Posted by Paul
The first two All Day rides have been arranged as follows, so put the dates in your diaries.
Saturday 8 April to Newdigate, let by Steve W; meet at Nonsuch Park at 10am
Saturday 13 May round London Parks, led by Madeleine; meet at Beddington Park, Pavilion Cafe, 10.15am.
By Paul
Saturday dawned wet; seriously wet. Duncan in the bike shop was investigating the fox on heat who lived in my crankshaft and offered to back me up if I wanted a (bike) sick note to avoid the ride, but hey, Nigel is still missing and we all have to muck in and the rain abated a bit, but only a bit and Maggie and I thought we'd go to Nonsuch, no normal person would turn up in this miserable weather, and then we could have a coffee with Colin and just go home again. Roger and Anna had already decided that the wind was too blustery and the rain was too wet.
We had forgotten that cyclists are not normal people. Colin was waiting, but not alone. Stuart and Rob were with him and did not take kindly to my surmise that a trip home might be sufficient exercise for the day. Then as we sheltered from the resurgent rain, Steve rolled up. Then Tony. Then Alan. We had us a convoy. Worse, we had a leader. Well, a leader of sorts. Soon he had lost Colin off the back (turned home), and then Rob (lost somewhere on the Sandy Lane pass: his cries unheard in the wind). Tony volunteered to go and find him, and did so on the scree slope they call Cuddington Way.
So off we set on the scheduled ride up the col du Tumblewood, buffeted by the gale, slowly but surely wetted by the rain, fingers and toes none too warm, only to discover when we summited that Pistachio's was closed. So we went across the road to the Lavender Kitchen (where the coffee is good, the Italian cakes are great, the place is warm and packed and the staff are friendly as ever), only to discover two truants, whose names I will not disclose but who for the sake of the story we will call Anna and Roger. These renegades had driven there and had the effrontery to look warm and happy in their dry clothes.
Renegades reconciled. The reconciliation will send tremors around the globe.
After they had gone we found out that Rob, whom we thought we were doing a favour by cycling to the vicinity of his home, had actually driven to Nonsuch and had to go back down for his car. There was really nothing to do but take severally our diverse descents down Mount Banstead, get indoors and batten down the hatches.
By Paul
With Nigel now, thankfully, on the road to proper recovery but still some weeks from venturing out on a bike, I prepared myself for leadership. The schedule had us down to get to Garsons Farm but with sub-zero temperatures when the sun is not up we did not believe that with a two-o-clock start we could get there and back and have coffee before the ice formed on the roads; two-o-clock really does not make much sense as a start time at this time of year. Therefore I concocted a shorter route in the same direction.
Surprise, surprise, there were no Beginners at Nonsuch; merely a collection of regulars old enough to know better than to assume that in this weather the cannon balls would not remain frozen to the brass monkey; Colin, Steve, John, Kasumi, Tony Hooker, Alan, Maggie and me, and since no-one could hatch a better plan than mine through chattering teeth and Maggie, disconcerted by a slippin' an' a slidin' through Sutton, opted to go home, I ended up leading the seven of us.
In the tradition of British expeditions through the ages, however, our trip was plagued. The weather itself was fine, though the wind on the chest was sufficient that we could have done with some newspaper to stuff down our fronts, but we got no further than Horton Golf Park before the first of our team was struggling. John caught us up when we stopped, saying he had a puncture but none of us could see that his tyre was flat and in the cold I cut short the conference and continued on our way. It was when we got to Chessington North that Steve told me there were only three of us left, and there we waited and waited and waited until Steve said he would go back. Then Tony and I waited and waited until the icicles grew on our extremities and decided that everyone had been told the route and the ratio of leaders to non-leaders in the missing group was 1:1 so on we went to prevent total annihilation of the party. By the time we had turned off Clayton Road and reached Squires at Woodstock Lane our toes and fingers were pretty painful.
Never mind, there were vittles and warmth available. Or were there? At the entrance we met Colin and Alan (how had they got there? They refused to say!) who announced that the restaurant was not open to the public. And that John and Kasumi were making their own way home. And that Steve was lost. Brave soul, I clearly heard him say "I might be some time" as he left us. Nobody has seen him since.
The rest of us reformed as a team of four and completed the greater part of the ride, through Surbiton and Berrylands and back through Worcester Park, tea-less and coffee-less and, worst of all, cake-less. Still, losing three out of seven riders in twenty five miles must be some kind of club record.
Paul writes
It was my turn on the rota to lead the short ride but there were not a lot of takers at Nonsuch as many believed the latest Atlantic weather front would put a windy dampener on the afternoon's pleasure.
It was no coincidence that the short ride I had been volunteered for is the hilliest short ride that Nonsuch Beginners regularly do, and there was a small breakaway group who opted for an unscheduled, shorter, flatter ride but we had seven souls willing to undertake the ride and so on a grey day Stephen P, Nigel C, Roger, Anna, Maggie and Colin all followed my mud-free variation of the standard route, which I had recced in the morning so that I knew it would work.
We avoided the off-road bit of Nonsuch Park but worked our way up the long, slow incline that took us around Cuddington Golf Club to Banstead Station and thence up Nork Way before turning up the slightly steeper inclines of Beacon and Tumblewood to approach Pistachio's cafe from the west along the splendidly newly tarmaced Garratts Lane.
The dreaming spires of the Big Smoke in the distance, the leader waits patiently for the team to complete the Hillary/Tensing Tumblewood route onto the infamous Banstead Ridge. Back to the traffic, the photographer, Colin, twice nearly got run over taking this masterpiece.
The thing about the Banstead ride is it takes an hour to get there and ten minutes to get back, down past the prisons and back into Cheam.
No Audax credits, then, but a nice day out, a bit of air in the lungs, and good company.
