Joint ride with Spokes
Posted on Sunday 27 December 2009 by Charles Harvey
I wouldn’t have been surprised if no one had turned up. It was cold. It was two days after Christmas and Spokes had had a ride in the same area the day before. Normally, if you are leading a ride you tend to get a little flurry of phone calls and emails beforehand asking how long the ride is, how long will it take etc.. But this time there was nothing. However, to my surprise, there were seven on the ride — one from Spokes, five from the Central London CTC and one rider who belonged to both.
We started with coffee at a cafe near Watford Junction Station. Here we hit our first problem. One of our number clicked her cable lock shut and when we left the café found that she had left her keys at home. While the ride went on its way she went off to Homebase to find something to cut the cable. Twenty minutes into the ride we got a phone call saying that a kind assistant at Homebase had freed her bike and I rode back to collect her and Jon while Andy led the remainder to The Plough at Belsize.
Watford was snow free but we had to be careful as we gradually climbed into the Chilterns as there was still a certain amount of packed snow on the roads. Car traffic had created clear snow free ruts but the verges and the centre of the road were often slippery. From Belsize we climbed up to Flaunden and then we headed back through Sarratt. Spies, real and fictional, seemed to a theme of the ride. Guy Burgess was a frequent visitor to The Green Dragon in Flaunden while Sarratt is the home of the training school for agents in John Le Carre’s novels. We had teas and coffees at The Clarendon [very posh] on the way home. I let the side down by having a rear wheel puncture a mile or so short of the station, proving that even Specialized Armadillo tyres are not totally puncture proof. The ride finished without me.
My thanks to Andy Duffy for being Backstop and temporarily Ride Leader and to John Toplis to staying with me to help with a difficult puncture.