There was no reason to ride to Kew. That was more or less the point. I did not need to be anywhere, I just wanted to ride, and ride a lot, and it turns out I still need somewhere to aim at even when the aiming is the whole excuse. So: Kew Gardens, from Barking. About thirty-three kilometres out, forty back. The longest ride I have done, and that forty home a record for a single leg on its own. The way out took an hour and a half of pedalling, faster than the two hours the map had promised.
The way there went straight across the city, through Hyde Park and past Buckingham Palace. Near Embankment it all opened up, the whole skyline at once, the Gherkin, the Walkie Talkie, the London Eye. The good parts of the ride were like that. The bad parts, at the start and the middle and the end, were just traffic, and I spent them slaloming between cars, which is not the riding I came out for. At Hyde Park, almost halfway, I was tempted to stop, sit for a while, and turn back from there. I did not. I made it to Kew in one piece.
I am a member at Kew, so getting in is free and I do it without thinking. This time I did not have the legs to walk it. I went a little way in, found a bench in the shade, and sat there for half an hour with a banana. Then the obligatory lap of the shop. A few plants caught my eye, but some were too dear and the rest were no good to carry forty kilometres home on a bike, so I bought nothing and got back on it.
The way back was longer, because I made it longer. I looped up to Ealing Broadway to look at the old office, the one the company had when I started in January 2024, before we moved to Shoreditch last year. I could not see much. The gate was locked. I sat on the bike outside it for a minute anyway. It was the first proper job I ever had, the place I actually started, and back then I used to think about how I might one day cycle in, all the way from Barking. Here I was finally doing it, two years later, to a building nobody works in now.
A little further on I passed Park’s Kitchen, in front of Walpole Park. It is my favourite Korean place. The bibimbap and the gochujang there taste like nothing I have managed to find or make since. I did not stop. It comes in a hot stone bowl, and I would have devoured the lot even in that heat and then never made it home, so I rode past the one thing I actually wanted and settled a bit later for a Sainsbury’s instead: a Lucozade, a spinach and feta pastry, and the chicken I would turn into a pad thai that night.
The rest of the way home was where it caught up with me. The first half was fine, and then my legs started to shake, and the only reason I kept going was that I did not stop, because starting again from a standstill is harder than never stopping at all. The strange part is that my heart worked hardest on the way out, sitting around 150 for the hour and a half and touching 188 at its peak. Coming back, when my legs were the thing giving out, my heart rate was lower. The legs went before the engine did. It was hot. I sweated through everything and got through almost four litres of water, plus an energy drink and the Lucozade, and it still did not feel like enough.
The bike is where I get through books now, and in my ears the whole way was The Silk Roads, which I finished somewhere on the ride home before starting straight into the sequel. I was never much of a history person at school, or much of any subject really, and what history I did get, growing up in Italy, leaned hard on Rome and Europe and the West, with the rest of the world kept off to the side. Not that a different syllabus would have made a difference. Teach me the East instead and I would probably have found that boring too. History at a desk never took, whatever the map on the wall said. So it is strange that it reaches me now, on a bike, how much of what I think of as Western history was really set moving from the East, and the book’s bet that the East is slowly getting back the weight it used to carry. The old Silk Road cities were the centre of the world once, and they may be again.
The other side of that bet is the West. The book makes the case that America, the country so many people take to be the greatest in the world, is quietly losing its pull, turning inward while the East draws closer together, and that even some of its oldest allies are starting to look the other way, back toward the Silk Roads. I had all of that in my ears while pedalling west across London, the wrong way, if the book is right.
By the last stretch I was not thinking about any of it. Not the East, not the old office, not the food I had ridden past. Just my bed, and how good it was going to feel to lie down. I had the long bath, and turned the chicken into a pad thai with green beans, broccoli, chilli and a Wagamama kit, and tomorrow my legs will probably be useless, and I will get on the bike anyway. Seventy-three kilometres to sit on a bench with a banana and look at plants I did not buy. It was exactly what I wanted.
