The bike came back from Tredz yesterday with a new tyre. Today, after work, I got on it and did not get home for hours.
The plan was small. Ride to the Decathlon at Surrey Quays and buy something to keep the rain off. It has rained all week, and probably will next week too. By luck the bike was away being repaired through the worst of it, and the one day it came back was the one day that turned hot. So I rode out to buy waterproofs in the sunshine, getting ready for weather that had just stopped. They had a thin jacket I liked. The trousers were out of stock, so I have to go back for those.
The way there went through Whitechapel and over Tower Bridge. I have lived here years and somehow do not pass that way often, so I had never seen the bridge open before. It opened while I was on it: the road tilting up ahead, everyone stopped at a red light, a ship coming through somewhere underneath. I missed the ship. I was stuck well back in the traffic, too far to see down to the water, so I watched the famous thing happen and saw none of the actual point of it. I took a photo of the bridge instead, like everyone else stuck behind me.
Decathlon took forty minutes. Then I rode on to the IKEA at Greenwich, twenty minutes away, for no better reason than it was there. The way ran along the river, and the tide was out. The Thames had pulled back off a long stretch of sand and shingle, and there were people down on it, walking about on the bottom of the river like it was a beach. You forget there is a floor under there until it shows itself.
At IKEA I bought a bag of frozen plant-based meatballs, a warm cinnamon roll, and a vegetable hot dog. The hot dog is always good. The meatballs I turned into a peanut sauce stir-fry with noodles later, which was good, maybe a touch too peanuty.
Home was fifty minutes, with the Woolwich ferry in the middle of it: the bike wheeled on, the river going gold, an evening crossing for free.
The whole way round I had a book in my ears, The Anarchy, William Dalrymple, the rise of the East India Company. I keep ending up with empires, and lately they have started to join up. Genghis Khan was in there not long ago, and the Mongols became the Mughals, the same word worn down over a few centuries, and The Anarchy is the story of the company that swallowed the Mughals whole. One thread, unwinding for six hundred years. I might even be a loose end of it. The bike puts my hands on the bars and my eyes on the road, and the ears go looking for something long.
Two weeks off the bike had cost me. My quads burned every time I got off to walk, and for the first stretch my legs struggled, remembering the work. I will pay for it properly on Sunday. The soreness never comes the day after a ride. It comes the day after that.
When the bike was gone, I wrote that the listening was never really mine, that it belonged to the handlebars, and that with my hands free I just scrolled. The handlebars are back. So is the book. I went out for a pair of waterproof trousers, did not get them, and crossed a good slice of the city instead. That seems about right.
