One Man and His Bike: A 5,000 Mile, Life-Changing Journey Round the Coast of Britain
Mike Carter
Language: English
Pages: 352
ISBN: 0091940559
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Mike Carter's journey around the edge of Britain by bike.
What would happen if you were cycling to the office and just kept on pedalling? Mike Carter needed a change. Fed up with a Britain rife with crime and sliding into economic downturn, one day he decided to cycle straight past the office to find out for himself what was going on. He would follow the Thames to the sea and then ride around the entire coastline, a journey of 5,000 miles, the equivalent of London to Calcutta. If he completed it, he would end up exactly where he started. Physically, at least.
Camping or relying on the hospitality of strangers, Mike met an array of brilliant characters and experienced innumerable random acts of kindness. He encountered drunken priests and drag queens, gnome sanctuaries and hippy communities, fellow travellers and people building for a different type of future. He also found a spirit of unbelievable kindness, generosity and hope that convinced him that Britain was anything but broken. During the five month journey, cycling the byways of the nation, he became...happy.
day’s goal was always to be where I ended up. No more, no less. This had resulted in a blissful state of existing purely in the moment, concerned only with the need for food and a place to sleep and, for the times in between, breathing and pedalling. It was such an uncomplicated and happy life. The fact that my map consisted of ripped-out pages from a road atlas, like pieces of a jigsaw whose completed picture I never saw, only helped me keep my eyes on the piece of ground directly in front of me
natural. ‘It’s weird,’ I said, ‘because for me the reverse seems to have happened. Maybe because I’m living twenty-four hours a day in “communal” space – eating, sleeping and cycling in the open – I’ve lost all sense of what’s mine and what isn’t.’ I thought about those sentiments. At the Do Lectures, the speaker talking about the Amazon Indians had explained how, for them, the whole forest was sacred. The developers just saw wild and uncultivated land not being used, and couldn’t comprehend
can look at an atlas and see the shape of a nation, but only by actually travelling all the way around it can you truly understand the way it was formed, hold that whole picture together in your mind. And there was now something else for me, something really quite marvellous. It was almost as if I could feel my country in my bones. Just the other side of Folkestone, looking for somewhere to stay the night, I followed a sign bearing a picture of a tent down a long, steep and narrow lane. At the
time attended by a screeching rising to a crescendo, as if some act of terrible brutality was occurring somewhere nearby. Then it went deathly quiet again. I picked up the pace, feeling like the backpackers in An American Werewolf in London. I decided that I must be hallucinating. I’d covered 90 miles that day and hadn’t eaten since lunchtime. That must have been it. At the top of the drive was a pub. I walked in. It was not unlike the Slaughtered Lamb in the aforementioned film, in that the
I then pointed the Ridgeback north. Gadzooks! Curses to Boreas, Greek god of the north wind. Legend has it that Boreas resides in a cave on Mount Haemus. But he spends his summers holidaying in Lincolnshire. Must do. Because he’s out there, every single day, blowing a fury, tormenting the mortals. Great for the windmills, of which there were many; terrible for northbound cyclists, of which there seemed to be only one. I tacked and gybed in the quiet back lanes, northbound progress agonisingly