The bike and the beginning

The world was set for self annihilation. In the last twelve months Russia has detonated the worlds largest nuclear weapon the Tsar of bombs, a 9 kilometer wide fireball blooming over siberia. Construction of the Berlin wall continues, and war in Vietnam has commenced. An american U2 plane flying over Cuba, spies the deployment of soviet medium range missiles, and the doomsday clock is ticks closer to midnight. John F Kennedy, only twelve months from assassination, negotiates the crisis, and the world pulls recoils at the threat nuclear war. And  while the world seems to be plunging into crisis, in a small workshop in Putney, in south west London, my bike, a Holdsworth Monsoon, is manufactured, a frame for enthusiastic “road men” and an outstanding model in its class.

“Double butted “531” tubing is brazed into lugwork of a balanced scroll pattern, designed and cut by our own craftsmen, making a pleasant change from the stereotyped pressings found on most frames today. Careful selection based on long experience of angels, forks, bracket height and wheelbase measurements ensure for the Monsoon rider a stable yet lively design”
-1961 Holdsworth Catalouge

and now, forty seven years later she is in my possesion, still as beautiful as when she was tested one fine spring day along the Thames toe path and maybe further afield through the untamed meadows of Barnes and Roehampton. She outlasted communism, Kennedy, general strikes, the Nuclear arms race, and The Beatles, who released their first single the year that she was made. so I sing to her “love, love me do”.

That same year, 1962, one of my favourite authors, John Steinbeck, received the Nobel prize for literature, and his book, Travels with Charley was published. He believed, as I do too,  that a good interesting life is marked by quality, not quantity, and taking note of my itchy feet I have prepared to travel, with my bike, through Europe.
It is in homage to him, as much as that other old man inspired by books of chivalry and adventure, that I have chosen to name my bike Rocinante. She shares that name with Steinbecks trusty campervan that he took across America, though woods and forests, desertst and large cities. In turn he took the name from  Don Quioxte’s horse.
I feel like  both of them, the  tall, thin, fancy-struck, and idealistic Quixote, and Steinbeck with his fascination for landscape, natural and human, and the crucial knit of people with their setting. These things were the fuel for Steinbecks creativity as I hope they will be to mine.
He said this of travel, which I have reread over and over, in those times when I have felt apprehensive with planning and preparing, or worried about leaving this place, which is both my prison and my home.

“When the virus of restlessness begins to take possession of a wayward man,
and the road away from Here seems broad and sweet, the victim must first
find in himself a good and sufficient reason for going. This to the practical
bum is not difficult. He has a built in garden of reasons to choose from.
Next he must plan his trip in time and space, choose a direction and a
destination. And last he must implement his journey. How to go, what to
take, how long to stay. This part of the process is invariable and immortal.
I set it down only so that newcomers to bumdom, like teen-agers in new-
hatched sin, will not think they invented it.
Once a journey is designed, equipped and put into process; a new factor
takes over. A trip, a safari, an exploration, is an entity, different from all
other journeys. It has personality, temperament, individuality, uniqueness.
A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards,
policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find after years of struggle that we
do not take a trip; a trip takes us. Tour masters, schedules, reservations,
brass bound and inevitable, dash themselves to wreckage on the personality
of the trip. Only when this is recognized can the blown-in-the-glass bum
relax and go along with it. Only then do the frustrations fall away. In this
a journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you
control it. I feel better now, having said this, although only those who have
experienced it will understand it”

I left New Zealand just over 5 years ago, and since, I have lived mostly in the city of London. It has been a turbulent time in this unforgiving city, filled with as much success as failure, love found and lost, triumphs and dissapointments, etc. And while I don’t imagine that the problems I have here will disappear when I hit the road, I believe it is high time that I take the drama of everyday life to a different setting.  So I have packed my belongings onto two bikes, one to take and one to stay, and I am going in search of somewhere else to be.