August 14, 2014
A Time to Kill: (a cat)
As always I woke up automatically at first light and as always I did not want to get up very much. With each passing day it was getting more and more difficult to motivate myself to make an early start, biscuits or not. As I lay there still half asleep it was as if I had an angel above one shoulder and a devil above the other. The angel would say "Come on! Get up! You have to cycle 130 kilometres so get your beekeeping outfit on, get the tent down and get moving!" but then the devil would counter with "Naaaah! That's terrible hard work! You should just lie here in the tent for a couple more hours, it's ever so comfortable in here!" And they would continue with this back-and-forth for some time and on this particular day it seemed as if the devil was going to win, but then the angel called to the stand her final witness, which was my aching body and she asked my aching body why it ached. And my aching body spoke of how the previous evening I had failed to find a good camping spot and had ended up in a field of bumpy and uneven ground and a night on this had left my body aching and I'd had no good sleep at all. And in a rousing closing statement the angel declared that the devil's argument that it was 'ever so comfortable in here' was completely without merit and the jury was convinced, and I got up.
It is worthwhile noting here that, because of the similarities between this brilliant summing up and the final court scene of the film 'A Time to Kill', the angel will be played in my movie by a young Matthew McConaughey.
Although I managed to get on the bike and start cycling I was not at all happy about it. Each day it had been getting harder and harder to find any enthusiasm for what I was doing. Every day had been pretty much the same - get up, take tent down, cycle 130 kilometres, put tent up, sleep. There was little of any interest on the road as all of the towns and villages were set off from it and I had no time to spare to go and investigate them. And all I could see ahead of me was thousands and thousands of kilometres of the same and I honestly didn't know how I was going to get through it. I needed something to happen.
And then, luckily, it did. A car pulled over and a middle-aged man that looked a bit like Ryan Giggs greeted me with a big smile and gave me a tomato. Then he drove off again. If that had been all that happened I probably wouldn't have been all that inspired by it and probably wouldn't even have mentioned it, I don't even like tomatoes, but luckily, that wasn't all that happened. A hundred yards up the road he stopped again and this time invited me to stay that night at his home in the town of Krasnoyarsk, which was about 80 kilometres away. If I accepted I would be falling short of the daily target, but I wasn't about to look a gift horse in the mouth. I'd been praying for something like this, so I accepted the offer.
I still had to cycle to Krasnoyarsk of course, but I felt better knowing I had something to look forward to now. And then, as if one thing happening in a day wasn't amazing enough, a second thing happened soon after! A British couple touring on motorbikes stopped to talk to me. It felt strange to talk with John and Bev, it was the first conversation I had had in proper English in weeks. As I spoke to them I could hear in my own voice how much I was struggling. It was a voice that I did not recognise as my own, an unenthusiastic voice, a tired voice.
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Krasnoyarsk turned out to be not so much a town as a pretty big city and Sasha's house was on the other side of it. That was good because I got more of my daily target done and because I got to see the city on the way through. Here it is for your viewing pleasure:
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When I got to Sasha's apartment block he wasn't home but the girl who lived the floor down from him phoned him and he came right over. That girl, by the way, was the most beautiful in the world. Sasha showed me inside and let me take a shower and do my laundry and we spent some time chatting using google translate because he didn't speak English. He was a really friendly man who was into cold water swimming and spear fishing and mountain climbing and all that cool stuff. It was so nice to relax and spend some time with someone for an evening. He was so nice, he came out with a big pot of honey for me to take as a present. "Oh no!" I said, "I've seen enough bear-based cartoons to know not to go camping in the woods with a big pot of honey." Sasha looked confused. I typed into Russian about the bears in the woods. Sasha laughed and started typing: 'Bears might attack people' he wrote. I wasn't so pleased about this and was considering accidentally throwing the pot of honey out of the window, but then I saw he had written more. 'Bears might attack people but only in early spring or late autumn when they are hungry. Your carrots are safe.' He was making fun of me being vegetarian, but I didn't mind, the biscuits were moving back in with me.
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Sasha insisted that I sleep in the big main room on the bed and he would sleep on the spare mattress in the kitchen. It was typical of the man, such a kind thing to do, but it didn't work out so well for me in the end. And that was because Sasha had a cat. Naturally with the lights out and me trying to drift off the cat came into the big main room and started to jump around on everything. And by 'everything' I mean 'me'. It was very annoying and there wasn't anything much I could do, because I couldn't throw it out and close the door as Sasha had said not to close the doors as the cat would just scratch them. So I tried to sleep anyway but I couldn't because I was constantly just waiting for the next time the cat would jump on me and because there was also an extremely loud ticking clock in the room. I have no idea why anyone would put a loud ticking clock in the same room as a bed. I have no idea why ticking clocks even exist anymore but to put one in a place of sleep is the very edge of madness so it is. Oh it's alright up until the point that you notice that the ticking is there, but once you do notice it there is really no way to ever stop noticing it. It was the most annoying thing, to try and sleep in that room with that ticking clock and that restless cat. Nothing could have been more annoying. Well, no, I suppose if you'd thrown in a big fat unhealthy man snoring away on the sideboard. But nothing else other than that could have made it more annoying. Except Janet Street-Porter maybe. But nothing else. Finally my patience gave and I dragged myself out into a third room which was being renovated and was empty and rolled my camping mat out on the cold and dusty floor. Almost immediately the cat appeared and leapt onto me. I threw it out. It leapt back again.
The devil reappeared above my shoulder. "Throw the cat out of the window," he told me. I looked over at the angel on the other side. "I'm with him on this one" she said.
Today's ride: 101 km (63 miles)
Total: 25,290 km (15,705 miles)
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