up to cater for this trade. Not now. Cheap flights, package holidays, changing tastes and insecure incomes altered that world. Sangria and Sex on the Beach have replaced a pint of bitter and cockles. We ride through to town, and we can see the physical inheritance of mass seaside tourism, but not always the income base that sustained it. Leisure has packed its bags and moved to Tenerife.

I can imagine a boardroom in the City of London. On the agenda is the next investment opportunity and considerations of Return on Investment. The CEO and his team are mainly interested in where value can be extracted. Private Equity and Venture Capital do not always operate as a social enterprise focused on the needs of ordinary people. They may not know where Bridlington is or that it requires patient, long-term, socially useful investment. However, the market likes assets that can be sweated, flipped, converted, rented, leveraged or subsidised. The hard miles of civic repair are often not profitable enough to attract attention.

I once sat in a bar in St Ives and wondered, “Who owns all of these places?” I can ask the same of Bridlington. The answer is not easy unless you want to spend a lot of money on interrogating the Land Registry database. But it is safe to say that many high streets are legally and economically many things. They have different landlords, leases, and incentives. Some owners live in the town and care. Others live in the Cotswolds or Jersey. You can see that some cannot afford the necessary repairs, while others hold onto property for speculative reasons that can leave a site derelict for decades. This results in making an overall recovery plan very difficult. Fragmented ownership and fragmented aims and values make regeneration a challenge.

All of this I’ve seen around the country as we ride. There is an argument that people should just leave the deprivation and dereliction of such places and go to where the opportunity, wages and affluence are. There is an argument that capital reallocates resources in an efficient way, and therefore, Bridlington should just shut up shop as it is no longer needed or profitable. I tend to think that a town is not just a market; it is a place where people come together for social life. Its value is not just economic, it is also social (if you think that matters?). Many people feel the same, and that is why they will not or cannot move easily. There is family, commitment, belonging and memory. None of that matters to the capital market. That is all inefficient emotional nonsense. I tend to see a town like Bridlington as a moral document, as a metaphor for what we value and what we do not. These towns have not simply failed; they have been caught between an old economic model and a new one that has little use for them unless profit can be extracted.

What looks like decline is better understood as disinvestment plus functional redundancy: buildings, streets and institutions built for one social order are now trying to survive in another.

In the morning, it is raining hard. We load up the bikes and prepare to drive south, towards the money and the ambition and the opportunities. We drive over the Humber Bridge and on towards the Lincolnshire Wolds and finally to King’s Lynn. The lad behind the bar at the Swan Inn tells us that everyone in King’s Lynn migrates to Cambridge, Norwich and Ely. It is the same story. A once thriving town, King's Lynn's wealth was historically built on the medieval wool trade and its status as a major port connected to the Hanseatic League. Today, the town acts as a local sub-regional hub facing modern high street pressures, but it is supported by multi-million-pound government-funded regeneration schemes.

We have seen many boarded-up shops, but they are not just boarded up. They are signs of broken connections: between economy and place, capital and care, planning and community, consumption and citizenship.

Many a town asks a simple question:

Do we want places to live in, or merely assets to extract from?

That is the argument.

Tomorrow we ride to the Capital, where Capital Thrives.

Next:

It is sometimes very difficult to have any faith in people, in humanity as a whole. There are over seven billion of us on the planet, and at times it feels like seven billion semi-evolved monkeys are trying to out ‘banana’ each other. They do this by throwing bananas at the other monkey’s head, and then wondering why they have no bananas left to throw when the sun sets.

If you care to look, we are told about the horrors in faraway places, and of hate and fear marching with flags nearer to home. What this all boils down to is that the monkey is trying to save as many bananas as it can by inserting them up its own and other monkeys’ rectum in a self-defeating cycle of idiocy.

This might be a confusing metaphor, I grant, but in the end, we are animals with barely developed brains, which is a paradox. This high-functioning yet utterly stupid monkey is beginning to understand some of the fundamental laws of nature, to describe quantum physics and the art of Leonardo, but is incapable of grasping that a few monkeys with a fistful of bananas may not have the interest of the group in mind.

I have good news.

There are good people in the world; it is just that they don’t own newspapers or social media platforms or bankroll TV channels that foster hate and division. The good people are not motivated by accumulation for accumulation's sake. Ordinary people care. As we find out…

The West of Scotland can boast of a Glen Coe, and the North can boast of crystal clear waters and pristine beaches, and what can the East deliver? A coast road that should be in every Lonely Planet guidebook, that’s what, but I hope it’s not so as not to spoil it. The East can also boast the road across Speyside, across the Cairngorms National Park. Go, if you must, but take a while to tarry, to sip, to talk, to breathe.

The bikes have taken a bit of a pasting. 1600 miles, without a service or even care of the chain. There is dust on the swing arm, and a bit of grime on the frame. However, we have booked our bikes at Shirlaws of Aberdeen, courtesy of Mark Stevenson. Shirlaws is a Kawasaki, Triumph, and a KTM dealer and Mark is the manager of the place and couldn’t be more helpful. He had arranged his PR team, and his workshop team was put at our disposal. They went above and beyond to help, support and encourage us. We left Aberdeen in high spirits and followed the coast road down through Montrose, Arbroath and on to Dunfermline.

Lunch in Arbroath was Pie Bob’s, recommended by Mark. It is justly famous. Chris, the manager, wanted pictures of us and his shop, and then gave us two more pies to take with us. They call it a ‘Doner Baba’ pie; it lasted about five minutes at our destination at the hotel.

For much of my time motorcycling, if another rider has looked to be in trouble at the side of the road, the etiquette is to find out why and offer what help you can. I experienced that many years ago on the M5 north of Exeter, having had an electrical fault on a very old Triumph. After crossing the Tay Bridge at Dundee, I went to change gear and found that my boot simply flapped in the air instead of the grip of the gear lever peg.

I pulled over to check what had happened, and indeed the peg had flown off. Sean rode back up the road to see if it was visible at all. It was about two thirty, and we were dry, so that much we were thankful for. However, I was conscious that Lands End is a long way away and changing gear by catching the welt of my boot on the lever instead of the peg was going to be tedious. With Sean out of sight, a biker on a BMW rode past, stopped, and turned around to see what was up. He was rather helpful in telling us that there was a Suzuki garage ten miles further down the road in a town called Cupar. I thanked him and waited for Sean.

“No worries”, he said, “I’d like to think others would stop for me if I needed it”, and he rode off.

Sean returned after a fruitless ten minutes, and so we rode off to Cupar. We caught a mechanic called Jason who was about to clock off work, but stopped to fix the gear lever with a bolt and nut, which works perfectly well. He didn’t want any fee for doing so and wished us luck. I insisted he take at least a tenner for a beer.

Another two strangers, another two episodes of caring.

After a good night’s sleep, it was time to head south again, this time to skirt the south of Edinburgh, and then head towards the border, at least 1300 feet above sea level. It’s a bleak place, but it has fantastic views north across Scotland. The A68 then undulates southwards with dips and blind summits. This could easily catch out the bored, frustrated, unthinking driver. Another night stop at the Saxon Inn at Escomb near Bishop Auckland, where there is the oldest complete Saxon Church in England. before the destination on the East Coast at Bridlington via Whitby.

Riding along roads as we have been for over 1600 miles now enables us to see and experience the country, and it is far more interesting than motorways, to state the obvious. It is also quite tiring, and concentration levels on a bike have to be 100% for 100% of the time. On a country road, some tractors just pull out, there are car drivers cocooned and unaware, and there are bunnies, weasels, squirrels and pheasants blindly running into potential oblivion under your front tyre.

The blind summits and tight corners test one’s skills and attitude. Damp conditions add another dimension. The cold starts to creep in, despite the many layers we both wear, and a dull ache appears in my left shoulder on a daily basis. The miles we cover every day do not seem to be much, especially for those of us safe and warm in a good car, but out here on a 125cc, the level of exposure is quite different. The only thing between a good day and a not-so-good one is the two contact patches of a motorcycle’s tyres. They are about the size of a fist. That’s it. Every single junction has to be assessed for the switched-off driver, who might look but fail to see us. Now, this may all seem a bit melodramatic, and you may wonder if biking is that difficult and potentially dangerous, then why do it?

Although there are these risks, we know we can control a good many of them by adopting what is known as ‘Roadcraft’. We know from statistics that many events on the road involve no other vehicle than the bike, and that means we as riders can control much of what we do and cut the risk considerably by the way we ride. It is also why we know when the day is done, before tiredness makes us complacent. There is huge satisfaction from concentrating and riding well. We also know that we learn every single ride, as we reflect on the day and what we did well and what we can improve. This is something I believe those of us who drive cars just don’t do to the same degree.

Bikers tend to talk about freedom and the open road. They say this is what attracts them to biking. I think it is simpler than that, and that this sense of freedom is also tied to dependence and care. We are never quite the self-sufficient hero of the brochure - the rugged individual against faceless bureaucracy, regulations and time. We are caught within a total web of interconnectedness, care and dependence. From the fact of tyre rubber, the weather, unknown mechanics, decent cafe owners, other riders, and the hope that the person waiting at a junction has actually seen us. There is still evidence of an old moral code, and these factors point to what this may be. If someone is stopped at the roadside, we would check. If someone needs a bolt, you find one. If two daft men on 125s are riding the length of Britain for a hospice, you give them a pie. Not because the market demands it, but because being human occasionally breaks through the fog.

We leave John O’Groats with mixed feelings. In truth, it is not the elation of a mission accomplished. For the past thirteen days, it has been a destination, a place on the map in the far north. Somewhere to aim for, yet it is strangely nowhere. Points on the map are arbitrary, as there are many places around the coastline of Britain where the land ends and the sea begins. Yet here we are. Photo taken, signpost noted and a view of Orkney. I am well aware that there is one road in and another out. So, not so much an end as another start. Cornwall.

When we arrived, it would have been easy to think we had accomplished something. We hadn’t. There was no fanfare, no fireworks, no chorus line of dancing girls. There was rain, and we still had to get home. We were just two men on small motorcycles, with sore backsides, flapping waterproofs, and the knowledge that we had a long way home.

After the glories of Wales, the Lake District and the Western Highlands, we now faced a new road down through Wick and Helmsdale towards Contin. This is one of those roads hugging the East Coast that provides a sweep and openness to it. The sea, always on our left, appears and disappears, the land folds and rises, and the sky seems to take up more space than it has any right to. We don’t dominate this road on our 125s; we accommodate it, we blend in with it, we flow with it.

I have a Volvo at home. It is a wonderful car. It protects and insulates me from consequences. Big cars, big bikes, heated seats, heated grips, cruise control, screens telling us where to go, how fast to travel and where to get an overpriced sausage roll. On our bikes, the world bangs on our doors and says hello; we are reintroduced to the environment, to the elements. Everything now matters: wind, showers, hills, lorries, potholes and knarly road surfaces. The weather has also turned very cold, and so the gradient, the camber, the sheep’s apparent death-wish, the sudden gust, the caravan with the aerodynamics of a garden shed, all become part of our personal journey.

It is so cold that I am wearing every item of clothing possible. It is May, it should be Spring. After about two hours, the cold is beginning to creep through into my hands, knees and legs.

And then there is lunch.

Helmsdale is a coastal fishing village. There is a cafe called the ‘Thyme and Plaice’, a name which deserves respect simply for existing. Anyone who can produce a pun and a decent lunch is deserving of sainthood. It is another example of the many small family-run businesses, warming the lifeblood of the nation.

On most days, riding in these conditions, food is not just food. Tomato and red pepper soup, a warm bread roll and a hot chocolate with a surface festooned with cream and marshmallows is proof of civilisation and provides hope against despair. We find restoration in a simple bowl of hot nourishment. Customers here include a group of four German bikers, an Australian on holiday by herself and a table of regulars known to the staff by their first name, and abused accordingly.

As we left ‘Thyme and Plaice’, we met one of those people who appear on journeys as if written into the day by a storyteller after his third coffee and a dram. He was eighty-three, riding an e-bike, and looked as though the ordinary rules of ageing had not been properly explained to him. He told us a story or two, and in truth, we had little choice but to listen. One such was that in his early youthful exuberance, he had ridden a Ducati on ice. The ice, unsurprisingly, had cracked, but he obviously survived to tell us the tale.

He had also been a pilot and had flown many aircraft.

And crashed one.

I begin to think that this was a man for whom trouble was a daily companion. The laws of nature have tried to kill him several times and finally given up out of professional embarrassment. Some of us survive by being cautious, others by sheer bloody luck.

There is a kind of wisdom in such people, though not necessarily the sort recommended by risk assessment forms. He belonged to that older tribe of men who had done things, broken things, mended things, flown things, crashed things and then, when the legs got a bit doubtful, bought an e-bike and carried on. Not out of vanity. Not out of some gym-fed fantasy of “staying young”. Just because stopping had not yet become interesting.

I took to him, warmly and wished we had time for a beer or three in a local pub with a log fire, a few hours and a few drams to pass the evening.

It is easy for me to think about ageing as withdrawal. In a former life, as a registered nurse, I have seen what age can do. And it is not pretty. Age can present us with options (and incontinence) such as “Less of this. No more of that. Better not. Too far. Too risky. Too late”. Much of the advice for older people is well meant, but somehow misses the point of life, for what is life for but to experience its fullness, which includes risk. I am sixty-seven and riding a 125cc bike around Britain. Perhaps that is not a good idea if I were to think too seriously about preventing broken bones or serious injury. Yet, here was a man of eighty-three who had ridden a Ducati on ice, cracked it, crashed a plane, survived the lot, and was now pedalling electrically through Scotland as if this were the obvious next chapter.

I am not recommending that everybody should do this. For clarity, I am not proposing that the over-eighties form a Ducati ice-racing league and take to the Cairngorms in leather trousers and attitude. Our hard-pressed NHS has enough to do. But he was a reminder that a life over-managed can become a life half-lived. Risk is not always stupidity. Sometimes it is freedom, sometimes it is participation, sometimes it is life itself.

We geared up, and he wobbled off down the street on his bike, possibly looking for others to tell stories to.

We rode on to Contin.

Contin is a small village just west of Dingwall, set in that transitional landscape where the Highlands begin to soften, though not quite enough to let you forget where you are. Our accommodation was in a hotel that had once been derelict and was now being brought back into life by two Frenchmen who had been working at it for eight years.

Eight years.

Those are two words that deserve a pause, that deserve reflection.

Eight years is a long time to argue with damp plaster, uncertain bookings, building regulations, broken pipes, Scottish weather and the monthly arithmetic of survival. It is long enough for enthusiasm to become labour, for romance to become routine, and for the original dream to be tested against boilers, invoices and the weary facts of hospitality.

Yet they were still there.

Contin is not on the fashionable map of places to visit. No Instagram influencers are vying for the best place for a selfie and narcissism. I quite like these places that are not yet quite what they want to be, but are trying very hard indeed. The slick, polished chain hotel has its uses: hot water, clean linen, breakfast by algorithm, but many have no soul and the staff, though well trained, don’t have skin in the game. The resurrected hotel, the old building being coaxed back from dereliction by two Frenchmen in a Highland village, has something else. It has risk embedded in the walls. It has hope in the paintwork. It has the faint smell of an unfinished project and stubborn human intention. The kitchen and restaurant have been refurbished from scratch; the covid years provided the setback, but the food was unpretentious and delicious.

Rural hospitality is not just a matter of beds and breakfasts. It is part of the fragile infrastructure of travelling, walking, cycling, fishing, riding, visiting, and returning. When such places disappear, they do not merely remove accommodation from a booking site. They remove stopping points from the map, and they weaken the social fabric of movement. Tourism can homogenise, can blur hard edges and become bland. Small independent businesses working hard against rising costs and well-funded competition are often staffed by people who love what they do despite the odds. Of course, there are the Basil Fawlties out there, delivering authenticity with their insouciance and beer.

I do not like to see a failed, boarded-up hospitality business. It is a silence where conversations, humanity, warmth, wit and warmth used to be.

I am therefore pleased to see two ‘outsiders’ trying to make a go of it. Two French men in Contin are repairing not only a building but also constructing a possibility. They have a vision, and it will take time, but they’re working at it. The cynic may ask whether it will work. The accountant may sharpen his pencil and mutter about margins. The market may sniff and move on. But all renewal begins in some form of irrational commitment. Someone has to look at a collapsing thing and say, “No, not yet.”

And that is something worth celebrating.

Today we are going south-east toward Aberdeen via Grantown-on-Spey, through whisky country. Distilleries appear with the regularity of churches. Glenfiddich, Tomintoul, Aberlour, and Glenmorangie are all drams I have tasted. Grand buildings, neat signs, copper stills hidden somewhere inside, and visitor centres promising authenticity. Whisky has become Scotland’s (and my) liquid theology: barley, water, time and marketing. There is craft, and patience, and geography made drinkable. This is also a triumph of marketing, one I am happy to fall victim to.

We ride past many of them without stopping. I deserve a medal or a knighthood for my moral heroism in doing so. To ride through Speyside and not sample whisky is to perform a small act of heroic discipline. Admittedly, this discipline is assisted by the law, common sense and the wish not to die under a logging truck near Dufftown, but still, I must take virtue where I can find it. It is said that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven. I’d say entering heaven is a piece of pish for a rich man than for me to pass a distillery and not sample a few.

Lunch at Grantown-on-Spey. It is a town that feels like it has learned to live with visitors without letting itself be overwhelmed. It has the slightly formal bearing of a twin set and pearls place, with a history, fresh air and shops that understand waterproof clothing. I think there is always something attractive about towns built before the domination of the retail park. Streets still mean something. Buildings speak to each other. You can imagine arrival as an event rather than a parking problem.

From Grantown, the road toward Aberdeen changes mood. The Highlands do not exactly end, but they begin to loosen their grip. Aberdeen waits ahead, granite-faced and practical, less theatrical than the west, less myth-soaked than the north, but with its own hard dignity.

Our daily rides have become less about arrival than about rhythm. Fuel, food, weather, road, rest. Repeat. The bike’s engines hum along with its modest little claim on the world. Not fast, not glamorous, not heroic in the ‘long way round’ adventure bike sense. The 125cc bike does not flatter you, it does not give you the illusion that you are conquering anything. It teaches limits, patience and attention.

I think this journey keeps teaching the same lesson again and again in different forms.

We meet an eighty-three-year-old on an e-bike who had riddena Ducati on ice and crashed an aircraft.

We meet two French men spending eight years resurrecting a derelict hotel in Contin.

We are two ageing men on 125s trying to ride from Land’s End to John o’ Groats and back for St Luke’s Hospice.

These are very different stories, but there is the same thread.

Keep going.

But this is not blindly going or stupidly going. We don’t have the hollow motivational nonsense of corporate posters and LinkedIn prophets. We do have some grounded understanding that life is made by participation, by doing, by seeing, by feeling but not with perfect conditions. We are learning that there is no perfect time to ride. There is no perfect time to rebuild, to begin, to repair, love, write, cook, sing, give, or try again. There is only the available road, the weather you have, the machine beneath you, and the next place to stop.

John o’ Groats was never the end. It turned out to be another beginning.

Old Sweeney Mactavish, the ginger-haired and bearded ogre of Glen Nevis, was a little bit bored one day. In an attempt to find amusement, he stomped around the Grampian mountains but did not find any. His temper worsened when he discovered he had also run out of a decent malt whisky.

“Damn this infernal country and its wee idiot porridge-headed people”, he said, “Oh for a wee dram to soothe my aching soul”. He took his axe, which was the size of Argyll and Sutherland, swung it above his head and brought it down sharply to cleave Scotland in half. “Damn the wee bastards, if I don’t need a drink”, and repeated his axe-wielding several more times. After a while, and bored with cleaving, he went in search of a bonnie lass to cook him neeps and tatties.

And that’s how the Great Glen was formed.

It runs in a diagonal line south-west to north east between Fort William, through Fort Augustus and on to Inverness. The cleft Old Sweeney formed with his axe was soon filled in with water to form Loch Lochy and Loch Ness.

Corpach sits at the Fort William end of the Glen, and our destination of Bonar Bridge is beyond Inverness. The drizzle accompanied us for the first few miles to Faith’s Cafe at Spean Bridge, recommended by Norman, our host. A decent breakfast was called for, and that’s what we got. Another Lorne sausage decorated the plate, this time made from a recipe handed down to a local butcher from the mother of the young woman who runs the place. It is something to be respected, the hard work, pride and dedication some folk put into their business. All of which shows in the service and quality of the food they serve. I counted at least five members of staff, and to have that many means they are either running at a loss or are making enough to employ them all. I believe it is the latter. These independent cafes are islands of quality and character in a sea of corporate offerings. It is not that the big chains offer poor quality, although let’s face it, many do - it’s more that the commodification of everything erodes community. Why so? I have no evidence for that; it's just a feeling that not everything should be decided in a faraway corporate boardroom by people who have no knowledge or interest in small places serving small communities.

Family-run establishments are not perfect, and frankly, some should go bust, but when they do it well, with commitment, then they are to be treasured. God forbid that the big chains choke off these independents - I’d invite Old Sweeney MacTavish to wield his axe on their heads if they did.

Bonar Bridge is a very small community, at the junction of the Firth of Dornoch and the Kyle of Sutherland. The place boasts a red painted community hub which started life as a double-decker bus, then as shipping containers, and now as a proper purpose-built facility. We are served tea and cakes in the cafe by a local woman who is more than ready with some local gossip about the place. Her assistant is a young man barely in his twenties whose parents had moved him there about six years ago, from where I don’t know. What he does for entertainment, what any one of his age does for entertainment, is anybody’s guess. If you don’t like golf, I think you have had it. The young man has probably already had a relationship with all of the available girlfriends and is now considering a life of Netflix, golf and lost opportunity.

Bonar Bridge has a ‘local shop for local people’, a butcher, no pub, a closed-down hotel and a golf course. There is also a railway station. We met ‘Ally’, a worker in the local refrigeration plant, who sadly lamented the lack of watering holes.

“The nearest is Lairg, about ten miles away”. The now-defunct Bonar Bridge Hotel once boasted a bar stocking over eighty whiskies. I feel his pain.

However, the setting is bucolic and rather peaceful. Sheep abound, as do red kites.

I think it is easy for me to patronise places such as Bonar Bridge, especially as I blow in on my motorcycle with a tank full of ‘somewhere else’. I am tempted to notice only the ‘absence’ of a pub, a hotel and the presence of a railway station, which looks less like infrastructure and more like an invitation to leave. I can easily measure a place by what it lacks according to my own likes and wants. Those who live here may measure it by what it keeps.

I remember reading some sociology, and the debate around the meaning of ‘community and society’, between the intimate and the anonymous. Ferdinand Tönnies called them Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft: the village and the city, the known and the contractual, the neighbour and the stranger. Small communities can offer recognition, continuity, memory and help. They can also offer surveillance, gossip, a few opportunities and a social life as narrow as a sheep track in February. The same closeness that comforts one person may slowly throttle another.

Some people stay here because their families are here. Some stay because work, land, habit and affection have sunk roots deeper than ambition. Some stay because the city’s promises look fraudulent: higher wages swallowed by higher rents, entertainment bought at the price of exhaustion, anonymity mistaken for freedom. Some stay because they prefer red kites to ring roads, weather to traffic, and knowing the butcher’s name to choosing between twelve kinds of urban loneliness.

I find it very easy to sentimentalise the countryside, but of course, life in a rural setting is not one long story of moral purity conducted among lambs and dry-stone walls. It can be hard, cold, poor, boring and suspicious of outsiders. But neither is it merely backwardness with a post office. A place like Bonar Bridge asks an uncomfortable question of those of us passing through: what exactly do we mean by a good life? Is it choice, novelty, bars, restaurants, and the permanent availability of distraction? Or is it peace, recognition, landscape, routine, and the possibility of being known?

Well, I am not sure I know the answer. I like my places to have a decent pub because, without one, a village feels empty, like a vegetarian pasty. A village without a pub is recognisable as a village from the outside, but is missing something, I think, vital. I stand outside the community hub, feeling the wind, looking across to the hills, among sheep, red kites and the soft northern light. I could see why some people might choose it, but not for the excitement, because it probably isn’t. Life here is also, I guess, probably not easy, and although I might crave stimulation, I also need attachment, repetition, memory, and the strange human need to say, of one small patch of the earth: this is where I am from, or at least, this is where I have agreed to remain.

In the evening, our host Leslie at the Dunroamin Hotel, introduces us to the Holy Trinity of haggis, neeps and tatties, and a wee dram served with them. I have never had a malt with the haggis, but Leslie insists we take a portion each of the holy trinity and sip the whisky to enhance all the spicy flavours. I can say it works. The science is probably the science of Port and Stilton, cheese and wine, or tea and a dunked biscuit.

The windy wild moors of West Penwith, beyond Penzance and St Ives, are evocative of time passing and time past. Old mines dot the cliff edge where men lost their lives far underground, while granite-faced farms eke out an existence among the wind-bent trees and gorse. People live here, linked by the tiny B3306, which threads its way through Zennor and on towards St Just. It is the sort of landscape that inspires novels, poems and legends of mermaids tempting the locals to their watery fate.

I am reminded of this remote place in Cornwall, as the road to the north coast leads us onwards across similar terrain. The next village to Bonar Bridge is Lairg, and a sign says ‘last fuel for 44 miles’. There are no mermaids, and we are far from the ocean. Instead, we ride across a vast expanse of open moorland, rivers, lochs, lochans and a view of distant mountains. The road narrows to one lane with passing places. No one is here. No one. It is wonderful; just ensure your vehicle is in top shape because a breakdown truck is going to take a while to get here.

Thurso on the north coast is nearly twenty miles from John o’Groats. We have stopped at a small garage forecourt to check the destination’s location - it is a very remote house. The sun is out, and we are dry. Sean attempts to restart his bike but gets a warning light about the ‘immobiliser’. Any warning light on a vehicle is not welcome, but one that indicates immobility is especially worrying. Nonetheless, the bike starts, and we carry on, but the warning light remains. It is very troubling, it’s an itch you can't scratch, a boil you can't lance. All the while it remains on, the fear is the bike will just stop…after all, it says ‘immobiliser’. Ahead, we look up to the sky and a grey wall of clouds and rain, like a dirty curtain, rises before us. Before long, we ride straight into it.

We have gone from sunshine to a rainy day in the blink of an eye, with a bike that has gone from reliable to worrying in a few seconds. We decide to check in with our hosts and, as the bike still works, press on the last few miles to the landmark’s post at John o’Groats. Luckily, after restarting the bike, the light goes out, and we can continue with more confidence. Man and machine, if not in perfect harmony, are at least singing from the same chorus book.

I think of Robert Pirsig, who knew better than most that a motorcycle is not merely a device for converting petrol into movement. When you ride a motorcycle this distance, you are in a relationship. When all is well, the machine vanishes beneath you and the world opens out. When a warning light appears, the machine returns with a vengeance. The road narrows. The weather darkens. The mind stops wandering and begins calculating. Pirsig might have called it a failure of Quality; I would call it a pain in the arse twenty miles from John o’Groats.

The signpost stands stark white against the darker seas behind it. The Orkney Islands are in mist and drizzle. The sun behind us throws rainbows into the rain. We have arrived.

I do not feel excitement or elation, for this is not the end of the journey. It is only the halfway point, and we have the same, and perhaps more, to do again. It is raining, it is cold, but that is not a problem; it’s an expectation. We aim to raise awareness and funds for our hospices, many of which are struggling. I find it very hard to accept that in wealthy societies, we do not have a reliable mechanism to ensure that everyone gets the dignity and care they deserve when needed. Our own life’s path will end, perhaps without a white post and a small harbour in the rain. An ‘End to End’ is for us all, how we get there is up to us, but not the finality, not the last moments. We don’t decide if we see a warning about being immobilised, nor do we choose if it will be sunshine or rain when we are. What we can try to do is smooth the way for those going just before us.

Mind, there is a decent craft ale in the small pub at John o’Groats, I’m hoping there is a decent pint where I’m going to in the end.

Glen Coe

Previously….

Yet again, and I know not why, the next morning the sky is blue, and the sun is out. The destination is a little village just beyond Fort William called Corpach. There seems to be at this point only one road to the Highlands, the A82 winding its way along the shore of Loch Lomond. The Loch is embraced by the hills, the hedgerows are a blaze of bluebells and bright yellow coconut-smelling gorse. Glittering water in the morning light is set against the azure blue of the sky and green hills. I’m getting bored with trying to describe the beauty of it all. I know, go and buy a shortbread biscuit tin and you will see what I mean. Almost.

At Tyndrum, there is a fantastic cafe and shop called the Green Welly. It caters for everybody who is drawn here. Retired couples are having perhaps a last hurrah before decrepitude catches up with them and locks them up in a semi in Surrey. There are earnest young things fresh out of University telling each other just how wonderful their lives are and how they have friends in California, France, and Bali. The girls especially use the ‘vocal fry’, which is as appealing to listen to as nails scratching a blackboard. It is an affection meant to make them sound otherworldly and ‘cool’. It doesn’t, of course, it makes them sound like entitled know-it-alls. There are coaches of school children excitedly running around, annoying each other, their teacher and the staff. Serious folk enter as well. You know the sort. OS map, compass, boots that cost more than a flat in Kensington, and all the gear for a day out in the high peaks - no mountain rescue for these chaps.

Then, of course, the various bikers. We get chatting to a husband and wife on a Triumph Tiger 1200. This is Triumph’s answer to the big BMW adventure bike, designed to take you beyond going to Waitrose to pick up an avocado.

“Where are you going today?’ I ask.

“No idea, I’ll see where the road takes us”. They had left Preston this morning at 0100 and had ridden in the rain all day to get here. Proper bikers. Proper hard. I bet they have not packed flip-flops, though. I bet they don’t eat avocados either, unless it’s with chips and gravy.

Many years ago, I took it into my head to drive to Scotland from Cornwall. I mentioned this to my sister, Karen.

“Can I go too?”

So, at ten in the morning, we set off from Camborne in my little Citroen AX Diesel, France’s answer to the Mini. By 1700, we were driving through Glasgow, and by 1900, booked into a B and B at Luss on the shores of Loch Lomond. This was our first time in this area, the destination was Fort William and the ascent of Ben Nevis. The next morning, we must have driven past the Green Welly, but I don’t remember it. We crossed Rannoch Moor totally unaware of what was to come. The road continues from the valley floor up a slope and straight towards Buachaille Etive Mor. This is one of the most iconic mountains in the highlands and truly a wondrous sight. From one angle, it is a huge triangle of a mountain dominating the whole horizon. The road is drawn towards it as if captured by its majesty, then it turns into the valley, the Glen of Glen Coe. Karen and I just had to stop, get out, and, in awe, take in the scene. It is emotional.

Today, knowing what was to come, Sean and I crossed Rannoch Moor, rode towards Buachaille Etive Mor and then turned in the Glen. Again, we just had to stop and get off the bikes. And again, it is emotional. We didn’t need to say anything. The Glen in bright sunshine said it all. One doesn’t visit the Glen; one feels it viscerally. It gets inside your head and stands you stock still. I believe we evolved within nature, and not until modernity did we really sever our ties with it. Our minds and bodies evolved in such landscapes and need them to feel again. That’s why hordes of tourists are drawn to such places. We all need this.

Sean and I just stood and said nothing. Glen Coe, one of the wonders of the world, no doubt. This is a wide valley with steep sides, so towards the Glen Coe village is the high ridge running along the side of the valley called Aonach Eagach. On the other side, three ridges form the Three Sisters of immense dramatic presence, making us feel very small indeed. There is history, drama, and geology here. It is with reluctance that we leave.

“Let’s go to Glenfinnan, as we have time this afternoon”.

Many folk know Glenfinnan due to Harry Potter and the steam train crossing the viaduct. Others know it as the landing place of Bonnie Prince Charlie come to start the Jacobite rebellion. There is a column with a statue of a highlander to mark the spot. Karen and I stumbled across it in peaceful isolation, all those years ago, until we heard two pipers playing - the pipes echoing across the valley. Pipes, the wind across the heather, birdsong and lapping water of the loch were our soundtrack back then.

Today, it is a mess. A victim of the popularity of Harry Potter. A new, big car park has been built, but cars still park on the road, and coaches turn up with tourists. Peaceful it is not. It’s more like a theme park now, but without a rollercoaster and toffee apples. The steam train is not running this year, because there’s an issue with the locking doors of the old coaches, so Harry Potter fans will be disappointed. After the splendour of Glen Coe, this was a let-down, so we headed quickly back to Corpach and the night’s accommodation.

Norman, our host, is a six-foot Scotsman who is ready to chat. He built the glamping pods in his spacious garden. made entirely of wood, he made sure they are well insulated as they need to be. Today, the view of Ben Nevis from his garden is magnificent. Many times, the Ben has his head in the clouds, but the clear blue sky enables him to show off his snowy peak. We could see the trail to the summit, and the death trap that is Five-Finger Gulley. It has caught even seasoned walkers. Ann and I walked to the summit one June, across a snow field. I only attempted it because I knew of the dangers. Norman, as it turns out, is a champion downhill skier and holds a record for speed. “Snow is like concrete at that speed”, he said, “I once fell and did a backward push-up to prevent my skin being peeled off under my suit”.

Sean and I loved the wooden ‘pod’. It was basically one room, with a shower and toilet at one end, with the sleeping space divided only by a row of skis placed together to make a makeshift wall. The view is towards Loch Linnhe and across to Ben Nevis. It is a simple lifestyle, living and quite appealing. One can imagine living a very quiet and leisurely life here, ideal as it is for the solitary type - the writer, the poet, the philosopher.

Henry David Thoreau wrote Walden, or, Life in the Woods, published in 1854. His book was a reflection upon simple living in nature’s surroundings - something that is getting out of reach for many people. Thoreau wrote of being independent, of going on a spiritual journey, of self-reliance with a little satire. Thoreau’s experiences over the course of two years, two months, and two days were those of living in a cabin he built near Walden Pond amidst woodland owned by his friend and mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson, in Massachusetts. I am reminded of this solitude and connection within nature as I sit in this ‘log cabin’. An important point to remember is that he had a friend who allowed him to build a cabin on land Emerson owned. Increasingly, many of us are cut off from just such a refuge, but the urge still beats deep within. The silence of Glen Coe is a residual memory of a time long ago, when we all were immersed in nature, for the good and the bad, of course. It is easy to go too far and romanticise the past, which was often in reality, ‘nasty, brutish and short’. Nonetheless, we might have come too far as a species, designing out our natural connections, resulting in many of us jetting or campervanning around the globe in search of lost being.

The fact that we love our log fires, that Norman built a fire pit, that we barbecue when we can all point to a more primaeval past within us. There are people, though, for whom this would be a terrifying experience, preferring the human-built environment and all of its trappings instead. Nature, to many, is fine on TV but not anywhere near the home. Why some have lost the connection to land, loch and stream, is a question for the psychologists, the sociologists and the philosopher. But two answers suggest themselves. The first is that many of us have not simply lost nature; we have been organised away from it. Land is owned, fenced, priced, regulated and often turned into a destination rather than a dwelling place. Thoreau’s solitude depended upon Emerson’s land. That points to the facts of the political economy of retreat.

The second answer is that nature is not always benign. It is beautiful, yes, but also cold, wet, dark and indifferent. A log fire is romance when the roof is sound, the fridge is full, and the car is outside. Without those protections, it is not authenticity but exposure. Perhaps what we seek, then, is not a return to some pure natural past, but a more honest settlement between comfort and creatureliness: enough shelter to live well, enough wildness to remember what we are.

So for every log fire we sit around in the Scottish woods, there are midges too!

Next…

The Green Welly, Tyndrum

Previously

Under another blue sky, we roll out of the car park of the Buccleauch and Queensbury Arms. I immediately spot the town’s monument in the middle of the small roundabout. It is a column with Pegasus standing proudly on top. Just another horse for some people.

Dunfries and Galloway do not come to mind when I think of Scotland. The Western Isles, Lochaber and the Nevis range are high drama in the form of landscape. If the Highlands is the ‘Scottish Play’ Macbeth at the Globe, then to my mind the lowland and borders is a sixth form production of the same. Recognisably similar, but in scale and drama, they are worlds apart.

However, I have to revise my judgment. While it is obviously true that the landscape can’t be compared, Dumfries and Galloway are a delight. There is still drama in the fields and hills, and a peaceful quietude to be had. Motorcycling here is a delight as it is easy and traffic-free (again).

On every road, in every region, in every county, there are folk who perhaps could take a refresher course in driving. I suggest that you buy a copy of Roadcraft and give it immediately to your relatives who you know might be a little wanting in understanding the craft of making progress on the road safely.

Some people can hardly see over their steering wheel and are incapable of judging distance, especially of the gap between their nose and the tractor in front. Sean and I followed just such a motorist in a small white car, such as a Micra or Clio, weaving from side to side as if they could not make up their mind which bit of the lane to use. The car was so close to the tractor that we thought it was being towed by it. Many other cars had overtaken the tractor, but this driver seemed stubbornly wedded to the position, so that they had a lack of vision, which must have been the tractor only.

On a bike, our thoughts are about passing safely. A weaving, wobbly car in front makes us uneasy. If the driver is incapable of making a good decision following a slow vehicle…what else are they incapable of? Looking in the mirror while two small bikes try to overtake? The fact that I’m writing this reveals that, in the end, the situation was easily resolved by us. We passed both the car and the tractor on a lovely straight road, giving both the tractor and the weaving hazard a very wide berth.

Apart from that, it was plain riding.

Kilmarnock has a football team. I recognise many of the Scottish towns because of this fact. It does not help with navigation because there are only a few places I can place on a map - Glasgow, Edinburgh and Fort William. Kilmarnock happens to be south of Glasgow and on our way to Balloch. In the middle of town, there is a great cafe and restaurant called the Duke, on John Finnie Street. This is the old main street with grand nineteenth-century Victorian architecture funded by local coal merchant John Finnie. By the mid-18th century, the town was a leading centre for woollens in Scotland, particularly known for “Kilmarnock cowls” and tartan. Kilmarnock was also a major centre for heavy industry, including Andrew Barclay Sons & Co. for steam locomotives and Glenfield & Kennedy for specialist valve manufacturing. The town was involved in railway locomotive production from 1837 and later manufactured Massey-Ferguson tractors. I can hear the steam engines still as I sit sipping a coffee in the sunshine. I did not find this out until later that the town was the home of Johnnie Walker whisky, founded by local grocer John Walker in 1820. So two of my favourite things: steam engines and whisky. Well done, Kilmarnock. Of course, as with every town in the country, all of this has vanished; even the whisky distillery has moved on to Fife and Glasgow.

Before we left from Lands End, Sean was instructed, by those who know, to look out for my tendency for ‘things to be left behind’. Every time we stop, we have to think about the tech kit, including the camera and navigation, wallets, phones, keys and laptops. There is a lot of checking and rechecking before every setting off. With this in mind (not), the warmth of the Kilmarnock sun was a comfort as we reloaded the bikes to set off again, just a few yards from the Cafe. But before a key was turned, we heard a shout and saw our two backpacks being held aloft. I now wonder how far we would have got before we both realised we had left them behind. They are so well designed that it is easy to forget we are wearing them. So, thank you to the eagle-eyed man in Kilmarnock. So, who is looking after whom?

Balloch from Kilmarnock is easy, a very short bit of motorway to avoid going through Glasgow, over the Erskine Bridge and up the rather lovely A82 to the Highlands. Our accommodation for the night looks like a converted old one-story cottage, nothing spectacular, but more than enough for our needs. We headed for dinner, a short walk across the bridge over the water that leads to Lomond. The wind was bitter, though the sky was blue. Grateful for the warmth of the pub, we ordered a roast dinner.

“Are you from Australia?”

Our young waitress stood at the table after taking our order. About in her mid twenties, I thought that at first, perhaps due to her inexperience in hearing many different voices other than Scots, that she had misheard. I don’t think I have a strong Cornish accent, which to some inexperienced ears would sound very strange and could be mistaken for Australian, I suppose?

“No, why?”

“It’s the flip flops, and we’re in Scotland”.

The young lady had a point. Both Sean and I seriously underestimated that even in May, Scotland, and indeed, it seems the rest of the country, can still be cold. Very cold. We had both packed flip-flops to cut down on bulk and weight on the bikes. The weather this week has other ideas, and I'm regretting that decision. During the day we are dressed up in all the bike and wet weather gear we can lay our hands on, and in the evenings it is a T-shirt and flip-flops. We’d be fine in California or New South Wales.

The shocking news from the Met Office is that a cold blast of air from the north was going to bring a huge drop in temperature and perhaps even a flurry of snow on the high ground. It is cold enough today, without the Arctic getting in on the act. None of this would matter, of course, if we were driving a car with air conditioning and heating. On a 125cc bike in these conditions, it is like being sent bollock naked into the gladiatorial arena to fight a tiger armed only with a feather boa and flip flops.

Without even a dram to warm us, we drifted back to the accommodation to get on with the writing, the editing and the podcasting. Thankfully, the rooms have heating. We are going to have to rethink our clothing strategy to deal with next week’s weather.

There is a song and an anthem called ‘Scotland the Brave’. In this weather, Scotland is for the brave. Brass monkeys are worried.

next…

Sunset at Workington

Previously…

What images, ideas, and feelings come into your mind when you read or hear about life in a Northern Town, such as Workington? Do the stereotypes of whippets, racing pigeons and ale-sipping, surly curmudgeonliness come to mind? Is it all flat caps and Rugby League, bingo and skittles, black pudding, pies and gravy? There is nothing wrong with any of those things, of course, but ‘The North’ and its people are as diverse and as interesting as any region in Europe, and certainly more so than Kentucky, even with its fried chicken.

Having crossed the Lake District from Morecambe, the sun greeted us upon arrival at the Hall Park Hotel, right on the edge of town, opposite the ruins of Workington Hall, hidden by mature trees in the park. The Hall was Mary Queen of Scots last night of freedom before being arrested by the militia based in Carlisle. Her crime was to have the cheek to import a brand of suspect Christianity into England, the sort with bells, smells and fantastic art. Mary and her theatrical religion threatened Queen Elizabeth’s Protestant monarchy, which was as dull as a rural bus stop on a rainy day in January. Accused of treason, her head parted company with her shoulders at the age of 44, at the behest of her cousin, Elizabeth. Mary’s primary language was French, but she also spoke Latin, Italian, and Spanish, so this meant Mary could plead for mercy in four languages. It might have helped if she were fluent in English, as Elizabeth might have been more lenient. This story, and the now ruined Hall, is part of Workington’s history.

I know this because Sir Tony Cunningham told us, when he led us outside from the bar to see the sunset. Sir Tony and his wife, Lady Anne, are regulars at the Hall Park Hotel bar. Don’t be fooled by the titles. This is not Downton Abbey, and they don’t talk with plums in their mouths. Sir Tony was knighted in 2012 for public and political service, having had a career in teaching and as an MP for Workington and an MEP. We were introduced by our host, Paul, as we sat down to dinner. Tony, as we know him, was asked by Paul a few years ago why he never came into the Hotel. “It’s because you serve shite beer” was the honest if blunt reply. Paul duly introduced Jennings Craft Ales so that Sir Tony and Lady Anne made the bar their regular. Anne, his wife, had told us this story not five minutes beforehand, but that didn’t stop Tony from telling it again. I got the feeling this was a ritualistic dance between them, as she said: “I’ve already told them, but you might as well tell it again”.

Tony is of slight build, age 73, and a great talker. He volunteered for Paul to take us in his car to see the sunset more clearly down by the shore, something Paul was very happy to do. This was not the first time that Tony had asked Paul to do this! I dare say Tony would have gladly done so, but he is not well enough to drive a car. From the shore, we could see the Isle of Man in the clouds over 40 miles away, and the black silhouetted hills of Dumfries and Galloway, while to the west the sky turned blood red.

After this spectacle, Paul, in his early sixties, dressed in a blue shirt and jeans, joined us for dinner. In the background, a TV played the hits of 1976 all night, while his two brothers, a couple of friends, and Tony swapped stories. The Irish would say ‘the craic was good’. I think I heard "Save All Your Kisses For Me” three times, as the TV programme must have been on a loop, hosted by one of the members of ‘Showadiwaddy’. I began to feel that Sean and I were on the edge of a whirlpool that could easily suck us into a whisky-fuelled late night, but with great resolve, we resisted and got a decent night’s sleep. It is hard work to pull ourselves away from such congenial company.

We found out that Workington had the first covered bus station in the country, that it once was a steel town with blast furnaces lighting up the night sky while producing railway lines for global export; that the grassed covered cliffs are actually slag from the furnaces, and it has some of the best sunsets anywhere. We also found out that some of its people are warm-hearted, welcoming and with a very dry sense of humour. The town was once one of the powerhouses of the Industrial Revolution and of the Empire. Today, Workington is undergoing a significant economic transition, and it is getting £millions in investment from the UK government. Its economy is currently shifting towards digital technology, advanced manufacturing, and green energy, with major construction and regeneration projects aiming to modernise the town centre and improve infrastructure. I have not seen a whippet, a flat cap or a racing pigeon.

After a good night’s sleep and avoiding the whisky trap, another warm sunny morning sees us off to Thornhill via Carlisle. We pass a bike dealer selling Royal Enfields ten miles or so from our destination, the Hollywood Garage. Scott, in his late twenties, offers us coffee and is keen to talk ‘bikes’. There are new models of Enfields to look at, and a few Chinese makes. One is a ‘Benda’ - a monster of a cruiser but with an in-line four engine. Its back wheel more properly fits a small truck. Scott says it is a good ride, but I’m rather sceptical. I like my bikes to look like bikes, not an AI concept…which by the way is exactly what this is. Designed by AI, the very first manufactured bike for sale to be so!

Our host tonight is Ralph of the Buccleuch and Queensberry Arms Hotel, which is a very fine hotel indeed. After unpacking, we relax in the bar and are served by an eighteen-year-old girl called Dior, as in the designer. Her confidence and manner belie her age: quick-witted and cheeky, and with a great deal of charm, she lights up the room. When I was eighteen, the most charm I could muster was not to pick my nose in public. I had acne the size of volcanoes, the confidence of a frightened hamster and the social skills of someone who has been locked away in a cupboard for the past ten years. There is a column in the middle of the roundabout outside the hotel. It has the statue of Pegagus, the winged horse, on top of it. Dior was blithely unaware of its existence until it was mentioned last night. I guess eighteen-year-olds have better things to think about than a small town’s monuments. Jose, the chef, served up delicious haggis in breadcrumb balls, spicy bean hot pot and a chicken pie. We met him the next morning and exchanged stories about… motorcycling.

By morning, the bikes were loaded again, and the road was waiting. Workington and Thornhill had given us more than a bed for the night; they have given us history, humour, beer, sunset and good company. That is the thing about travelling slowly on small bikes: the places you might once have passed through become places that pass into you.

Next…

Previously…..

We continue on our way to Scotland, now over 600 miles from Land’s End, and arrive truly ‘up north’. The sun shone early in Morecambe as we left the hotel.

Coffee and cake by the lakeside in Ambleside, while swallows dart over the water, black-headed gulls squawk and a heron takes off as a pleasure boat disturbs its fishing. A huge wedge of orange and chocolate cake sits upon the plate and is ignored by the little gulls, unlike their bigger cousins in St Ives, otherwise known as ‘robbing bastards’. It is all very peaceful and all very beautiful. In the near distance, we can see the fells of Loughrigg and the lower ridges leading toward the central fells. The Lakes have captivated poets and artists as well as the walkers, famously Alfred Wainwright. Rightly so.

The Romantic poets, such as Wordsworth, Coleridge and Shelley, loved nature and the Lake District and wrote as a direct reaction against the rapid industrialisation, urbanisation, and environmental degradation caused by the Industrial Revolution. They rejected the "mechanical" view of the world, which prioritised efficiency and profit, and instead championed nature, emotion, individual imagination, and the sublime.

In their world and in mine, Money without Imagination is Poverty.

Last night, Sean and I walked into Morecambe for dinner. Our hotel is situated at the eastern edge of town, so we walked towards the West End. The contrast between what we experienced today and what we saw yesterday could not be stronger. Once proud buildings are falling down, paint peeling, boarded up, and crumbling into dereliction. This area of Morecambe is one of the most economically, socially and politically deprived in the United Kingdom. We walk past fences and abandoned plots, past the grime and litter, past the smell of decay. All we had to do was turn ninety degrees and look towards the setting sun. It is Golden Hour. The sun sends its rays between the clouds high into the sky as the sea glitters its reflection. I turn to look at the orange glow it gives to the buildings on the seafront. It is inspiring and life-affirming.

Matt, who is heavily involved in fostering grassroots arts at the Playhouse in the West End, knows this explicitly. He is a big bloke, possibly six feet three, broad-shouldered, with long hair and beard. He laughs easily. His work brings hope and healing to folk who might not otherwise have them, and for the second night running, he revels in the setting sun. He has lived here for 10 years and seems to be as excited at sunset as when he first saw it. His passion to bring something to what looks like a hopeless situation is to be greatly admired. We talk of the people who live here in the West End, the sort of folk living on the edge, lacking financially, Matt calls them ‘real people’.

I fear that the funding he gets will be further cut as politicians talk of slashing welfare spending and tax cuts because “we can’t afford it”, a position I simply do not accept as true in any sense. I do not suggest that everyone here is on benefits without working; we know many work and still need financial assistance just to get by. The suits in offices and newspapers talk of ‘benefits’ to conjure up the image of the ‘skiver’, deliberately ignoring the fact that this category is largely made up of pensioners, working families, children, the elderly, sick and mentally ill.

“Bread and Roses” is a political slogan associated with the fight for women’s suffrage, the labour movement, as well as inspiring a poem and a song. Helen Todd, a suffragette activist in the United States, used the phrase in a speech in which she said: “bread for all, and roses too.” James Oppenheim was inspired to then write a poem using it as a title back in 1911. Todd was possibly taking inspiration from Jesus, who allegedly told Satan that “man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God”. Jesus, in turn, might have read Moses telling the Israelites the same thing. Dante, Aquinas, Rumi and Saadi, among others, have all added to this idea.

Manfred Max-Neef identified nine (sometimes ten) fundamental needs, such as Subsistence, Protection, Affection, and Freedom. He also identified Wants vs. Needs and argued that true human needs are few, finite, and constant across history. Importantly, he suggested that any fundamental need that is not adequately satisfied reveals a form of poverty. He also warned against things that look like they help but don’t, like how consumerism often offers “pseudo-satisfiers” that leave us feeling empty.

Eric Fromm identified our needs for relatedness, transcendence, rootedness, sense of identity, and a frame of orientation. These are all things Matt’s Playhouse is trying to foster and grow. One reason fascism flourishes is that it provides all five of those needs, but in a very dangerous form that divides rather than unites. If Matt doesn’t succeed, then others with those more dangerous ideas will fill the void. I fear they already are in towns like Morecambe all over the United Kingdom.

Fromm also distinguished between a “having” mode (centred on possessions and “wants”) and a “being” mode (centred on authentic experience). Health, for Fromm, is the ability to live in the “being” mode. He also argued that a “sane society” facilitates these needs. If a society forces people to choose between their needs and their “wants” (like choosing money over connection), it creates widespread mental illness and alienation. Our insane society is too often ignoring being and instead sells markets and champions wanting.

This is something Amartya Sen knew as he developed the Capabilities Approach, which argues that poverty and well-being should be measured by a person's actual freedom to achieve "functioning", the things they value being and doing, rather than just their income. Sen helps us to shift our focus from material wealth to real opportunities (capabilities) we have to lead a life they have reason to value. Any society that does not assist in this shift creates a poverty of mind, a poverty of spirit.

It is my firm belief that too many of us become alienated from nature, forgetting we are extensions of it, part of it, but our economics and political systems tend to ignore nature as a source of life or beauty. Instead, it is often reduced to a commodity to be bought and sold, to be marketed, to be charged for. The Eden of the North in Morecambe is an attempt to reverse that perverse view. The Lake District’s popularity is a testament to this fundamental human need, as is Matt’s love of the sunset.

Our work should be a creative, joyful expression of human life, similar to how a poet like Matt creates a poem. Yet modern working systems all too often turn work into forced labour, a gig economy, minimum wages, or, as David Greaber calls them, “Bullshit Jobs”. Work too often becomes a repetitive, mindless chore. And, in this hustle culture, we encourage people to see each other as rivals for wages or as cogs in a machine rather than as fellow human beings. This destroys the communal bond that is essential for a healthy society. The folk in the West End are trying to build something despite the odds.

This is something all children know, but many adults now forget.

As important as physical needs are, it is not enough that they be met for human flourishing; we need beauty, nature, music, art and the opportunity to engage with them. They should not just be commodities to be bought and sold in the market, accessible to the well-off few. That’s why local authority and national government grants are necessary. Charity and individuals can only do so much.

The small-minded, money, bean-counting people, in glittering towers of glass and steel in faraway cities, will never walk the promenade of the West End of Morecambe; they will holiday in five-star luxury and cruise or fly to exotic locations and discuss investment opportunities in more fashionable locations. They are “Hollow Men”, a generation of people who are spiritually and morally empty, effectively scarecrows filled with straw instead of substance. They have become so detached from nature, their work, and their own humanity that they have no identity left. T S Eliot described them as having “shape without form” and “gesture without motion,” representing people who can no longer find meaning in a world dominated by cold, mechanical systems.

They want all of the bread and the roses, too.

Matt disagrees.

For St Luke's Hospice

Next:

Previously:

In May, the birds are up early and singing their little hearts out. My window, high up on the fourth floor of the terraced building, overlooked the park opposite in Llandrindod Wells, and was open enough to let in the chorus. It is a wonderful sound to start a morning, and in this town, there are no sirens, no delivery vans clanking their wares and no roaring traffic. Just the birds. The flat is at the end of a very quiet side road, which is also a dead end for vehicles; only a few dog walkers were about.

Llandrindod was once a thriving Spa town, by the look of it. A facade of a rather grand hotel and a curved parade of shops suggested great nineteenth-century Victorian wealth. However, the Gwalia hotel is closed, and so are many of the shops. There is a lake, a cycle museum, spa springs and even a railway station still open. Despite the closed shops, it doesn’t look too ‘shabby’. There is still a heart beating.

Saving breakfast for later, we packed up in the dry and headed North to Chester, via Newtown, Oswestry and Whitchurch. It so happens that we would be passing a place where Colin and Sean went to school. Gobowen is on the old A5, now bypassed, of course, and as it often is, looks a lot smaller to the adult eye. We stopped at a house and chatted to an old neighbour of Sean’s, now in his eighties.

The first half of the journey was again Wales at its best - traffic-free, wonderful scenery and twisty roads. Later, we would wistfully think of Wales and these roads, but we can't have everything our way; despite Wales’s charms, we have to keep going. There is a mysticism in the air that casts a spell over us, and yes, this is romantic fantasising because I’m sure in the deindustrialised small towns, many people would think we are fooling ourselves. We have the privilege and opportunity to cross this land in a way that suits us, and that is to be prized. This contrast of opportunity and closure, of poverty and wealth, of natural beauty and industrial estates, of hope and hopelessness exists in most places, and always will. We have the chance to see everything, acknowledge everything and hope for everything. Sean and I, each day, are looking forward figuratively and literally; the road goes on and on and will take us to the good, the bad and sometimes the ugly.

Chester encapsulates all of that, and we saw glimpses of that spectrum. Getting to the hotel, which was in the centre of town, was a little tricky due to the one-way and pedestrianisation, but Chester is worth a visit for sure.

The hotel does not have secure private parking, so the option was to use the nearby public car park. Aware that there might be scrotes lurking about armed with junior hacksaws and malice, Sean improvised and spotted a private bank car park directly opposite the hotel, which had the added protection of lockable gates. So, after a brief negotiation with the Bank manager, we were able to park the bikes, lock them up and padlock the gate until the morning. The manager drove off, and the space where her car was parked was now empty; however, we opted not to position the bikes in that space beside the wall of the building, but to push them further into the yard.

Packing and unpacking the bikes is a bit of a faff, and it takes a short while to complete. As we were doing so, there was a whooshing sound and the clatter of a plastic drain pipe cover hitting the floor, followed by a stream of raw sewage. The toilet had just been flushed, and the soil pipe’s cover couldn’t take this final insult. We just stood and watched from only a few metres away, thankful that we didn’t park the bikes in the spot recently vacated by the bank manager’s car. I am sure she will have something to say the next morning about her space littered with paper and human detritus, which had all night to fester on the tarmac. Ugly indeed.

Dinner was in the Old Harker’s Arms, and the staff again were exceptional towards us, organised by Paul, the manager. It looks like an old nineteenth-century (or earlier) warehouse beside the canal. Two narrow boats were moored outside to provide that authentic feel. The "Harker" in The Old Harkers Arms name refers to a Mr Harker, who operated a canal-boat chandlery in the late 19th century in what is now the pub building, which previously served as a boot factory before becoming a chandler's. I’d rather hoped that ‘harker’ referred to a canal worker occupation, now lost to posterity.

The next stage was to get to Morecambe, and this is a challenge given that Liverpool, Warrington and Manchester were between us and the coast northwards. At our dinner table, a couple had just enjoyed their meal, and so I took the chance to ask for a local’s opinion of the route. Bearing in mind, I said, we are on small bikes and avoiding motorways, he suggested heading up the Wirral towards Birkenhead and crossing the Mersey using the Queensway tunnel. Once across and through the western edge of Liverpool, we would be in the ‘countryside’.

Subjectivity, of course, is an important concept. What is the best pasty in Cornwall? Philps, Gear Farm, Anne’s or Ginster’s? The answer is subjective and depends on what each individual thinks is ‘good’. I know we can get a consensus going if you ask enough people, but a sample of one skews the result. Remember, that we have just ridden Cornwall, Devon, Exmoor and North Somerset, the Wye Valley, Mid Wales and into Shropshire and Cheshire. Proper countryside. That is our standard. We can tell the difference between a carrot-infested, greasy industrial pasty and a traditional steak from Gear Farm; we can tell the difference between a flimsy disc lock and a D lock strong enough to anchor the Titanic; and we can tell an amber ale from a pint o’ piss.

I think we know what the countryside looks like. Apologies to those who live in the area between Chester, Birkenhead, Liverpool and Morecambe, but you have work to do. The run to the tunnel was a commuter run of traffic lights, roundabouts and heavy goods vehicles. Not good, very bad and sometimes ugly. Certainly slow. It took two hours, nine minutes and fifty-eight seconds to ride 29.9 miles to Ormskirk. We also discovered that three tunnels cross the Mersey, or so the signage would have us believe. I was told to look for the Queensway tunnel. We saw signs for the Liverpool/Birkenhead tunnel and the Wallasey tunnel. No Queensway? Of course, there is a ‘Queensway’, but it is the Liverpool/Birkenhead, so two tunnels become one, which you don’t find out until you enter the tunnel and read Queensway above the entrance. I now have local knowledge and will not be fooled again. The good thing, motorcycles pass through for free. I think this is not born of altruism towards bikers. It is to stop us holding up traffic from behind while we remove gloves and hunt for cards/money.

So out of the tunnel we emerge into Liverpool, which was to be expected, and soon the countryside! That did not turn up until Ormskirk, and then it was only a shadow of its former self all the way to Morecambe via Lancaster. The longer route, and Sean’s preference, was to ride via Warrington and then up to Ormskirk, as he had knowledge of the route and swore it was good riding.

With the bikes safe in a garage at the BnB, no sewage pipe was spotted nearby, so we walked into town for dinner. Morecambe Bay looks across the hills of the Lake District and has some of the best sunsets in the country. The town has its famous titular son, Eric, whose statue sits on the seafront. Again, the town has its less than salubrious face, and has lost some of its past glory, which can still be seen in the seafront architecture. Despite the very real deprivations behind the facade, work is afoot to bring art and hope to the place, in large part due to the efforts and enthusiasm of Matt, Sean’s friend. The Eden of the North is also to be built, not to the scale of the Cornish version, but it will add another reason to visit. Llandrindod Wells and Morecambe may be geographically distinct, but they share a common history. Ordinary people come to live, work and to entertain and be entertained. Wealth built grand designs such as the red brick and turreted Gwalia Hotel in Llandrindod and the Winter Gardens in Morecambe sea front, and then moved on, leaving behind a trail of detritus to be cleared up by people it leaves behind in its wake. But many people are resilient and still look to arts and music as a defence against despair. The Smuggler’s Den pub in Poulton Road provides just such an accessible space for open mike nights, jokes, series and beer.

Private Equity Capital rarely cares about deindustrialised towns or heritage pubs with histories such as the 600-year-old Coach and Horses in Chepstow, whose wall was once the border between Wales and England. It cares about investable assets, predictable returns, exit value and risk. There is always bad, always ugly, but always good as well when people find a passion and begin to care about their towns with a moral attachment to geography and to their community.

Next…..

Previously…

The army has a reputation for meticulously planning events, focusing on detail and logistics. It is not for nothing that we say ‘with military precision’ about any ordinary plan of ours that actually works out. Dads will stand back proudly and look at a newly placed shelf that is actually horizontal. They will swell inwardly with pride if they can get the family safely and quickly to the Caravan holiday in Skegness without being diverted through Runcorn. Granted, these achievements don’t rival the Normandy Invasion, but they do illustrate the everyday little victories that all men with unimportant jobs, unimpressed wives and impossibly entitled children all strive to achieve.

The reality of the military’s prowess is different to the theory, as any active or ex-serviceman knows, and there is also the maxim that “No plan survives first contact with the enemy”. Well, that might be true.

Dave, our host at the Coach and Horses in Chepstow, is a proud ex-army man of the Devon and Dorset Regiment and runs the pub in an orderly manner, and I don’t doubt that many of his plans, though not all, actually work. Upon arrival at the pub, the bikes were put away, one in the pub garden and the other in a public car park, complete with five security features. Yes, five. Our plans do not involve a bike being stolen by some opportunist scrote who takes a shine to a little orange KTM.

Come the time for departure, Sean and I walk to the car park to release my bike from its constraints. After the fourth lock, Sean walked back to the pub, leaving me with the final disc lock on the front wheel. The disc being locked is the brake disc; a steel bolt is housed in a bright yellow steel box and stops the disc from turning once fitted. I have seen security testing videos on YouTube in which various devices were tested, and while not foolproof, a disc lock should prevent the opportunist. It will not stop a professional with an angle grinder; the fast-spinning diamond wheel blade cuts through metal in short order.

The plan so far was working. The bike had not been stolen; four locks were now removed.

Dave and Sean, standing outside the pub chatting, then saw me approach holding up a key. As I approached, I said, “we need a solution”, as I held up a key that had sheared off in half. The lock was still on the bike. The tables had turned, and we had to think like bike thieves about how to proceed.

My first thoughts included watching those YouTube videos to remind myself how they did it; the second was to call the RAC. Dave suggested putting out a call on Facebook to anyone in Chepstow (on a bank holiday Monday) who could source an angle grinder. He also very kindly offered us to stay another night if we didn’t find an answer.

Christina, his housekeeper, walked into the bar, discovered our problem and said she would call her husband as he had tools. Christian shortly turned up, looked at the bike and went away to fetch something. He came back holding a junior hacksaw - the sort of tool I look upon as having a function in theory (cutting through metal) but in practice couldn’t cut mustard. I have to say I was sceptical, but he insisted and wanted to give it a go, so off he went to the car park while I dialled the RAC.

Time began to tick away, and many thoughts occurred, not the least of which was that if we missed tonight’s venue in Llandrindod Wells through having to stay in Chepstow, then we would have to ride double the distance in one go to get to Chester. This was not a prospect I relished, given that we ask a lot of the 125s as it is. That run would be at least ten hours of bum-numbing, cold-bone-aching, discomfort.

The RAC staff were still verifying my RAC membership with my Bike insurer when Christina walked back into the pub. “He’s done it”, she said. He’d only been gone about five minutes. I admit, I couldn’t believe it, and thinking that, as English was her second language, she had misheard or, worse, that Christian had cut through a brake pipe.

Both Sean and I were stunned. Dave wasn’t a bit surprised. At that point, Christian walked in holding the now-removed lock; he had cut through a steel lock bolt with a hacksaw. I could've kissed him. My mood had gone from the blackest to elation in a few short moments.

This escape then allowed us to load up and prepare to leave. Christian and Christina are from Romania but have been in the UK for some time now. We had a chance to chat for a while, and we found out that Christina is a dental surgeon, and Christian is a retired Navy Diver. “We have a saying in Romania: if you have a problem, you find a solution”. Christina gave up dentistry and now works for Dave at the pub and couldn’t be happier doing so. They are legends in my book. So the Navy and Army are working together!

We were able then to leave by eleven o'clock to head up through the Wye valley and on into Wales. Our route was to take us to Monmouth, then after a short detour up a country lane littered with tractors, gravel, potholes, mud and the smell of fear, on to Abergavenny. We passed the pub just outside Aber, where I nearly choked to death on a piece of meat on a previous bike trip with Marcus, my sister’s eldest. We then passed a biker cafe called the Roadhouse (which we must return to someday), towards Bronllys and a wonderful stop at a wisteria festooned cafe called the ‘Honey Cafe’ for a decent lunch.

At one point, I had to pull over and just laugh at the sheer enjoyment of riding this little bike on these Welsh roads. Bikers will get what I mean. I’ve never had to stop and laugh on a road trip in a car. We finished the day in Llandrindod Wells, as planned. We had achieved it not with military precision, exactly, but with a good deal of luck and help from complete strangers, who couldn’t have been kinder on a bank holiday!

Oh, and why had the key sheared off? I was trying to open a disc lock with the wrong key! We have two identical Oxford locks, and I thought I was removing mine instead of Sean’s. The locks are both yellow, both with yellow lanyards, but the struggle to loosen the bolt resulted in key failure. We now know that locks will not survive first contact with a teenager and a hacksaw.

Next:

‘Expect the unexpected’ is something I have been told, usually by those with PhDs in Hindsight. It is a good maxim as maxims go, but I think it is entirely impractical, as who knows of the infinite number of possible unexpected outcomes we are faced with each moment? Walking down the high street, a piano could fall on your head from four stories up, so are we supposed to walk to the pub with one eye on the heavens? Should we look out for a half-cooked mouse in our pork pies? What about taking the dog for a quiet walk in the park and coming across a choir of squirrels singing the Anvil Chorus from Verdi’s Il Trovatore?

The ‘unexpected’ is only so because no one expects it. It’s the very definition.

I think the better maxim is ‘expect the unlikely but possible’, such as no meat in a traditional steak pasty, the Prime Minister farting loudly at Prime Minister’s Questions or Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor sweating in a Pizza Express.

I was also told that when on the road, one should always be able to ‘stop in the distance one can see to be clear’. That’s sound advice, especially in the high hedged countryside of Devon and Cornwall, where visibility can be limited to a few metres around the next bend. It is advice not always taken consistently by many drivers, particularly on roads they know well. They might think that because they’ve never hit a cow in the past 20 years on their commuting road, today will be exactly like all of the others, until a cow’s arse sits on their face after coming through the windscreen at a rate of knots.

Sometimes, though, the unexpected happens, and there is not much you can do about it. A deer will leap, a toad will cross the road, or a sudden hailstorm turns the surface into an ice rink.

Sometimes a heavy D lock will wriggle free of its cargo net on the back of the bike in front of you and bounce gaily onto the road surface and miss one’s front wheel. A D lock is not like a scaffold pole or a spill of diesel, both of which would make a pleasant day turn nasty very quickly. But riders would not want to hit a D lock deliberately. Just ask Sean. They are not as light as a mouse, nor as heavy as a washing machine, but they have the potential to cause more than a modicum of consternation. The Gods smiled today, and the lock bounced away from danger just in time.

This incident happened on the road out of Watchet on our way to Chepstow on an otherwise lovely ride towards Cheddar Gorge.

We stopped at the Eidelweiss cafe in Cheddar and got talking to a lovely local couple from a village nearby. They enjoyed riding their e-bikes and even carried a small French bulldog on their outings. Earlier in the day, I had planned to get ahead of Sean in the gorge and film him sweeping around the bends as he rode up the hill. In my mind, there was no one else there but some sheep grazing nearby. I’d get a lovely shot of the cliffs rising above either side and Sean leaning over on the little Duke. As we sat with coffee and got talking, the bank holiday crowds had already arrived in force. The village at the gorge entrance is all tea shops, restaurants and gift shops. Dare say you could buy a Mendip sheep if needs be. Andrew and Trina, our ‘new best friends’ at the cafe, were not going up the gorge, and instead would cycle back home. They’d been here before and knew the ropes.

Meanwhile, we joined the queue of cars, motorcycles, bicycles and jaywalkers coming back down as well as going up. Cars lined the gorge verges for quite some distance, with all manner of folk and their dogs milling around. There would be no picture worthy of the cover of Motorcycle News today, as I had earlier expected there would be.

Finding a route through large conurbations without using motorways is a challenge, which is the point. Bristol is a good example, but before that, we again hit a small farm lane south of Chew Valley. The navigation App called this section ‘fun’. If your idea of fun is dentistry or counting the cars on the M25, then yes, this is fun. The only way I’ve traversed Bristol is on the M5, and so missing the Portway along the river Avon and under the Clifton suspension bridge, keeping the two sides of the Avon gorge apart.

After crossing the Severn, we were on our way to Tintern for a splendid Sunday roast and then our final stop at the Coach and Horses in Chepstow. By this time, I was hot and bothered, so I parked the bike in the nearby public car park. Sean and I made it as secure as possible using five different security locks, including the D lock that had bounced earlier in the day, and three disc locks. One thing we could expect was some opportunist bike thief taking a shine to the little Duke. That scenario is definitely not ‘the unexpected’, and falls neatly into the category of not only ‘possible but probable’ if you give them a sniff of chance.

Next:

Previously:

‘Screaming devils’ was a name once used to describe the swooping arcs blading in the air just above our heads. We once used fanciful and colourful language to describe nature. I think we still should.

This particular morning, I wasn’t woken up by the sound of Swifts screaming above the rooftops above Stratton, but I think I should have been? The view from the bedroom window overlooks the village and reminds me of a time spent in Wiveliscombe in Somerset many years ago. Swifts at that time were numerous, and their sound is always evocative of summer weather and warmth. Perhaps I am being too eager to hear them again.

After breakfast, we said our goodbyes and thank you to Simon, and headed across Mid Devon towards Crediton and the Union Moto-Velo cafe. Although not really that far from Cornwall, this is a part of the world I have rarely visited. We usually drive past it. Crediton, I have heard of, but never had any reason to go there. I think I have one now.

It is called the Union Moto-velo cafe, and its vibe is similar to Project 83 in Newquay. As we approached, we could see five Harley-Davidsons parked on the street in front. Their owners were enjoying coffee and cigarettes and watching the passing cars and bikes. They were a subset of the Harley tribe. They wore the same uniform of desert camo shirts, denims, leather waistcoats, big beards, wallet chains, but with the addition of a ‘patch’ - The Devon Demons. I noted one had a small badge on his leather jacket saying ‘RIP Pete’ and a date. I can’t imagine what sort of lifestyle they lead or if they have day jobs as accountants and dentists. Their bikes cost as much as a flat in Carbis Bay.

How do you become a member of the ‘Devon Demons’? What life experiences must you have to lead you in that direction? What keeps you a member? I’ve never seen an advert for membership or been handed a leaflet at any biker meet-up. I guess that it is word of mouth and a personal invitation among a small group of those ‘in’. The group looks like and suggests drug dealing and violence, but despite their unsaintly name (and stereotyping), they do a huge amount of charity work. This is another example of not judging by first impressions.

The cafe has vintage motorcycles for sale and walls decorated with bike and music memorabilia. There is also a fender on one wall. I think some would say this place is ‘cool’. Beards are not obligatory, not even for women, but they are fashionable. As we left, a very nice bloke gave us a tip for staying in Rhayader in mid Wales. “Try the Royal Lion, a great place and biker-friendly”. Sadly, the hotel was already booked up.

The road through the Exe valley is not one I’ve ever used, but maybe I should come again. We decided to go to Minehead before Watchet as there is a fine cafe there called the ‘Turntable Cafe’, because unlike the majority of cafes in the country, it has an old railway turntable beside it belonging to the West Somerset Railway. We sat under an umbrella, drinking coffee, watching rivulets roll off the canopy, and steam engines come and go. The weather had turned from overcast to downpour. Thankfully, there were only six miles or so to the accommodation - it was a test for the wet weather gear. Mine failed, I was going to have to rethink, as we may face much tougher tests in the days to come.

The West Somerset Railway is staffed by volunteers in the main, people who give time and energy to keep heritage, memories, and life. The station was packed with folk, but many of these heritage lines are facing rising costs. We face the possibility of losing some lines or of seeing the shrinking of services. It is a tension everywhere: that between ‘the bottom line’ and everything else that makes life worthwhile. Heritage is seemingly becoming a privilege; perhaps it always was. We face choices always, and we could just let these lines face ruin, as with Tintern Abbey. We already rely on love and charity for these services. It is not without irony that our ride is to plug a gap between a necessary service (not heritage) and what hospices actually receive from the health service - note they only get 20% of funding from the State. In many ways, the West Somerset Railway and the Hospice movement exist in the space between humanity and accounting, between love and cash, between heart and head. I fear that the accounting, cash and the bottom line are increasingly dictating what we value and cherish, but I don’t believe that is inevitable. Chepstow would teach that lesson again the next day.

There is a great pub called Pebbles near the harbour in Watchet, and they allow us to bring in fish and chips from the takeaway next door. The place is lively, and we find a table to share with two young couples. They are busy playing a drinking game with cards. The rules are ill-defined and leave enough room for interpretation and therefore for ‘debate’, which becomes lively. They are interested in what we are doing, and one of the young women donated there and then. Her father had started a refrigeration business from scratch, and now she is a junior barrister working in South London. It is not often a ‘grumpy old biker’ like me gets to hear the experiences of people in their twenties, but this group were very willing to chat and share their stories. Sean and I left them to finish the game in whatever messy way it would end.

The owner of our bed and breakfast, the Georgian House in Swain Street, was Keith, and his helpmeet/housekeeper was Sharon. I thought they were a married couple as their banter was a joy to watch. Sharon is sixty-seven, and Keith is possibly a bit older. The house was a ruin and without a ceiling when Keith bought it. He has done it up beautifully, as it now resembles, well… a Georgian period house; there is not a stick of Ikea in the whole place. There is a mix of ornaments with a few Art Deco pieces, which nonetheless fit well into the whole. This was a five-star BnB in every sense. Keith, a few years ago now, had spotted Sharon and her friend standing near the front door of the house and had asked them if they would like to come inside for a drink. Soon, he asked her if she would like a job. I think that was a wise move. They both said they had been married before, and that would be enough for them, but the relationship is clearly built on trust and love. Sharon’s cooked-to-order Full English was a work of art. We left in a very happy mood.

This was a day of charitable Demons, supportive Welsh advice, volunteering effort and spontaneous generosity. You don’t always see that on social media.

Next:

Previously…

Some people make you sad, some even make you bad, and some (a few) make you think evil thoughts about them. They just do.

But not everyone.

Today is our first leg to Scotland and back, starting from Land’s End, and my goodness, what a morale-boosting start. Charlotte, who works for Lands End Landmarks, had prepared our start with a smile, encouragement, and helpfulness. Our parking fees were waived, as were the photograph and signage fees at the famous post. The team at Land’s End couldn’t have been more helpful. So, a big thank you to them!

The signpost was personalised with St Luke’s Hospice as the core message. We placed the two bikes in front with a glorious view of the cliffs and the sea behind. As it was about 9-ish, we were the first there in an atmosphere of calm, and soon to be joined by one walker and two cyclists, each making the journey north.

After our picture was taken at the post, it was Jordan’s turn to have his done. He is a wiry thirty-something with steel in his resolve and love in his heart, who is walking 1200 miles on his own. His backstory was only hinted at by the two friends who waved him off. Let’s just say he was not born with a silver spoon; it was probably a rusty farmyard shovel. Here he was, taking on an epic walk for those suffering from mental health problems that may have led to drug use and jail time. Tonight, he is wild camping somewhere about twenty-five miles from Land’s End.

Our own ‘cheering on crowd’ was Ann, who stayed with Sean and me in Sennen last night and worked tirelessly behind the scenes; my always supportive sister Karen and my eighty-seven-year-old mother, who makes up for in spirit what she lacks in athleticism. David, an old friend and keen motorcyclist, rode down on his Ducati, probably to make sure we would leave the county! I did not expect anyone to put themselves out for us, but then some people just do.

After the hugs and kisses and promises of a safe return, we pointed the bikes northwards and slowly rode off across a line which says ‘start’ - even though there was a no-entry sign right beside it. We ignored the little red and white warning circle as crossing a start line was an opportunity not to be missed. The conditions were perfect, as for once, wind and rain had taken a day off. Our next planned stop would be forty six miles away in Newquay at Project 83 cafe and biker stop. I had forewarned the owners we would stop by at midday, and we actually rolled in at twelve, two hours after we set off. The 125cc bikes love the small roads, and so do we.

Vision. Without it, some wise person said, ‘the people perish’. Gillan and Krista, who run Project 83 biker cafe, certainly had that over six years ago. They had been running a bike clothing store and a small barber shop when the derelict garage across the lane came up for rent. They took it and designed the whole thing with an astonishing attention to detail. It is a stripped-down basic industrial/bike garage look, with battered leather seats to relax in, to complement the tables. Their very friendly staff, Katie and Gemma, banged out the tea, coffee and bacon baps.

After parking the bikes in the cafe’s yard, I saw Gillan walk into his ‘office’ - fittingly a yellow-painted shipping container. A tall, well-built bloke with a proper hipster/biker beard and tattoos, he looks like he bites the heads off chickens for breakfast. He doesn’t, of course; he is very approachable and mild-mannered, and I like to think I scared him when I poked my head through the door to say hello. In reality, I merely spooked him as he was concentrating. His partner, Krista, who owns an Indian Scout, was working in the bike gear/barber shop across the lane, all part of the same business. Krista exuded warmth and confessed to being loath to sell her Scout.

To get a feel for the 83 vibe, you need to start thinking about Route 66 and desert highways. ‘Americana’, I think it’s called. If you own a Harley or an Indian, you will instantly find a home here. Mind you, all bikers will find a home here. As I sat down to a decent cup of tea and a bacon bap, I was approached by another customer, Shaun, who looked like he had just arrived from somewhere in the deserts of south-west USA. His T-shirt announced that he too, was an Indian owner, but he was very interested in our bikes and our trip. His wife or partner, Jasmine, whose gloriously coloured tattoos matched her gloriously coloured hair, also joined us and wanted to know in more detail what we were up to. They took our flyer, unbidden, and promised they’d support us further.

Lunch over, it was time to head off to Bude. Cornwall in the sunshine on the coastal roads is very hard to beat. The relative lack of traffic at this time of year, the twisty corners, combined with the views at both Watergate and Widemouth Bays, will be well known to many. Sweeping sands, blue skies, green grass-topped cliffs and white surf provide the palette that creates a healing deep within.

Arriving at Summerleaze beach, we were joined by Tom on his brand-new Aprilia. He had spotted the bikes, recognising them from social media posts, and just had to come over and talk with a genuine interest. Many folk mention a feeling of camaraderie among bikers, and I don’t want to overplay that, as some bikers are just as rude, ignorant, and stupid as everyone else. Yet, chaps like Tom continue to break through the wall of cynicism that can easily be erected between us all. He was excited about our two 125cc Dukes, not letting the fact of his newly acquired Aprilia overshadow the discussion. Some people like to talk about themselves, others are just as interested in others. In a mad, self-consuming, self-obsessed and fracturing society, this is always a welcome finding.

At our destination, The Tree Inn at Stratton, Simon, our host, demonstrated his generosity by waiving the fee for the night’s accommodation. He has had the pub for six years. Having finally given in to his partner’s wish and moving down from London to run an Inn, he was now putting in the hours to make it work. The pub dates back to at least the 1600s, and it shows in the black oak-beamed architecture. There is not a straight line in the place. One of his customers sat with friends at a table in the sunlit courtyard, having seen the bikes, asked about the journey, and immediately put his hand in his pocket. This spontaneous generosity would be a feature of many a chance encounter.

Kilkhampton is five miles north of Stratton and is reached by a very lovely, quick bike ride across the countryside. The New Inn in the village serves some of the best pub food around, as its handcrafted, shortcrust and rich dark gravy steak and kidney pie attests to. Our hosts, having learned about the trip again, waived the cost of the food. The place was soon buzzing after we arrived for dinner, and a degree of entertainment was the old Padstow fisherman at the bar. His strong accent and use of fruity language are born of dealing with storms at sea - I guess that fishermen have more important things to worry about than social niceties. No one cared as he was obviously a regular local whose feet had eroded the floor of that portion of the bar. Anyone new to the area, bringing snobby city sensibilities, would swiftly get told to be quiet, but in words far more colourful than a bouquet of rainbows.

The hospitality trade, and small businesses generally, are facing very tough times. Yet, some are still willing to support the hospice cause. I’ve no doubt many stories sit behind their actions, stories we can only dimly imagine. The cyclist in tears back at Lands End, who was clearly moved even before the first crank was turned, had his own private story.

Some people demand respect, some people earn it. Some people would sink small boats at sea, and some other people volunteer in the lifeboat service to risk their lives to help those in peril, regardless.

Kindness of heart and generosity of spirit still exist in this country, despite the tawdry headlines and scaremongering stories in many of our media, both old and new. The people we met today give me hope. I’m convinced we will meet many others in unexpected places and in unexpected encounters.

Some people, eh?

Next:

Twenty-one miles.

Fifty minutes.

There are more speed limit signs on this B road than there are pasties in Cornwall. It is a bit of a joke on a small bike to be told what the limit is, as often the little engine and gradient will tell you. Trewellard, Botallack, Pendeen and Carnyorth - fantastical names to include in a misty Cornish mystery to evoke a Celtic or pagan past. The village signs have their own stories as we slowly pass them.

However, despite the speed limits, this is one of the finest little runs in the country. We are about to find out over the coming weeks just how it compares as we head north. The road is the B3306, which runs out of St. Ives and meanders all the way towards Sennen to eventually join the A30 just before Land’s End. On the way, you will pass the erstwhile home of the occultist Aleister Crowley, the ruined granite engine houses at the car park of Bosigran, and you will see a sign to one of the best cream teas in the south west - Rosemergy tea rooms. They draw their own water for the tea, and it tells, for a better cup of tea cannot be served anywhere else, apart from your Mum’s kitchen table.

The village of Zennor sits in a dip in the road, its church tower clearly visible as you approach. The mermaid calls no more, but the stone walls and slate roof of the Tinner’s Arms in the heart of the village still record her adventures. The sea is just a chough’s call away, and the swell sings its own song. The road twists and bends and narrows so that in places you have no option but to stop or crawl, as a blind bend can suddenly deliver a vehicle taking up the whole space. Get it wrong, and you risk either a head-on or leaving the bodywork and chassis of your own vehicle in bits as the granite blocks in the hedges tear at the metal.

This is proper moorland country; granite tors rising on your left and sweeping fields fall down the cliffs on your right. Bright yellow gorse at this time of year decorates the hedges, which are not so high as to block your views across the landscape. Often, you can spot the road contouring ahead around the next headland. Windblown hawthorn and may trees keep the gorse company, their upper branches bent from the prevailing southwesterlies. Jackdaws are blown along above your head in a cackling dance of celebration, while cattle and sheep pretend not to notice the beauty and instead focus on grazing.

Gurnards Head has its hotel, which emblazons across the landscape, painted as it is in daffodil yellow. It sits at a ninety-degree bend in the road, so don’t get distracted as you approach it. The path down to the magnificent rocky headland, which gives the Hotel its name, crosses a few fields before you are transported into another mythical land. The sheer black cliffs are frightening, magnificent and awe-inspiring; they draw climbers from afar to take on epic routes, some of which start at crashing, white, sea wave level, should you dare.

The 125cc bikes cope with this road extremely well, its short but steep sections provide no real challenge, and we are calmed by the thought that bigger, more powerful vehicles than us cannot go very fast or be any more nimble than we are. The bikes today are fully laden with our dry packs strapped and clipped to the back seat, while we carry rucksacks. The extra weight is noticeable as I can now easily place two feet flat on the floor, whereas before I had to balance on the balls of one foot. However, the extra weight doesn’t seem to adversely affect the handling of the bikes.

Lands End airport provides an airshow as we pass, if you can call a single light aircraft taking off such a thing as its wings flap from side to side in the crosswind. A grey Royal Navy helicopter hovers over the cliffs, no doubt practising and testing the skills of the pilots. A kestrel joins the aerial performance as it launches itself from the hedge in front of us, the brown of its back a brief giveaway as to its nature.

All of this you can see on a slow-moving motorcycle, if you care to look. The speed limits are irrelevant to this passing pageantry of the Penwith Moors, and laughingly, some sections are of the ‘national speed limit’, which means you could do sixty miles per hour, in theory. Yes, in theory. I wouldn’t recommend it.

The final thirty-mile-an-hour sign ushered us towards our destination, just a few short hops to the Lands End car park. Tomorrow we leave for Scotland, but if twenty-one miles in fifty minutes is a guide, it is going to be a long journey.

Next: a surprisingly emotional departure from Land’s End, the kindness of strangers, why hospices matter more than most of us realise, and the first miles north as two small motorcycles begin a very long road through Britain.

Next…..

My very first bicycle arrived when I was about thirteen years old in 1971. I was a schoolboy with scabby knees and an interest in girls unmatched by any flirting competence. David Bowie was Ziggy Stardust. I remember the bike clearly. It was a red steel framed racing bike with drop handlebars with gears we called ‘drayliyurs’ in our Cornish accents. I rode it like a nutter around the Cornish lanes, and once came off it as I deliberately rode it into a bush. The bush caught the spokes, and I was dumped into the lane. The broken front wheel nearly matched my broken heart. There was no such thing as hazard perception or risk assessment at that age, just the sheer bloody joy of cycling.

I passed my motorcycling licence, age seventeen in 1977, by simply riding around the block and waiting for the examiner to indicate for me to do an emergency stop. My knees were less scabby, girls were still a mystery and David Bowie had released ‘Low’.

I have ridden motorcycles ever since. The first being a Kawasaki (which I nearly crashed) and the second I bought a year later, a Triumph Bonneville (which I did crash). I was enjoying speeding around the roads in South Devon until I went into a corner and then hit a car as it pulled out on my left. My fractured thigh bone bore witness to my young stupidity.

I rode bicycles and motorcycles on and off ever since. In 2012, I began a serious affair of long distance cycling, ending up with an epic Calais-Montpelier ride through France with my brother. We had put in the miles beforehand to prepare for this challenge. I had replaced scabby knees with surgical scars, women were still an object of mystery and David Bowie was still alive.

We learned, very quickly, that on a bicycle your life is in the hands of other people’s attention. Their skill, confidence, good intentions and self assessment as good drivers are irrelevant. It is their attention to us as vulnerable road users that means life or death. The close pass is common. All drivers will miss a glance, we will ‘look but fail to see’. We will miss a mirror check, some of us will read a text at the wrong moment, and the whole thing will quickly become a mess.

Cyclists begin to learn via social media that attitudes towards cycling can be offensive, ignorant and dangerous. I tend to think that one cause is that there is often a sense of entitlement, rather than a privilege, to be driving at any speed on public roads.

I now ride a 125cc. A little KTM Duke that is rivalled in power by a dishwasher. The road today is fraught with hazards that have to be negotiated - potholes, drain covers, slippery wet surfaces. We have always faced these things, but more importantly is the non negotiation bikers and cyclists have with drivers of vehicles of all types. We, as drivers, simply put our feet on the gas and go, protected by cage of steel. We just drive, and to be fair that attitude is held by bikers as well. Time pressures, lack of attention, entitlement and speed. A lethal combination.

I love speed, and I have done more than my share of speed awareness courses over the years, as well as picking up points in the past. The whole point of some bikes is speed and acceleration. Along with my 125, I have other bikes that are as powerful as necessary, shall we say. I recently got pinged for doing 35 in a 30 simply because the speed limit sign was covered by a bush!

I am perfectly able to spot a 20 mph sign and curse also at being forced to slow down, and yet I see and hear the chorus of complaint wafting into the air like a bad smell that seems to accompany every attempt to reduce the number of killed and seriously injured on our roads (1, 602 killed in 2024).

Most of the complaint, if we’re being honest, is selfish. We simply want to drive as we decide and bugger everyone else. Instead of saying that clearly, we reach for higher more ‘reasonable’ justifications to cover up our selfishness. And so perfectly normal, nice folk turn into self congratulatory, self justifying, numpties when behind a wheel. There is a quiet, everyday selfishness that says “my time matters more than your safety”. Frustration turns into resistance to “nanny state interference” or a “war on motorists” or “money making racket”.

The complaints we make are a refusal to think properly about what driving a vehicle is. It’s our birthright, our entitlement, our right of way. Isn’t it?

I was reading an article about manslaughter charges rarely being applied to killing someone by using our cars, vans or trucks. Instead the law usually turns to ‘careless’ or ‘dangerous’ driving. I don’t think that is adequate when someone gets killed or seriously injured.

As my crash on the Bonneville clearly attested, competence is not something we possess; it’s something we perform, and most of us perform it badly more often than we would care to admit. At the time I cursed the driver for pulling out. Upon reflection…I more than contributed to the crash by thinking that as I was on the main road, I had the right of way and it was down to me to judge my speed.

We pass a driving test once upon a time during the Jurassic era. Then we spend the next forty years congratulating ourselves on being ‘better than average’ , while quietly shedding the very habits that got us through it in the first place. ‘Mirror, signal, manoeuvre’ becomes…quickly look (and fail to see), vaguely indicate (if at all), go anyway as quickly as possible because we’re late or just pissed off.

Cyclists and Bikers witness the choreography of falling standards combined with the stresses of modern life. We see the slight drift of a vehicle across a white line as a text message is read; we see the inching forward at a junction or roundabout while the driver looks through us rather than at us. We see the head tilted downwards just long enough to read something that cannot possibly wait; we see the speed increase as if road signs were invisible. Not one of these drivers think they are careless or dangerous. None of us think we will become killers. The blood on the road writes its own story of tragedy and carelessness and of arrogance. Why should I slow down, we tend to think, rather than questioning why I assume I should be allowed to go quickly in the first place?

From a small bike, a 125cc, speed feels different to that sitting in a car because we are not insulated or protected. Thirty miles an hour through a village feels like movement with consequences. Twenty miles an hour does feel like a crawl and it often irritates. At forty mph we are aware, in a way that is hard to describe until we’ve felt it, that things can go wrong very quickly and that when they do, we will not win the argument. In any case being right is no consolation when face down in a gutter because a child had the audacity to run into the road and has felt your tyres snap their little leg in two.

Cycling teaches you that. Motorcycling, if done without self deception, reinforces it.

And yet we continue to behave as if small increments of speed are trivial. Twenty, thirty, forty. What’s the difference? We are the captains of our destinies and we are well able to judge what is appropriate. Well, yes, we often are. Sometimes we are not.

The laws of physics will not be bent; the laws of motion, mass and velocity care not one jot about our egos.

If we know any science at all, we know that the relationship between speed and damage caused by it, is not linear. Twice as much speed is not the same as twice as much force; it is far, far more. If you want the equation it is this: KE = 1/2 mv2. This means at 25 mph you’re not taking a small extra risk over 20. You’re delivering over 50% more energy into whatever you hit. That small 5 mph difference is the difference between injury and death. But, we get royally pissed off for doing twenty four mph in a twenty if we get caught. The faster we go our reaction times shrink, stopping distances stretch, impact forces multiply. The difference between twenty and thirty mph is not ten neat units on a dial; it is, for a pedestrian or a cyclist or me on my Duke, often the difference between walking away and being carried away.

We go for years without incident and because we have monkey brains we treat the absence of catastrophe as evidence of safety, of skill, of competence. The truth is it is often sheer bloody luck. As the old joke says “I’ve never been in an accident, but I have seen plenty”.

To get the the roots of this we need to think more about us as people and the reasons behind the way we behave. We need to think about the normalisation of everyday driving habits.

Everyone speeds a bit, glances at their phone a bit, pays partial attention a bit, then that becomes the norm. And once it is the norm, we stop seeing it as a problem. The “competent and careful driver” then becomes what we actually do as ‘normal’ rather than what we claim to value. This is all fine until we kill someone or someone else hits us. At that point , if we are still alive, we shout and scream, we cry, swear and curse. Anger, sorrow and confusion become our bedfellows. The conditions we fail to see were laid down, mile after mile, by entirely ordinary behaviour.

When I cycled a lot, I became extremely aware of these issues and the risks I was forced to take. Vulnerability became a passenger on the handlebars. I knew how little it takes to ruin my day with a close pass. As I ride on my motorcycles around the B roads of West Cornwall and see cyclists, I now wince…how could I have done that? However, it still is something I really enjoyed and would encourage others to do the same.

Riding a 125cc doesn’t entirely erase that feeling of vulnerability. On a small motorcycle, you have to notice more about whats going on around you than when in a car. Hazard perception and anticipation reduce our risks and may save our lives, but that risk is never wholly eliminated. I have seen, as you no doubt have, that many drivers are not making decisions so much as drifting through them, guided by habit, convenience and the gentle narcotic of entitlement and routine.

So when I read the complaints on social media, the eye-rolling at 20 mph zones, the muttering about cameras and fines, I find myself less sympathetic than I once might have been. We all need to develop the ability to step outside the insulated bubble of the car and see the road as a shared, fragile space rather than a private corridor for personal efficiency.

Riding a 125cc motorcycle, or a bicycle, teaches us that fact very quickly.

A Small Favour

Sean and I are riding our little 125cc bikes all the way to John O’Groats and back—up the west coast and down the east coast—raising money for St Luke’s Hospice in Plymouth, whose work supporting patients and families is extraordinary.

If you’d like to support the ride, you can donate here

And if you happen to see a small blue and orange motorcycle ahead of you somewhere on a quiet British road… please remember this article.

#Motorcycling #RideSafe #MotorcycleAwareness #UKMotorcyclists #BritishRoads #CharityRide #JohnOGroats #KTM #KTMRiders

Some of the world’s best brains are focused on developing stuff we didn’t think we needed. This would include weight loss drugs, smart phones that know your psychic aura and nipple tassels. Technologies have been developed to cure cancers, orbit the moon and to facilitate the sharing of dick pics. The people who have these ‘best brains’ like to think they are the smartest in any room they enter. However, many would fail to remove a lid from a peanut butter jar, replace a flat tyre or correctly identify if another person is feeling sad, lonely and anxious. Instead they like to think about developing toys that can be monetised, to make up for the lack of a personality and a decent haircut.

Life can be difficult to navigate at the best of times, and always has been. Neanderthals had to decide if that rustling in the bush was a tiger about to pounce, just a light breeze or dinosaur mating. Getting it wrong could be costly in terms of life or embarrassment. More evolved hominids used paper maps to describe their landscape, and as a technology to move around the place. Maps often worked very well, some even showed you where the dragons are. Some had lovely colours on them, pink for example, that indicated where the looting, the genocide, the raping and the pillaging took place in order for a far away Queen to wear nice jewellery in her Crown.

Maps were not good enough for the ‘smart brains’. A map could get wet in the rain, cannot be mounted on a handle bar and would flap around in the breeze. Reading a paper map at 60 mph on a motorcycle is a challenge. Worse, a map cannot be easily sold for £150 plus electrical accessories - most right thinking individuals balk at parting more than a tenner for a piece of paper. The smart brains, knowing the human weakness for novelty and ‘shiny things’, decided they could fund their pension pots, investment portfolios and third homes in the Caribbean, if they could persuade the rest of us that a computer could tell us where we are at any one moment.

And if you don’t care to know where you are at any given point in time, you could be coaxed into thinking that you should, and that a little computer was just the thing to help you. Your little monkey brain can be switched on with the promise of instant gratification, as if a banana was on offer after a particularly long banana shortage.

I have just such a small bar mounted computer on my little motorcycle. I have been persuaded into thinking the technology will be necessary to go from point A to point B with the minimum of fuss, or a psychotic episode, should I find myself the wrong side of the Tamar. Or in Redruth. Cornwall is not an unknown entity to me. I can place the major towns, and quite a few minor villages, correctly on a paper map. Truro is easy, as is Treskillard, and I don’t need any map to find the best pasties in the world on the Lizard peninsula at Gear Farm.

Land’s End to Scotland and back, up through Wales and down the east coast via London to Brighton, will be trickier. This will be especially so, as Sean and I are going to avoid motorways and busy well sign-posted trunk roads. I know where the A30 and the A38 are. The A303 is also a path well travelled. But where in hell is the A557 or the A385 (Widnes and Ullapool)? I am not about to learn the number of the main A roads in England, Wales and Scotland - I have a life to live and sausages to cook. Worse than that, in many cases a sign telling me how far away ‘Strathpeffer’ is, will be of zero use as I have no way of knowing if it is a City, a town or a description of a Scottish breakfast. In any case I don’t yet know if I should be headed there.

My handle bar mounted computer will tell me though. All I have to do is tell it to go from here to there ‘avoiding motorways, tolls and ferries’. The ‘smart brains’ have even designed things called gpx files which a computer reads as eagerly as a schoolboy reads the underwear section of his mum’s catalogue.

Sean followed me down through the Glynn Valley (the A38 as ‘we’ all know), and parted company at the junction with the A30 near Bodmin. The journey was easy from Gunnislake. My task was to get to St Ives avoiding the slog down the very nice major trunk road built to facilitate the exit and entry of all goods and services, and emmets, into the county. The A30 is full of the usual traffic - delivery vans, articulated lorries, caravans and flat bed trucks with a loose collection of scaffolding tied to the back. All of which will kill me if I tried to keep up with them on my 125.

I looked at my little circular screen on the handlebar and it said ‘go this way’. After three or so miles of gentle leafy county road towards Lostwithiel, it said ‘turn left here’.

The smart brains in California must know this part of Cornwall very well. I have never seen this turning before, but they must have. They have designed the little noughts and ones inside the tiny machine so that they can tell the difference between the M25, the A38 and the B3268. I am trusting them with my life and my time as I make the turn.

Doubt appeared as quickly as the grass in the middle of the lane did. I don’t know if this ‘road’ has a number or in which compass point it is going. The hedges either side soon hide any sense of landmark or direction as the narrow sections got narrower and hemmed me in. The trees loomed overhead blocking out the sun, and farm gates provided the requisite amount of mud and gravel. Potholes decorated the surface resembling the surface of the moon. I soon spent as much time looking down as looking forward. There were names of farms and hamlets on sign posts of course, but they might as well have been written in Greek. The computer was 100% correct on the point of this not being a ‘motorway, toll or ferry’.

I was soon down to about 15 mph, so narrow and so rutted and so unsighted, was the way forward. If a tractor came the other way, I would have about one second to swear before ascending into oblivion (or descending). In many driving courses the word ‘progress’ means “making safe, smooth, and efficient headway, using the maximum speed permitted by the road, traffic, and weather conditions. It is not about exceeding speed limits or reckless driving, but rather using advanced observation and anticipation to avoid unnecessary stops, dawdling, or hesitancy”. I think the word permitted in that definition is doing a lot of work as the maximum speed was often no more than 20 mph at best and often less than 15 mph. No amount of advanced observation would save me from being done over by a modern tractor.

I had instructed the little machine to take me to St Ives. It obeyed, but I had no idea what the roads are like in Cornwall. Its knowledge was as practical for everyday use as is quantum mechanics for cooking eggs. I have to intervene, or risk being algorithmically dissolved under the wheels of a milk tanker, or die of fatigue before I see the Hayle bypass.

It soon became obvious that getting to St Ives by following the smart brain’s directions before the next solstice, would be a challenge. The distance is over 45 miles if one uses the direct route. I however found out by checking a map that I was ‘going around the houses’ in a scenic, if also very inefficient, manner. I was following in the way of Columbus who thought he had discovered India instead of Jamaica. So I made an executive decision, look for the nearest known town or village and go from there using eyeballs and following the setting sun. This led me into clay country and the utter delights of Stenalees, Roche and Whitemoor. Cornwall Council have upgraded the road between Bodmin and St Austell, and despite a bit of a circular tour I was soon merrily flying down the Ladock valley towards Tresillian.

This worked for me in Cornwall as I know where Probus, Trispen and Perranporth are. The smart brains do not. Sean and I will be going north and east of the Tamar, into the void, in which local Cornish knowledge is as useful as a cardboard hammer. I will rely a little bit on the technology, and a good deal of reading the route before hand. I might even stop and ask for directions from random strangers in Dumfries, Derby or Doncaster.

As long as they’ve not popped over from California.

#smallbikesbighearts smallbikesbighearts.co.uk

You sit and wait.

The clock high on the wall ticks over. A pile of dog eared magazines pile atop the coffee table. Unread. Out of date for the most part and covering topics so far removed and irrelevant from the occasion that brings you here, they might as well be hieroglyphics. Your interest in a celebrity wedding, how to bake the best chocolate gateau or the top ten golf courses in Miami, has waned somewhat.

The radio doesn’t play some forgotten song, because it is absent, along with the other normal accoutrements in more homelier rooms. The paint on the wall has been chosen to be inoffensively neutral. The pictures have been chosen by someone tasked with the job with a budget as small as their indifference is huge. Aesthetics left this room in 1954.

A water cooler glugs bubbles every so often, the coffee vendor promises the richness of Colombia, Ethiopia or Java but delivers a drink with all the finesse and taste of the drizzle of Stoke on a wet Wednesday night. Your mouth is too dry for coffee in any case and the knot in your stomach has drained you of any appetites.

You sit and wait.

The letter is folded in your hand. It is possibly the damnedest bit of writing in hell or it is the sanctuary of heaven. The actual wording is bland “We would like to see you in clinic to discuss your recent results.” There is no other clue. The routine screening in the mobile unit four weeks ago in a Tesco car park was the start. You had been invited to a routine screening because you fitted the criteria following a telephone triage. That irritating cough that had persisted had not gone away by the time you had the CT scan. Mind, the NHS and GPs are pushed, and there was nothing to indicate the need to see a doctor in any case.

You sit and wait.

You are unaware that somewhere, without a sign or an announcement, there are two doors you could pass through.

There is a door behind which there will be words; carefully chosen, measured and rehearsed language. You will have a label, a diagnosis, a new status and a rite of passage. You will hear about treatments, options and time. There are choices but some are grim and don’t feel like choices at all. You may transit from medical cure to the softer, more human system of care. The context shifts from cold clinical spaces, endless appointments, of heart sickening drugs. You enter a warmer world in which you are made to feel important and everyone understands the journey you are on. They give you time and space when you need it. The geography of illness shifts from corridors to somewhere quieter, slower, more human. A hospice.

You sit and wait, unaware that somewhere there is another door. It is not signposted, it merely opens up in front of you.

You follow a similar process as you would have before, but this time the appointments continue but leave a hollowness and a misunderstanding often in their wake. Cure fails, care fragments and the ground under your feet shifts violently. The familiarity of your own home should be a comfort, but sometimes it feels like a prison. Pain is managed but the nights stretch. As your functional abilities leave the house, your family absorbs what services cannot easily provide, they can’t always find the words, and they often do not know what to do. Isolation hints at being a companion.

The idea of a hospice still exists, but at a geographical and financial distance. Or it is simply unavailable. The diagnosis remains the same, but the pathways diverge. The die has already been cast, should you even know it.

You sit and wait, letter in hand, not knowing which version of the future has already been written for you.

You sit and wait.

That, in the end, is why places like St Luke’s matter. Not as a sentimental extra, nor as a decorative kindness at the edge of medicine, but as part of what makes dying bearable for the person who is leaving and for those who must remain. This ride on two small bikes is a long way of saying one simple thing: such care should not depend on luck, timing, postcode or exhaustion.

If you would like to support us please click on this link: Ben and Sean’s Excellent Adventures

Six miles.

Thats it, from St Ives along the coast road towards Zennor. It would take a donkey an hour, a cyclist 20 minutes and an earthworm forever.

The driver in the white Audi in front me is taking his lead from the earthworm. But that’s ok because I’m following the car on my KTM Duke 125cc, which would give the donkey a good run for its money.

I left Carbis Bay in good weather, if a little bit overcast and the temperature dropping. The roads are dry, and St Ives is as busy as a small provincial shopping centre at closing time. I can weave through the streets with ease, taking care not to run over any rats, drain covers or water melons. I would wave at the visitors as I pass Fore Street, but I don’t want to alarm them. After all they come from ‘England’ (mostly) and are not used to Cornish bonhomie manifest as an arm waving loon on an orange motorcycle. The road up out of town to the coast road towards Lands End becomes clear and I can speed up to a dizzying 30 mph. The bike fizzes and spits its exhaust note, not so much in anger as in exertion, but we climb up past the newly refurbished Leach pottery and to the junction where I turn left for Zennor.

The road ahead winds upwards through gorse lined moorland, I’m flanked by granite boulders in pasture fields and tatty hawthorn hedges. There is plenty of room for me, but many drivers find this stretch of road challenging in its bends and narrow blind turns. I open up the throttle and the bike leaps forward…in much the same fashion, and with as much speed and grace, as a slippered pensioner with arthritic hips would leap forward on a hopscotch square.

The feeling of freedom is intoxicating as the I change up to fifth gear. This might be an exaggeration, but that is what the motorcycle YouTube presenters say I should be feeling, so it must be true. The rev counter is screaming as if the engine is going to have an aneurysm. The road below the front wheel flashes by at a speed I can see the trails left by snails and pick out what colour the gravel is. I can look far ahead and spot potholes, road kill and water with so much time to spare I could write a book about them.

Nothing comes at me as a surprise. And yet, I still get the feeling of speed. I can throw the machine into a corner, safe in the knowledge that if there is a cow, car or caravan around the next bend, I can stop quickly. The KTM even has ABS! I’d have to be blind or in a K hole not to spot hazards in time. The road on this stretch of the coast really helps as it is often devoid of hedges as it winds ribbon like across the moorland landscape, high above the sea to my right.

Then I see it.

The back of a white Audi who is clearly here for the scenery. And why not? I soon catch up and follow his blinking brake lights for another six miles. Every bend, every twist, every hill requires this driver to attend to braking. He (?) has either just completed a speed awareness course or is desperate for the toilet and thus is avoiding sudden movements in case they bring on sudden movements. Overtaking is not an option. The KTM could overtake as much as reach escape velocity fuelled only by the bottled methane of donkey farts. I have no choice but to follow on behind, which is just as well as I’m probably at my personal speed limit anyway.

We pass the turning for the Tinner’s Arms in the mermaids’ village of Zennor and I have to reluctantly keep going instead of popping in for pint of frothy ale. There is a farm at the far end of the village where the little road narrows like an old man’s artery after fifty years of pork pies and fags. It is a chicane which, in winter, is a cow shitted skid pan when mixed with two months worth of cold Atlantic rain. The Audi keeps going, avoiding any mishap involving incontinent bullocks who lurk at farm gates, and I take the opportunity to turn left towards Penzance.

The KTM leaps like a young gazelle free from the restraints of any ‘traffic’. Far ahead I see a cyclist and I vow to catch and overtake him! At this point we are on the high moors of the Penwith peninsula, with views to match the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Pyramids at Giza or Tehran on a Saturday night at Christmas. The road runs down hill towards Mounts Bay, so there is little need of much throttle. There are a few hamlets on the way. They are lived in by the sort of folk who would have guns and bibles if this was in Kentucky or Idaho. you know the sort…all hair, beards and bad breath as they sing hymns with banjos. I’m not stopping.

Eventually I catch up with the cyclist and actually overtake him. As an ex cyclist, I am aware of close passing, but the devil in me wants to use the horn as I creep up behind with only two yards to go. Instead, I pass with 1.5 meters to spare and roar off into the distance leaving a trail of choking exhaust in his pastey face. That’s what I imagine of course, but these days motorcycles are so clean one could place one’s lips around the pipe and breath in rose scented air and dance as if the hills were alive with sound of music.

The A30 at Penzance is soon reached and I speed with the main road traffic all the way back to St Ives. At the national speed limit stretch past Marazion, I again come up behind a car who decides that 45-50 mph was “quite fast enough. Thank you”, completely unaware that I’m trying my best to get to warp drive (i.e. 60 mph), to avoid following inattentive truck drivers from impaling me on their radiator grills.

I imagine the Audi is in Sennen. The driver telling anyone who cares to listen in the pub about the mad biker on an orange machine tailgating rather than overtaking. He is exaggerating of course, much like I am.

So, that’s another 20 miles done on a 125cc bike. I guess the thousand mile run to John o Groats will be exactly the same?