Fat Bloke on a Bike

It’s 4am and I’m thinking what I should write, especially today.   Sleep at the moment is a very scary sweaty tearful experience where I cannot close my eyes without having the hallway lights on.   Why?  Well just before 05:30 on the 8th of August and after many months of fighting just about everything my Uncle Con, the lovely old man that he was, passed away after losing his battle with everything that breaks and decays on an aged body.  He was 86.    The day before I was sitting by his side, holding his hand, clenched lightly between both of mine as I whispered to him about how I had been baking again and that next week we would be making some buns together amongst other memories too personal and important to write.  I felt his soft warmth.  Heard his laboured yet gentle breathing.  Watched his heart beating.  I listened carefully as I watched the occasional movement of his lips as though he was trying to whisper something.  P...

There's never enough of it.  It is such a precious thing.  All of us want more of it.  It moves so fast that even during summer the time between the first pale hues of dawn and the final dark blues just before the stars come out, well the day is gone. I am 57 years old.  This September I will have been retired from BT for three years having completed just a few days short of 40 years at that company.  I've ridden LEJOG and the NC500.  It's passed by at the speed of light. It's also been a blink of an eye since my childhood.  I quietly sit here, recalling things like my first ever bike, a chunky heavy thing (like wot I am now) with solid rubber tires, stabilisers and white tasseled handlebar ends.  Oh dear, just now thinking about the mangled mess of my second bike after some idiot driver decided to run over its wheels whilst laid in the gutter at the side of the road. My very earliest memory of a bike was tucked warm and cosy into a home made pram...