So much for a quiet early evening ride. By the time we’d finished yarning, the sky was purpling and the stars were clocking in for the night. I like riding at night, so quite happily thumbed the starter and headed into the lanes. Ural therapy.
It was a clear night and a clear sky. I stopped by the signpost and turned the lights off and looked up. I always love seeing the Plough – it was the first constellation I learned to recognise as a child and I always look for it. It’s a sort of constant for me.
The Ural is no motorway machine. Its natural habitat is backlanes and B roads. Suits me. I hate motorways on a bike.
There it shone, just as it had at my first winter evensong as Head Chorister, my first night at University when I was utterly petrified and the evening of the day I started my own business when I was so scared I simply sat on a bench and shook. And so many evenings since.
This evening, the inhabitants came out to watch the silly man on the combo. I lost count of the rabbits, two foxes sitting on the verge, clearly sniggering. And, best of all, an twoowl flypast. I ended up between Bampton and the wonderfully named Chimney, just by the old WWII decoy site for RAF Brize Norton. A neat idea – string a series of electric lights to resemble a runway’s flightpath just a few miles from the real base. The idea was to decoy enemy bombers away from the real target towards the fake field. I wonder what action it saw. The bunker is still there, although full of rubbish now.
I grinned as a thought hit me and the day’s stress drained like an open lock gate. I raised a hand in salute, turned the lights on and turned the bars for home. Somehow the stuff that scares me doesn’t come close to sitting in a concrete bunker in a field on a darkened flood plain waiting to get bombed. By deliberate mistake. I take life far too seriously sometimes. April 2012
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