EDI-ELG/STAGE 1/EDI-PER

And you may find yourself …
And you may ask yourself
“How did I get here?”

Talking Heads, Once in a Lifetime from Remain in Light (1980)

*I write this on Tuesday the 22nd of September 2020, when the Scottish Government announced it was prohibiting households from meeting each other indoors. The timing of #edielg - Thursday 17th to Saturday 19th September - along with a number of factors, meant the whole endeavour would be blessed with a sense of immense luck, of misadventure rewarded with tiny miracles.

From our balcony in Leith, looking Southeast past the ever-growing construction site for luxury flats, you can see Arthur’s Seat. Well, you used to be able to before a seven-storey block of the aforementioned flats went up. Imagine instead it is 2015 and the flats are a mere concept on some architect’s Mac. A 610ft high extinct volcano, Arthur’s Seat and the Crags surrounding it are around 4km away. On a clear day you can see gaggles of folk at the top, no doubt looking back at me looking at them through a cheap set of binoculars.

Why is the arbitrary distance of 4km and a lump of rock sticking up important? Because when I rode my bike from Edinburgh to Elgin I would promise myself not to focus on the numbers, be they the distance I had come, the distance that remained or the elevations of the climbs I would face. I would just throw a leg over my bike, point it vaguely northwards and ride. Among the many messages of support I would receive along the way, the one my friend Sam Sills made would burrow its way into my head, occasionally stemming the need to check my bike computer - to watch the LCD churn its way through kilometres and hours and percentages and seconds and feet, all relayed by some distant satellite far above. “Remember to look up.” In the end, I travelled 354.056km in three days and a small part of me took some joy in that number, that I had not done 341.891km or 335.666km or worse, 349.999km. To be honest, I didn’t even check how far I had finally come, because I was too busy crying, hugging my mum and dad after ditching my bike and helmet on the driveway and seeing my folks do double/triple-takes at the sight of their son. And I had achieved that distance by the simple fact of poor planning, by doing what I had meticulously tried to avoid in the week or so of route planning. I had just gotten lost.

This story is about loss and gain; how you will experience one more than the other but in the walking of that tightrope discover things you did not know about your country, your body and yourself.

I first met Neil at a certain Edinburgh bike shop where I had started working after my freelance work dried up and I was pushed towards a minimum wage gig that would at least keep some of the wolves from the door, even if those wolves were mainly guilty of early morning phone calls and a forest-pillaging war of postal intimidation. Upon reflection, I had probably met him before in the shop - I had, it turned out, most likely been at some of the same shows he had been at too - but it didn’t take long to realise he was what Embra natives of a certain stripe might call “A guid c**t” and that a shift with him was a firm guarantee that the shop stereo soundtrack would be treasured mixtape territory rather than 8 1/2 hours of 6Music. He’s had his own wee health/life issues to deal with the past wee while but I won’t elaborate; suffice to say, we share a solid belief that wet wipes are one of the first items to pack before riding for any distance. He’s fitter now than he has been for years by simply riding his bike, and he’s the friendliest curmudgeon you’re likely to meet.

I had spoken to him after he’d been out on the bike the day before. “Good ride?” I asked. “So I’ve been told, aye,” he replied.

Like someone else might say, a guid c**t.

N kindly lent me a seatpack - I couldn’t source one in time to match all the other Orlieb stuff hanging off the bike and a mild sense of panic had started to set in - and had agreed to accompany me on the first leg to Perth from Edinburgh. Prior to setting off, I had taken the newly bag-laden bike for a literal 90 second time trial around the block, a somewhat rudimentary test run to get used to the added weight and the effect this would have on handling. N’s very used to me turning up late to every ride we’ve ever been on, so when I actually arrived early to pick up the bag, he wasn’t even out of the shower. To me: “Done any training then?” “Bits and bobs.” N, no stranger to a raised eyebrow, had made me more acutely aware of the task that awaited me by asking that question. My “training” had been a few 30-40-50 milers around Lothian and Fife. Since most of the “civilised” world now works from home, I had lost the benefits of my thrice-weekly fixed gear commutes into the office, activities that were more often 25 minutes of tongue-out uphill lunacy on 48x18 than a pleasant Low Countries bimble into the CBD. So, with my “training regime” trailing off nicely in preparation for 350+km, we met on the morning of the first stage - I was late, naturally - and followed the road North, our first architectural marvel of note being the utterly magnificent and resolutely brick-red Forth Rail Bridge ticking by over our right hand side.

I could probably butcher the HST line “We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold,” for the variety of unsettling visions that punctured my mind on the road to Perth. There can surely be no coincidence that the closer you get to the heart of Perthshire the more often you notice the FLAT EARTH gang’s daft slogans spray painted onto the sides of abandoned campers or motorway underpasses. I’d imagine operating a spray can presents some obstacles to the digitally-challenged, although they may just be more adept at directing their own chemical-laced bodily fluids than your average tinfoil Tory. It could well be Scotland’s Area 51, except instead of a shadowy desert complex miles from nowhere, the entire county is home to a proto-race of conspiracy wingnuts roaming free, proud in at least not being from Fife but prevented from going over the border by the mandatory forearm implant that sends 50 000V of electricity through their noggin if they try to make it to the south shore of Loch Leven.

Indeed, it’s hard to remain unconvinced that there isn’t some kind of dark government mass genetic experiment at play there, a top secret redacted programme - perhaps called “Operation Extra Thumb CLASSIFIED” - where the locals’ trusted news source is a Union Jack-liveried bi-plane, flown past their window once a week trailing slogans - featuring no more than eight words, for ease of consumption - such as “FEAR THE CEREBELLUM” or “CORIANDER GIVES YOU HEP C.” I realise this is a bit rich coming from someone who was born in Kirkcaldy, but I can at least spell “VACCINATIONS” correctly, and understand their usefulness.

In any case, we were somewhere around Cleish when the sky was filled with what sounded like a million angry wasps inside God’s Own Subwoofer cranked to 11. Looking up, we see a plane fly over, and both decide it’s a Spitfire. Sure enough, the WWII flying ace had been tooling about the skies, thanking the NHS for keeping us alive through the pandemic. Presumably the pilot was hoping he wouldn’t have to employ the services of the Kinross burns unit should his 80 year old sky jalopy plummet into the side of some farmer’s grain silo, the last thing he sees before he manages to eject an enormous, crude tableau of a minotaur gnawing the limbs off a weeping blond-haired child alongside the words “MAGGIE WAS RIGHT.”

Then, after watching a horse chew on a fencepost for a bit and cresting a hill past a fishfarm, we draw alongside what can only be described as a mountain made out of mattresses (below).

Peering closer through the chainlink fence we see hundreds of damp, limp mattresses and sheets had formed a mini Munro; it was difficult to tell where the hillside began and the fabric dump ended. As the cliché goes, “Every journey begins with a single step..” so this multicoloured cotton col must have started off with someone hoying a solitary soiled single slumberpad onto a small hillock, thinking, “Ach, I’ll sort that out later.” Many “Ach, I’ll sort that out later”s later, this diminuitive orthopaedic Everest wouldn’t be the weirdest thing I would see on the way; that would occur a half mile from my destination where I almost do myself a mischief, and will be covered later.

Before a short stop in Kinross - and a welcome cup of coffee from Unorthodox Roasters with N’s home-made tiffin - we descended down past Loch Glow where I began to fully comprehend the terminal velocity capabilities of bike, bags and man. Hitting 75km/h, my contact lenses were almost ripped from my eyes from the rushing wind but I became firm friends with disc brakes and we pushed onwards to Perth. I couldn’t find the café I had planned to stop at, but a bacon roll and 330ml of your other national drink at a nice wee Italian deli hit the spot. Whilst N was toiletting, there was a woman in the nail bar next door doing her UK citizenship test, so whilst the blood recentred and the legs returned to resting mode I would hear garbled snippets from the computer speakers. “The predominant religion in Scotland is a) Presbyterianism b) Catholicism c) Atheism or d) Islam.” Given all the weirdness we had witnessed in the past couple of hours through Perthshire I was mildly disappointed that they hadn’t factored in the local variant “e) THERE IS ONLY ONE GOD AND ITS NAME SHALL BE X-MEGNON-8 DESTROYER OF UNIVERSES.”

I parted ways with N, whose ride back to Auld Reekie would considerably more rapid without having to tow me along. The next day and a half I would be riding solo, inching my way North towards a bed, some proper food and, at the end of it, other humans to talk to.

NEXT: STAGE 1.5 /PER-BA