A weird dream, but no cycling...

Since I returned from Vienna on 28th June I haven't been out on the bike and I'm missing it. Last week I didn't go on Saturday because I'd been up late at a wedding and on Saturday night I had a late night too so I aborted. This week, well, similar in many ways. On Saturday morning I needed to be around at home to do things, like drive over to Kingston for a spot of shopping, and this morning I needed to be around. Alright, I could have gone out later, in fact that had been my plan, but, as always, when allowed to dither, I dither, and I didn't go out, not even an urban ride to mum's.

Andy rode to Godstone Green yesterday while I slobbed about...

Andy replied to one of my 'abort' texts with a question mark and now I'm left with that awful 'I haven't been cycling' feeling, which is made worse by the fact that it's now two (yes, two) consecutive weeks. To make matters worse, the weather is fantastic and has been for some time now. It was scorching hot in Vienna (where I managed to ride a bike for three consecutive days around the city) and it's hot here too. Outside now the skies are blue and it's beginning to brighten up having been a little dull early this morning.

Andy, incidentally, rode from Caterham to Canterbury last week and has written about his experiences on his blog. Click here for more.

Andy has cleaned both of his bikes, by the way

So I haven't been out on the bike, but I have had a strange dream. Last night (or whenever it was that I had the dream) I found myself in some kind of club, something like an ex-servicemen's club, not sure. It was large and roomy and unoccupied initially, although there was a sense that some rooms were occupied. There was a singer, somewhere, a modern singer, somebody contemporary, a woman, a girl, not sure, but while I didn't know who it was, others did, and when I caught sight of the girl I still had no idea who she was or whether I'd ever heard her music. It didn't matter.

While wandering around the largely empty club I sensed activity in one of the rooms and stumbled upon a group of crusty, ruddy-faced old war veterans wearing tweed jackets and cravats, smoking pipes and discussing an old military campaign. They filtered out of the room, chatting as they departed, but left behind a bag of archive magazines inside a thick plastic bag not dissimilar to those that contain garden compost. The bag had been ripped open in haste and inside I found many copies of a saddle-stitched publication about the Second World War peppered with colour photography throughout.

For me, time is pigeon-holed by photography. The dishwater years, as a friend of mine once described the 1950s, were characterised by black and white photography and so were the years that went before them. From the sixties onwards, colour photography took over, but in the real world everything is in colour as people have never lived in monochrome, even in the Stone Age, which somehow makes time seem less savage. I tried to explain this to an old friend in the dream, but we were distracted by an old college friend who sat alone in a quite corner of the club and was unaware of our presence. Neither of us wanted him to know we were there.

I woke up to the 0600hrs news on Radio Four followed by Something Understood on the subject of parochialism and remembered that my ears were jammed with wax after a swim at Waddon pool yesterday morning. I also remembered that I'd aborted the ride and wouldn't be hitting the road again until next weekend. Such is life, I thought, and went downstairs to make a cup of tea.