The other day over coffee, a friend and I were trying to
find the words for the feeling of riding after an enforced break. The weather
here has been foul – typically wintry and wet. No, flooded.
So when we finally had a dry weekend, we hit the road. Freezing or not, it wasn’t going to rain, the
roads had been drying for 24 hours – and there’s a reason I spent good money on
Gore-Tex. There is some truth in the adage that’s there’s no such thing as bad
weather, only bad clothes; but I’ve yet to meet a truly warm and windproof pair
of gloves I can still ride in, and still manipulate the throttle, clutch,
brakes and indicators. But hey, that’s
why we invented coffee.
The wind-chill factor notwithstanding, it was – wow. If I
have to explain, then I’m in trouble because there are no words. The roads were
gloriously clear; devoid of most traffic, with a conspicuous absence of boy-racers, ballistic cyclists and meno-Porsche convertibles. The sky was clear blue, the air newly washed
and too cold to have a scent yet, other than wood-smoke whenever we passed a
country pub.
Winter Sunday mornings, when you have a clear road to
yourself, purring through patches of pale sunlight slanting between elegantly
bare trees and over frosted fields, is about as close to transcendence as I’m
likely to get. The exhilaration, the sheer breathless joy of freedom as the
winter air bites your cheeks and lungs, defies description.
This is the point where language punches its time-card and
goes for a drink. Or a ride, with a coffee at the end of it, to nest in its
fingers and thaw out its hands.
