Congestion Charge

When riding my old CBR in London’s dense, Livingstoned traffic, there were occasionally times when even a bike couldn’t penetrate the haphazard vehicular maze. Pincered by red walls of wheezing buses, or forced wide like a flexed horse preparing to canter by hatchbacks driven by moles, before the path was closed by an overlapping black cab, progress could be slow from red light to red light

Up north, a bike’s progress is rarely so hampered. A Sunday blast can take in sweeping passes through a landscape of russets and greens, dipping and climbing, hauling in stray cars like a sea-fisher would a marlin, then ducking past them with a cursory excuse-me blink of an indicator as the cinematic sky turns from duck-egg to cobalt with the lengthening day. Until.

They came from all sides, their faces black and determined, their bodies permed and matted, a jumble of motion, trotting, walking, skipping, tumbling down the hill until they surrounded me, an ovine river of wool and muttered calls that had burst its banks. At the rear of this phalanx of mutton, a farmer on a quad-bike and a border collie marshalling its troops. And where red lights induced frustration and blinkered buses tightened the stress-ratchet, what else could be done here but sit, and smile, and wait? There were bends and dips aplenty still to ride, but for now, these guys had right of way.