Having a titanium bike doesn't lend itself easily to steady riding and so true to form I pushed at a decent lick across the Chew valley lakes towards Litton. With a windless day offering a calm and warm atmosphere, it was a sustained pleasure to ride in an area I didn't know very well. There were very few cars and as I travelled past cottages and stockbroker-belt mansions with olive-painted doors and green oak timbered car ports, all I heard to break up the natural calm was the occasional lawn mower.
Past William Waldegrave's demesne, including the Waldegrave Arms pub, and up the hill toward Priddy. I cut off the main road to Stockhill and the Old Mineries, a smooth tail-flow giving me a gliding impetus.
The sun seems to like the Mineries and this sheltered curve in the road was warm with bird song and the must of elderberries. Blackberries and elderberries alike were providing an autumnal olfactory haze that attracted insects of all kinds. I rode past beech trees, crushing their burrs on the road with heavy-lidded crunches.
Old Bristol Road leading into Wells must be one of the great descents in this area; a good two miles of winding road that threatened to drag the rider out of their margin of safety. I hurtled down at a speed I was grateful for not knowing, held up at one corner by a nervy jam of three cars and two other cyclists; I nipped through a rather small gap and left them to it.
Into Wells - it was packed. It was market day and the locals jostled with the tourists for all the space on the road as well as the pavement. I wove through the crowds and freewheeled into the space around the Cathedral. A stretch-out and 9-bar on a bench, and the world was pretty good.
Karin and I like to go to Wells; the cathedral has a worn-away age about it and the town still retains some resistance to cosmopolitan modernism. Medieval buildings jostle with branches of Boots and WH Smiths and I half expected to see a black-fronted Woolworths with glass windows reflecting out onto the street like a ghostly childhood retail opportunity. We thought about moving there some time ago but the only houses that seemed to be up for sale were scabby concrete boxes or leafy treats that were out of our range. Well, I don't want them if they don't want me.
I sat and thought about how Karin's illness has re-ignited an interest for both of us in visiting churches and the like to soak up the reflective calm; inhaling motes in the air like ethereal soup. We have experienced some life-defining moments in places like this recently, with the redolence hanging around us like sandalwood for days afterward. No religious message, just the availability of introspection sitting against age.
Sitting in such an established placed wearing lycra seemed very wrong - I nudged over the cobbles and left everybody to it.
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