Saturday 23rd July
I’m nearly packed and ready to ride up to Bath for two nights in the Lansdown Hotel which looks like an old pile. I can almost smell the carpet cleaner and hear the creaky floorboards now.
I took an enjoyable and sunny ride down to Lulworth Cove yesterday afternoon after writing until 2.30. The place was rather crawling with tourists but the coast is beautiful there and the sea stunningly blue. The ride over there was good too with lovely roads, though the ring road around Dorset always seems to be completely packed.
The writing has gone pretty well. It took a few days to build up concentration on it. I have written the final flourish and gone back over parts of the manuscript where there were gaps. I still have one of those gaps to finish but I have a map of headings for that and then finally finish another chapter. Then the whole thing is down. So many ‘events’ have happened during the writing of it, terrorism, the EU referendum, Jeremy Corbin’s rise and perhaps fall, events in nursing too. It seems the speed of news is increasing.
Last night and this morning my challenge was to eat everything that was left in the fridge and I have risen to that pretty well with only a couple of unfinished items to leave behind. The sky is heavy though rain isn’t forecast. I worked out last night, in a moment of inspiration, how to programme routes into my snazzy GPS so I am curious to know if it will work. My first stop will be to look at the Cerne Abbas giant, assuming he is still there. I have realised that the recreation of my fond memory of the ride in 1974 from Dorset to Bath by motorcycle won’t exactly work. What made that trip so memorable, or at least has made the memory of the memory memorable, is that it was a beautiful sunny Sunday evening when we rode. Today will be a gloomy Saturday morning (its actually getting gloomier) so not perhaps having the same magic. Still, with any luck it should be a good route and I am in no hurry at all.
