My trip to Denmark and Sweden starts: September 2012

Day 1: 8th September 2012

Another trip, something to be looked forward to and prepared for, though this time a mixture of work – 5 weeks at the University of Southern Denmark in Odense – and 5 nights in Sweden camping plus whatever short travels I can fit in, later in the year than I would usually chose to travel with a tent. So with so much stuff- camping gear and proper clothes, laptop and text books – the bike is really loaded down with a mountain of stuff but not that difficult to get used to in the end.

This is some of it.. note the toasty Rab sleeping bag
Getting ready to leave

Stopping at the first set of traffic lights is the most wobbly part. The journey through three counties to Harwich is as enjoyable as ever, a nice route through beautiful villages, and blessed with warm sunshine right into the evening as the boat sails off. There are only about 6 bikes on this crossing, a couple of beautiful red Ducati Multistrada among them, one with expensive panniers held together with silver gaffer tape after its owner lost the key and had to break them open, a Ninja owner who told me he watched on CCTV footage his bike blowing over in the wind in his work carpark and suffering hundreds of pounds of damage. Riding on to the boat up the ramps is always fun but strapping the bikes down seems hit and miss. Some crews really help others not at all, no advice today so it’s a struggle to get their old straps to work and we are there on the car deck long after the motorists have gone.

Harwich to Esbjerg ferry

The cabin is the same as usual and always my irrational fear that suddenly someone else will burst in and I find out I will have to share it.

Nice helmet


Sunset over containers

Up on the sundeck as we pull out of Harwich slowly at first then gather speed and the boat lists as we turn to the south coming out of the estuary and then east again as the boat points out to sea. With theses changes of direction car alarms sound below, despite the many requests to turn them off. There are only a couple of dozen people here on the deck. There’s an end of season feel. But the sky is beautiful as we look toward the sun as we leave the Suffolk coast behind. I realise I’ve been looking at the sea for 45 minutes. It takes these trips just to get into a slightly different kind of space.

Leaving Harwich

I think this is my seventh motorcycle trip. I feel a bit bemused about that. I was the one with reassuring information in the queue of bikers earlier. Since I started all this, I have a bigger bike, innumerable gadgets and lots more grey hair.

Look, that’s me

OK the other trauma

I can only just bear to write this. A little over a year ago I joined the Cambridge branch of the IAM, the M in this instance standing for Motorcyclists. Getting personalised tuition and feedback about my riding has been amazing and has transformed it – from complete mess to slightly less of a mess. I took the test to be admitted to full membership of the IAM on Monday and failed. Like my first DSA test failure back in 2007 it was about not not shifting enough ( I mean riding too slowly). These verdicts are terrible. I haven’t felt the same since, its incredibly dispiriting. There’s a lot more could be said…

Here’s the route we took:

Granuloma trauma

Its always hard to judge what to make public and what is best kept to yourself – but if you search for granuloma on the net you find some informative personal stories – I nearly wrote personal traumas – of this condition so I am adding one. This year has involved a couple of traumas for me so far but the granuloma trauma is sufficiently distant to write about it. Granulomas are a skin growth that can emerge anywhere but sometimes, for the particularly lucky, they are on the face or lip. Mine started as what first appeared to be a herpes sore on my lower lip but then outstayed the normal 5-7 days and kept growing. After 3 weeks I took it to my GP who searched on Google images but could not diagnose it. He referred me to a maxilo facial unit and an appointment was scheduled for three weeks hence. Unfortunately between then and the appointment not only did this keep growing but I had an international conference which I was organising to attend and do a great deal of appearing in public. Though I never believed that this was malignant or there to stay, this was a sudden initiation into the experience of disfigurement, of people glancing twice or of me feeling they were, of avoiding a chat with my neighbour, of sitting with my hand over my mouth at meetings. I was shocked by how powerful and constant my consciousness of this minor disfigurement was. The conference involved lots of speaking to a full auditorium with my face projected twenty feet tall on a screen behind me. This was great timing. Some people would ask me about it but most ignored it. This growth had the habit of bleeding profusely if I drank a hot drink, and in the shower and my hotel pillow would be stained with blood in the morning. This was ghastly. The conference over and, uncharacteristically for me, I lobbied my GP to try to bring my appointment at the hospital forward. Even an extra week with this would be terrible. In the meantime, because it changed from being more like a large red pea (picture 1)

into a small crusty carrot shaped thing (picture 2),

I realised, using Google again, what it was – a granuloma. The clinic said they could fit me in early and I arrived before it opened and was prepared to camp there all day if necessary. I had sandwiches, a flask and plenty of work to get on with. I was seen before 10.30. Once in the chair I was told that it was not normal to have these removed at the first visit (I don’t know why).  Again, uncharacteristically, I insisted and they agreed. An injection of lignocaine and adrenaline in my lip turned it into a large flapping piece of liver approximately a foot wide then there was the slight sawing sensation as Mr Granuloma was being separated from me, and then some unimaginably neat needlework was done, three stitches in a little quarter inch wound. At this point I started to travel somewhere very strange and was given lots of glucose drops by the surgeon and her assistant. They encouraged me not to hurry out of the chair as the paperwork would take forever anyway. In the recovery room I talked to someone who had had her jaw broken and reset for a reason I did not quite understand. See picture 3 for the finished result (of my lip, not her jaw)