Sixteen Days (Part 3)

Bike riding isn't what it used to be. Or I should say, it isn't how I remembered it being. Apart from a brief interlude during the summer of 2005 when I borrowed a knackered old two wheeled death trap off my dad to while away three weeks of being between jobs, which culminated in me springing over the top of the handlebars like a malfunctioning jack in the box as I approached a busy roundabout in Cardiff, I haven't really gone bike riding much. When, the following year, A bike I'd borrowed without asking got stolen I vowed never to approach the subject. The combination of death and theft is a potent poison for putting you off something. But I went for a bike ride today, and it was fantastic, although I don't think I'll do be doing it again in a hurry. I used a bike which was propped up against some of the crap in our garden near the wheely bin, old front doors etc. I think, after the events of the ride, this was the exact bike that almost sent me to an early grave three years ago. I should have realised when I had to put the chain back on the wheel before I'd even got to the end of the road.

My main intention was to ride out to the bottom of town and scale Winchester's 'twin peaks', the hills of St Giles and St Catherine. St Giles' hill is a really good hill because it's only five minutes from key parts of the town centre, like the Guildhall and the bus station, it has an incredibly steep but mercifully short incline, and then suddenly you realise you've only walked 200 metres and you're towering way, way above the buildings you were just strolling amongst, as the photos below no doubt demonstrate. At the top, there's a viewpoint which used to have a useful map of the city with landmarks and other titbits of information on, but this is either being replaced, or more likely stolen, and is just a green frame with nothing on or in it. There was an entire family using up all three of the benches up there otherwise I'd have taken a rest and admired the view, as it was, I took some photos and was long gone A good idea really, the main problem with St Giles Hill is that it sits neatly between the two most statistically vile parts of Winchester, which I'll admit probably has nothing on the slums of some areas of the world, but ALL the fuckfaced bullies and bastards from school were from one of these two places, and it's more the sort of places you'll find yourself retching at the sight of used condoms and beer can bongs rather than admiring the sights and sounds of Winchester in the pretty morning sun. I descended the hill and sped across town towards St Catherine’s Hill. I often wonder what the legality of listening to headphones when you're bike riding. Surely it's not approved of, but then is it illegal? It's not really a health hazard providing you've got you wits about you and use your eyes, such is my logic, and although I was keeping one eye on every policeman on the beat or offering the occasional cower from anyone in a high visibility jacket, it eventually didn't bother me. When you're careering down country lanes and through rapidly expanding farmland who's to stop you, except the horses and dragonflies? It really is worth saying, that casually careering around the edges of yellow soaked cricket pitches on a Sunday morning, or cutting lines across the gravel in the college grounds by the tennis club, listening to Your Protector by Fleet Foxes, well there's really nothing like it. Most of Winchester seemed to be out in force to provide me with perfect stereotypes of what people should be doing on a Sunday morning - a tennis match here, a country youth cricket game where nobody could throw the ball accurately there. I even saw two seperate classic cars, filled like a cartoon with a moustached prat with a flat cap and his jumper round his shoulders and the top down. On the same stretch of road. I ended up going right around the perimeter of St Catherine's Hill and not actually going up it, simply because every turn I reached approaching the ascent of the hill, the alternative route looked much more enticing, and so it was that I ended up keeping left of the river and arrived in the Water Meadows. I used to love going to The Water Meadows, in all three stages of youth; as a child it was a big expanse of grass to run around in, as a fainty rebellious teen it was a great place to swim and sling mud and dodge pike, and when I was 17 and realised what girls were, it was a sufficiently romantic place to go walking amongst the weeping willows. Except I never did that, of course.

Nowadays, The Water Meadows has become a cross between environmental sanctity, boring farmland with stupified cows and horses gaping blankly at trees, and wasteland. It doesn't even really seem open to the public anymore, you have to cross a stile to get in, there's cow shit everywhere, warnings not to let your dogs loose otherwise you'll get a fine slapped on your head, and most importantly of all, it was a pleasant Sunday morning, and nobody was there except me. I felt a slight tinge of sadness, but then it wasn't much different last time I came, in 2003. I thought the might have taken the face blocking access to the river from the grass away by now. Realising I wasn't going to be able to cross the river to the hill in a hurry, I decided to cycle through St Cross, the area of Winchester you have to cut through to get to the centre if you're travelling from Southampton or anywhere else imporant and don't fancy the M3. I then cut through another area of farmland into somewhere between lost and troubling, and then ended up by the motorway. There was a woman walking her dog by the side of the road, and after I took a ridiculous side turn trying to find the Hockley Aqueduct (which is pretty hard to miss) and doubled back on myself, I ended up talking to her for about five minutes about the state of the footpath. It was precisely the sort of tedious shit that two people who find themselves stuck on an overgrown footpath with nothing better to do tend to have, but it felt strangely superior to get involved in 'Sunday walker' culture, even for five minutes. I've not done that since I went up Snowdon. After this incident, I crossed the road and proceeded to do exactly the same thing down increasingly overgrown footpath channels, in which eventually I had to get off the bike because I had stinging nettle stings down the full length of either arm. I gave up eventually, and went off a side path through a field of a corn and ended up in Twyford. Twyford is an insignificant little village outside of Winchester but is renowned for it's 'Lock' which I never really figured out what it was, apart from that all the cool kids from school went swimming there during the summer, and it sounded like fun, although of course I never went. I thought about trying to find it, but I didn't like the look of the hill you had to go down to get there, and didn't fancy busting my legs out over trying to get back up again. So I did what any normal person would, and bought some lucozade from the village shop and sweated raw idiocy over the counter, and then went and tried to negotiate my way up an even worse hill that was around the next corner. The hill, let's be honest, to a Tour De France cyclist, is about as tricky to traverse as, say, a sleeping policeman is to you or I, but it took me about three or four attempts to get up this hill, stopping twice (although I conned myself that I was using the excuse to take photographs of MoD signposts) but the view from the top, of a different angle of Winchester different to one I'd really stopped and looked at before. There wasn't much in the way of landmarks, but you can see in the photo, just over to the right, about halfway down and halfway from the centre, is St Giles' Hill, a pathetic little mound of grass, and just emphasised how good this view was.

It was of course entirely downhill all the way back from there, and it was a fantastic descent, right up until the point where I turned in the car park of the Park and Ride, and simultaneously the saddle AND the chain of the bike fell off. I thanked my lucky stars this didn't happen two minutes ago when essentially on a motorway slip road, but then I had the annoying task of taking the remaining mile and a half across town without any chain (it actually snapped in two, somehow) which I had to throw into a wheely bin on Chesil Street or anywhere to sit, I just had to propel myself using kerbs, walls and lamp posts. The whole round trip took four hours, and I concluded it back home by filling the sink in the kitchen with cold water, and then half-drowning myself in it whilst various Radio DJ's discussed in depth an incident involving Amy Winehouse punching someone live on stage at Glastonbury. I don't remember that, I saw some of her set last night, and all I remember is her being off her trolley and forgetting half the words to her own songs.

In the afternoon, I treated myself to a roast dinner. By “treated” I of course mean, “resorted to” and by “roast dinner” I mean “microwaveable ‘lamb roast’” which had more carrots than peas, and wasn’t particularly nice. I ate it watching Children of Men, which is utterly brilliant, and is not only better than any of the Bourne films, but contains some of the most phenomenal single-shot or seemingly-single-shot scenes I’ve ever seen, There’s one ridiculously long tracking shot following Clive Owen as he machos his way through a war-torn compound near the coast that they break into, and it literally seems about twenty minutes long. It’s thing like this that make what’s essentially quite an average plot into a fantastic experience. That, and killing off Julianne Moore early on, which is always beneficial to any film. After that, I watched Neil Diamond at Glastonbury where he pretty much shit on everything else I’ve seen there thus far from such a gigantic height I’m surprised any of the many other hundreds of acts there even bothered tuning their instruments. He was amazing, even when the gremlins ate the amplifiers, he still owned the stage. I hope he didn’t play Solitary Man earlier in the set, because I missed that, but I got I’m a Believer, and Sweet Caroline, so I still went away feeling like a winner.

In the evening, I went into town via the Esso garage on Andover Road where I bought cigarettes and the cash point, to watch the final of the European Championships. I actually had difficult finding somewhere that was even showing it. My first port of call was The Old Vine, because it’s the only pub in Winchester that I’ve watched an entire game of football. That was five years ago though, and since then, The Old Vine has been turned into an all-weather wanky eatery with no pub element whatsoever. I had to do the awful thing that I imagine half the people of Winchester have done at some point, which is go in the back entrance, stroll in, realize the place is full of couples and families enjoying a quite meal, and then going out the front entrance, almost like I’d been carrying a neon sign saying “total jackass who only wanted a pint and watch the football on his own”. Then I tried The Eclipse, which, for all it’s charms, I don’t think even has a TV. Eventually I ended up in The Bakers Arms, a pub I’ve never been in before because it’s so awful, and thus it proved to be, because I was ID-ed at the bar and was subjected to the landlady saying I “was clearly trying to look like I was 15, but I can tell by your face you’re about 25” which made me want to rip her head off, and then after I sat down, I was told to move because a man with a Hawaiian shirt turned up and proceeded to set up a mobile disco right in front of me. I ended up going to the student plaza known as Alfies, formally The Coach and Horses. I watched the second half with a man in leather jacket and an ‘A’ t shirt, and because it was outdoors, I got to watch the pink grapefruit sunset and airplanes flying overhead, and it was super, not least because Germany lost the final 1-0 to Spain. There was a group of girls talking about their breasts which threatened to ruin it momentarily, but they didn’t stay long.

On the way home, I took an extended detour around the park so I could listen to the Andreas Kleerup album. Andreas Kleerup, or just Kleerup, to give him his studio name, was the person responsible for how goddamn awesome With Every Heartbeat by Robyn, last years BEST! song by anyone ever. I think, because the song ended up on Robyn’s album, the credits were mis-channeled, because it’s basically a Kleerup track with her singing on it, and this self-titled album should redress the balance, because it’s brilliant. I think the best pop songs are the ones with an element of melancholy and sadness, which is why With Every Heartbeat was so fantastic. Kleerup’s album is wall-to-wall drenched in sadness, with the ode to absent lovers, 3am, featuring the lovely Marit Bergman being the stand-out so far. It made a perfect soundtrack to sunset-gazing.