arty twaddle

I still have my first pair of ‘proper’ cycling shorts, they’ve not been worn for decades, literally, there’s a big old hole in them and the stitching is perished and unravelled, but I simply can’t bring myself to throw them out. Every time I rummage in the shorts pile they’ll emerge like spent ordnance from a long forgotten battle in a ploughed field, smiled at and returned to the mess.

A different lifetime ago, when we were young and full of immortality, we’d high-tail it from the coast after work following signs up the A1 to The North and batter ourselves until we were two packets of custard-cream crackered from ticking off as many proper hills as we could find in a Whitby weekend.