The problem with democracy is that people make the wrong choices, even when faced with the most obvious binary decisions.
There was a time that the Rookery ride was a regular event on the Beddington calendar but since the pandemic the ride leadership has become more democratic, so every month we waste valuable cycling time outside the Pavilion Cafe in a loosely structured "Where shall we go today?" debate. This is all very well for the followers but not so good for this leader, who if he can't recce the route, however familiar it might be, likes at least to think it through. This allows him to exude during the afternoon a convincing illusion of leadership, which puts the followers at ease and (he thinks) generally enhances the overall experience. Moreover, the debate, while earning maximum brownie points for mindfulness, openness, member empowerment and other endoplasmic notions of which Human Relations Departments are fond, ends up with us just repeating rides.
This month I had no inclination to do same old same old but little energy to devise something new and in a discussion with Maggie about how we might change things a bit, the Rookery Ride came to mind. It feels as if we have not been there in a very long time. Gibsons Hill is steep, the coffee at the Rookery cafe is not up to scratch, the loos there score minus 1 on a scale of 0 to 10, blah, blah, blah. But it's different, and Streatham Common is not an unpleasant space, the woods above it dark and deciduous, Norwood Grove has a fine old house (mentioned in one of the Sherlock Holmes stories) and who could not enjoy a meander through the chocolate box lanes of West Croydon and Fort Neaf?
It had been so long since leading that way that I had had to plot a route on Ride with GPS to take me through the tricky bits, and those who turned up were getting no choice. Roger is just out of hospital, Colin was otherwise engaged, Ken needed to pack for an expedition up the Amazon, but Anna and Jackie, an infrequent but very welcome visitor, made us a group of four.
Off we set on a cold, grey but dry and windless day, and a jolly pleasant ride it was, too. West Croydon had lost none of its picturesque charm and Fort Neaf has history (quite apart from Crystal Palace FC); not many people know it is where Dick Turpin, the notorious highwayman, was finally apprehended; I've always wondered why they did not search there for Lord Lucan. Nobody has yet tarmacked Gibson's Hill and it has got no less steep, but Maggie and Jackie walked. Norwood Grove was splendidly autumnal.
The woods are one of those little remnant pockets of the ancient Great North Wood and fully deserving of a mention (which they did not get) in Tolkien. The Rookery Cafe has reinvented itself, much cleaner and smarter and a smiling, welcoming service, the cakes were superb. And the loos (which in fairness to the cafe we think are managed by the local authority) have been upgraded by at least two points, to 1 out of 10. It was good enough weather that we could all laugh when I discovered that Ride with GPS had done what it sometimes does and taken me on a traffic-wise suboptimal route home, but we ignored it, found the cycle paths which Colin showed us years ago, under the bottle-strewn low railway bridges, and got back to Beddington Park before dusk and in good spirits.
So successful was the experiment that (certainly while Colin is away and I have complete control over both houses) I will be doing away with this democracy nonsense. Beginners First!
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