A Matter of Luck

A Matter of Luck

  It seems as if I have been for the ‘high jump’ this year.  I am speaking only from the cycling aspect, although it has had a bearing on my work, which, of course, has to placed first.

I started the year with a dose of flu, first of all, then in March the old steel bike went bust, and five precious weeks including Easter were wasted, whilst a new lightweight bike was on order – a Grubb.  Then in July, I got a bootful of molten metal at work, necessitating a further five week layoff.  This November, as a kind of grand slam to complete (if it is completed) the vicious circle, I got an eyeful of hot sand at work.  So far – December 10 – five more Sundays have been absolutely lost.  An eye is an awkward and somewhat painful thing, needing care and warmth, so, beyond an afternoon tramp over Rivington Moors, I have had to lay off cycling.  However, the optic is all but recovered after a dozen or so visits to Bolton Infirmary, and I hope to start work next Monday – then we shan’t be long !

It is possible that I may, after all, join the little party that is set to be based at Capel Curig for the New Years Holiday tourlet, the Mecca for Welsh mountaineers – and the destination of my last ride before my accident.  To now, I have lived on the memory of that weekend.  True, ‘Absence makes the heart grow fonder’ but I don’t need absence, my pastime ‘grows by what it feeds on’.  But these compulsory hold-ups, serve to show what a dreary, dismal life I would have if it were not for Cycling, and what a drab life non-cyclists seem to have – in my eyes.

The weather has been intensely cold with some snow while I have been at home, taking it all round, glorious cycling weather.  Canals and lakes have been frozen over for upwards of three weeks, the countryside has taken on a new and beautiful garment, and the woods with their snow-carpet and hoar-frosted branches have been a veritable fairyland.  As before said, I managed to get out one afternoon, and tramped from Montserrat, by Eighteen Acre Farm and the Sugarloaf, up the moorland col on to the open moors of Rivington, then down to Chorley Old Road near the isolated ‘chateau’ which is associated with a leper, and down to Doffcocker, Markland Hill, Lostock and up Deane Clough etc to home.

The town boundaries passed, the snow lay in its natural whiteness, and when I got on the moors, it was often knee-deep.  The setting sun tinted the ridges a delicate pink, which, as it went lower, turned grey, then the hush of night settled, and the world seemed beautiful in the twilight.  In the town the snow was churned up into dirty slush, and everybody cursed it for a nuisance –

‘The men with shovels in a row

Pile up in heaps the trodden snow,

The dirty snow, with ooze impure,

That trickles slowly towards the sewer,

The sloppy snow that fouls the street,

And squelches up beneath my feet;

The snow that neither goes nor stays,

That comes o’nights and melts o’days,

Churned under wheels, spat on, and cursed,

As being of all bad things the worst,

The snow, the nasty filthy snow –

“Thank God!” men say, “Its going to go!”

 

‘But as I walk with rubbered feet

Between the puddles of the street

A different picture seems to rise

From that the sordid street supplies

I see a great, white, glittering peak,

I see a tree-hung frozen creek,

I see a wondrous fairy glade,

Where frosted fir-boughs cast their shade

And as the cart comes down the road,

And grating shovels fill its load,

One thing is in my heart to pray:

The country!  Let me get away!’.         Jessie H Wakefield, writing in the Daily Herald

So here’s to snow, plenty of it on the (hoped for) New Year Tour, and many glittering peaks will be seen.

 

 

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