Row, Row, Row Your Bike

Earlier this week, the rain fell constantly for best part of 36 hours, incessant, deliberate and pervading. The sky above was a bleached-out grey, like a white sheet that had been through a dark wash, a colour undeserving of a name. The lawn became a motley swamp of mossy green and muddy brown, studded with sodden, disconsolate leaves, and the bare branches of the trees randomly stabbed at the biting cold air. Roof slates glistened, tyres hissed along shining, weeping roads and in neighbouring houses electric light glowed apologetically, unaccustomed to shining during mid-afternoon hours. The meteorological gloom provided a fitting, funereal backdrop to England’s forlorn, failed attempt, if attempt it was, to avoid defeat against Croatia in the aforementioned Euro 2008 qualifier.

It was not the weather for riding bikes.

And yet in all this, someone did. Doff your caps.