On the Road Bike Read online

  By the age of twenty-two, he’d given up mostly on cycling. More adult stuff had come his way, as it does. Now he had a young family, mouths to feed, responsibilities to discharge. Every day he went to clock on at the Courage brewery in Bristol.

  ‘At first I had a job knocking shives.’

  ‘You did what?’ It sounded quaint, skilled and obsolete. It sounded like you’d be expected to Morris Dance all the way to work and all the way back. ‘What’s knocking shives?’

  ‘Knocking the caps into the casks of beer,’ he explains patiently. I wonder briefly if anyone behind the bar at Wetherspoons would have the faintest idea what he was talking about. ‘But then I got a better job as a brewer. I was a fermentation operator.’

  In 1994, quite suddenly, he was told that he had a brain tumour. At first they told him it was benign. But he knows now that they were simply shielding him from the inevitable.

  ‘It was malignant. They just told me it was benign because there was nothing to get rid of it. I could have all the money in the world and go to America, and they still couldn’t do anything to get rid of it. It’s just in completely the wrong place. It’s too close to my brain. It’s too high a risk for them to try and take it all out. I could end up a vegetable. There’s nothing that they can do.

  ‘They told me I wasn’t allowed to drive any more. So I said, “How am I going to get into work?” It was twelve miles away. I’d have to get the bike out. I hadn’t really got a choice. The doctors were saying I shouldn’t really be riding a bike with a brain tumour. So I said, “Are you going to come and pick me up then and drive me to work every day?”’

  Life went on its course. In the winter, if he was on an early shift, he’d leave the house in the pitch dark at 4.15 a.m. for a 5.30 start. Twelve miles there and twelve miles back. In the summer, when he was feeling more vigorous, he’d throw in an extra twenty miles by following the path all the way to Bath and back.

  In 1999 the Courage factory closed and the family moved north when Ian took a job with the John Smith brewery. They settled in Tadcaster, within cycling distance of Ian’s other great love, Leeds United and Elland Road.

  All the while the tumour bided its time. He would occasionally check in for a ‘de-bulking’ operation, to shave off the more easily accessible tissue. But over fifteen years he remained fit and well. And he cycled to work every day.

  Then, suddenly, in 2009, the doctors had news.

  ‘My brain tumour changed and became terminal. It changed to a Grade 3.’ Ian pauses, and momentarily loses his way. ‘I’m just trying to think . . .’

  His sentence peters out. Sally Anne, who throughout our talk has been holding his hand, steps in to complete his sentence.

  ‘It becomes more aggressive as the grades go up and they struggle to control it as much. And that’s when it turns to terminal.’

  Ian’s smile lights up the table at which we sit. ‘So we crack on. We’re doing all right, aren’t we?’

  Ian Meek is a year younger than I am. Wetherspoons is thinning out, the lunchtime crush is subsiding.

  The first time I met Ian Meek was in October of 2011, six months or so prior to our meeting in Leeds. Mick Bennett invited me to make a personal appearance at the Cycle Show in Birmingham. Hilariously, this involved some commitment to cutting a ribbon to open the gates and posing in a semi-official capacity. It was one of my first professional engagements where I was obliged simply to turn up and be me. I was deeply flattered and mildly embarrassed. I could only assume that a number of refusals had led to their last-minute booking. No one has ever contradicted that version of events. And, after I arrived too late to cut the ribbon, I wasn’t invited back the following year.

  Not since I had been dragged, inexplicably, to the East of England Show by some family friends in the mid-1980s had I visited a trade fair. There were certain similarities between the two. Where Britain’s premier agricultural show featured the latest tractor technology and seed developments, so the Cycle Show had bikes and power gels. Thousands of people made the trip to the NEC in Birmingham and then paid for the right to stare at bicycles they had no intention of buying, let alone the means to do so. It was like witnessing a great annual migration of ruminant mammals, which, on reaching the lush pastures, opted simply to gaze fondly on them, and not to feed.

  Salesman: ‘Ever ridden Titanium before?’

  Punter: ‘Not enough torque in the frame for me.’

  Salesman: ‘I see. Tried a more aggressive geometry?’

  Punter: ‘With an oval ring? You’re kidding me.’

  This is only an approximation of how I imagine a conversation about bikes to go. I tend to tune out after the initial reference to lugs.

  I made a brief appearance on the Cycle Show stage alongside esteemed cycling writers like Will Fotheringham and Jeremy Whittle (during which I tended to agree with whatever opinion the last person to talk had expressed), and then I headed for the Condor stand, where I was to sit at a trestle table signing copies of How I Won The Yellow Jumper.

  I was worried that there would be an all-too-awkward entire absence of people. This had the potential to become my Alan Partridge moment, where he sets up a stand in the middle of Norwich and flogs copies of his autobiography Bouncing Back while wearing a market-trader’s headset and microphone.

  Mercifully, there was enough enthusiasm, or possibly enough disenchantment with the phenomenal prices being asked for pushbikes, to ensure a decent flow of people passing by my little stand. Folks stopped and chatted about all sorts of things: the Tour, Cavendish, Boardman and, more often than not, their own, often quite prestigious racing careers.

  I had never met so many amateur stars, so many men and women who had spent a lifetime driving to rainy, secret, windswept time trials up and down the country in the hope of improving on the previous year’s 34th place. I marvelled at their industry and the depth of their attachment to this peculiar, lonely sport. I wondered also what it was they sought in talking to me, a self-confessed outsider. Maybe it was the novelty. Perhaps I was like a first-time guest at a tedious family Christmas; some bewildered new partner that a cousin brings along. Such interlopers tend to get set upon by the regulars, all too stultified by the over-familiar nature of their own kind.

  I was busily talking to some confused twelve-year-old kid whose dad had pushed him in my direction clutching a book he would never read, when I noticed a tallish, slimish chap standing just to my left, carrying a brace of plastic bags like pheasants from a successful poaching raid.

  ‘I’m planning on riding Land’s End to John O’Groats,’ the poacher told me. Here we go again.

  ‘Wow,’ I said, insincerely. ‘That’s quite a thing.’

  Over the course of what was now becoming quite a long day, this man hadn’t been the first person to tell me that he was riding from Land’s End to John O’Groats. So, trying not appear as underwhelmed as I felt, I returned my attention to the lad who still looked baffled and still held his dad’s book out in the general direction of a complete stranger.

  Charity riders. Again! Various different fundraising adventurers had repeatedly accosted me that afternoon. Some had booked flights to Grenoble and were going to tackle Alpe d’Huez in the spring (while raising awareness of prostate cancer). Others were already in full training for the following year’s Étape du Tour, in which people get to ride a mountain stage of the actual Tour de France route. So the John O’Groats ride (or LEJOG to give it its full, ghastly acronym) struck me as neither particularly imaginative nor meritorious. I had only a certain reserve of interest in these acts of well-meaning endurance, and it had long since run dry.

  But the poacher wasn’t put off. ‘The thing is,’ he said, ‘I’ve got to do it. I want to raise £100,000.’

  ‘That’s a lot of money,’ I offered. Rather obviously.

  ‘I’ve got an inoperable brain tumour,’ he replied, rather less obviously. ‘I haven’t got long to live.’

  I put down my pen, and looked squar
ely at the man for the first time.

  There was something about his honesty. An openness of approach, a quiet, watchful appreciativeness. Calming company, Ian Meek. Six months later, back in the Leeds pub as I stirred my coffee and listened to him talk, I understood that I had a confession to make.

  Irony never translates well on Twitter. That’s why people use the little symbol ;-) after their sarcastic barbs. There’s a world of difference between saying ‘All I want for Christmas is the new One Direction album’ and ‘All I want for Christmas is the new One Direction album ;-)’. In fact, they are the polar opposite of each other.

  And so it was that when I tweeted ‘Delighted to announce that I have been chosen to carry the Olympic flame through the Blackwall Tunnel’ nobody realised that it was supposed to be a joke. It was barely a joke anyway (although I did like the image of the torch being bravely carried aloft through London’s dingiest tunnel. But, I freely admit, it wasn’t funny, and what residual humour there was flew straight over most people’s heads. Certainly, Ian Meek took it at face value.

  The thing was this: Ian had genuinely been chosen to carry the Olympic flame through York. As one of the country’s leading fundraisers, he deserved the recognition and was overwhelmingly proud to have been nominated. On reading of what he thought was my selection, and being a sweet, generous soul, he was delighted for me, and replied via Twitter to my announcement: ‘Congratulations, Ned. A great honour.’

  I had instantly deleted my tweet.

  I was horrified at the misunderstanding, and ashamed. I had no idea what to do about it. So when we sat in the pub that day last April, I had to come clean.

  ‘I’m not really carrying the torch, Ian.’

  ‘I did wonder about that. And so did my mum. She kept asking me when you would be doing it.’

  Just for a moment he looked wounded. Then he smiled. With the weight of that confession off my shoulders, I could listen with a cleaner conscience to Ian’s story.

  We had spoken a few times on the phone since our initial meeting at the Cycle Show. I had started to follow his story with interest, and to keep abreast of his plans. Things had been very tough through the winter, but the ambition to set out from Land’s End with a team of fundraising riders continued to figure large in his thinking.

  ‘Last year it would have been a good plan for me to ride it. But this year, it’s obviously gone wrong. In September I was as well as I’ve ever been. But in December I was starting to have small seizures.’

  They operated again, for the fifth time, on his brain tumour.

  ‘I don’t know anyone who’s had five operations,’ Ian tells me. ‘This one’s changed a few things. My hearing. My eyesight. I struggle . . .’

  ‘It got to my scan in January, and I went in thinking I’m all right. I’m going all right. The doctor said “How’ve you been?” I said, “I cycled fifty-four miles on Saturday.” She said, “How did it feel?” I said, “It was a bit like the pedals were going round and I was a bit spaced out. But I was all right.”’

  She’d listened to him. But then she’d cut him short. ‘It’s bad news.’ The cancer was growing very aggressively now.

  For a while, Ian was laid low by this newest prognosis and entered a very dark phase. Naturally ebullient, he found himself brooding, depressed. But the planning for the big ride continued. His son Sam, aged just fifteen, was involved too, announcing his intention to join his dad on the ride.

  ‘We talked about my diagnosis. We shed a few tears. And he said, “What about the ride?”’

  Then Ian had to tell his son he wouldn’t be able to join him. Reality had plans of its own. With Ian’s eyesight so restricted (he kept kicking the dog by mistake because he couldn’t see it beneath him) and the risk of seizures greatly increased, he reset his targets and limited his ambition to joining the team of riders on one ‘stage’ only. That day was to be 1 August, Yorkshire Day. That was when they planned to ride from Leeds to Stockton, some sixty-five miles.

  ‘That’s the day I am definitely planning to do. I’ll do that day, whatever. The only thing that’ll stop me is if my bike falls apart, which I’m not planning on. I won’t be getting off my bike that day. I don’t do getting off.’

  ‘Of course I want to stay alive. But not just existing. I need to keep happy in my head.’

  Time spent riding a bike, to Ian, had taken on a different meaning.

  ‘You can sort out everything on your bike, can’t you? I don’t know if there’s anything else I’ve ever done that’s like it. Staying alive’s not enough. It doesn’t float your boat, as they say.’

  We talked about his riding. He tended to go out alone, so as not to be distracted by having to make conversation. Sally Anne worried, but understood what it was that the bike gave her husband: necessary release.

  Then, after she had left us alone in the pub to go for a business appointment, Ian looked intently at me.

  ‘I couldn’t say this with Sally there. It would have upset her. But if it ends when I’m out on my bike, well, that’s not the worst thing. That’s not the worst way.’

  A little while later I tell Ian that I have to catch my train.

  He walks with me for while, through the busy station concourse. We shake hands. And then we head in our different directions.

  Over the summer, things changed quite quickly. I was kept informed by some caring folk at the hospice to which he had now been admitted.

  On 21 July, the day before Bradley Wiggins was to win the Tour de France, I got a text from Ian.

  All around my bedside for 5 tomorrow afternoon to see our man come in in yellow. Had a good day today. Picking up. Ian :)

  He saw Wiggins win. But that was the last I heard from him. The next time his number rang, it was a friend who was contacting me instead, to let me know that he was dead.

  He had gone at 11.30 in the morning, on 1 August 2012. Yorkshire Day. His team of charity riders had visited him the previous evening on their way from Land’s End to John O’Groats. Five days later, four riders completed their journey in his name. They sent me a picture. They were standing in front of the famous road sign at John O’Groats, all of them smiling.

  Ian is survived by Sally Anne, and his three children, Keisha, Hannah and Sam.

  At the time of writing, the charity that Ian Meek founded has broken his target of £100,000. That money will fund a research student for three years at the Leeds Institute of Molecular Medicine.

  And I have had occasion to consider my position.

  Sometimes bike riding is wonderfully pointless. But sometimes, as Ian Meek showed me, it is both wonderful and purposeful. There’s room on Britain’s grey and windy roads for both.

  CHAPTER 11

  SNIFFING THE SHOE

  SIMON MOTTRAM WAS striding now, neatly stepping down a steel industrial-chic staircase, and then walking along a corridor neutrally plastered, and in other places pleasingly displaying the sandblasted yellow warmth of London stock brickwork. Recessed lighting twinkled discreetly in the stairwell, and where windows opened onto the old warehouse space, spring light flooded in, mixing in the air with the smell of coffee and the gentle tapping of Mac keyboards.

  This was the house that Simon built, a monument to taste, a love poem to design, a hymn to merino wool. I was entering the heart of cool, with the patron saint of Rapha as my guide.

  I had not asked for a guided tour but was enjoying it nonetheless. I drank it all in, amazed at how easily it conformed to my preconception of just how the Rapha offices should look: the rooms full of designers smiling mystically at computer screens, or seated, leafing through a book of photography detailing Neapolitan bathing houses of the 1950s, presumably summoning the necessary inspiration to start to put together Rapha’s next bib-short design feature. Simon introduced them all by name as we walked on, and I nodded my hellos, feeling crumpled and ill-fitting in comparison with this svelte squadron of hipsters.

  ‘This is Josh. He’s working on toiletries.’ He may
not have actually said this, and there may not actually be a Josh working at Rapha, nor indeed a separate toiletries department. But you get the idea.

  ‘Hi, Josh.’

  ‘And over there’s Sven. He’s socks, but not just socks. He does gloves, too.’

  ‘Right. Gloves. That’s good.’ This conversation about gloves though, was for real.

  ‘What do you normally use?’ Simon looked at me, with curiosity and amusement. Josh and Sven looked up from their work and waited on my answer. I was under glove pressure. I glanced down at my bare hands, irritated by the stubbiness of my fingers and the slight traces of dirt under my thumbnails.

  ‘What, me? Oh. I’m not really . . .’ Simon looked suddenly sad, or maybe even a little cross. ‘I keep losing them.’

  ‘We need to sort you out with some. I must get onto that. Don’t let me forget to tell Laura you need gloves before you go.’

  We walked on. He elaborated, with some passion, on the theme. ‘You should have stuff that is beautiful. You shouldn’t have to compromise and wear some shitty polyester that falls apart. You should have the best stuff ever. You’re going to die on those climbs.’ It sounded like a threat. But he paused mid-stride and smiled sphinx-like at me. ‘Why should you wear some shitty, scratchy shorts?’

  I had no answer to that. Why indeed.

  Needless to say, Simon did forget to mention it to Laura, and I was in no position to remind him that he was going to mention to Laura that she was going to sort me out gloves-wise.

  Rapha’s clothing is undeniably beautiful. They may be fabulously easy to mock. No, I’ll correct that. They are fabulously easy to mock: expensive, exclusive, pretentious arrivistes, purporting to be something that they are not. They are designed, say their detractors, for dentists in Surrey. And no one likes dentists from Surrey.

  But, boy, can they stitch! I have owned a number of their garments, and, with the possible exception of some rather odd knickerbockers and a duck-egg blue turtleneck jumper, my usual shabbiness has been enhanced utterly by pulling on their merino perfection. Perhaps I will look back on my Rapha years with the same horror with which most people now regard the fad for stone-cladding in the 1980s. But I doubt it.