INparvo

140208 Coincidences are me
Picture this, if you will. We are standing on top of a hill. Half a dozen clubmates, marshalling. It is mid-day Sat. 8th Feb. 2014. About 6C. The wind is a steady 24mph. With many irregular fierce gusts. UK has already suffered bthe wettest Jan since records began. All of this via BBC from Met Office. As seen pictorially on a computer screen. It may not be exactly true.

Like all communication and the arts it may need

both human sender and human receiver to work a bit.

Lady X-country runners cross a lane -some in scrunching spikes - pass through a muddy gateway, turn immediately left, on to short green grass, then down a hill, out of sight and up again several minutes later. A sort of peepbo for babies, but not for us in this wind. Barring accidents, we know they will return, just like the baby?

(Later a flimsy lass will be carried back and taken to a car, thence to the finish , seemingly with no more than a pull).

Now they come flying back-wind along the flat top, out across the lane, along down a lane to a group like us to complete their race around another pond-infested rough field before the finish below. All we have to do is see them safely across the lane.

In the interval we wait for the Seniors and their two lap 6 mile marathon.

We stand, shouting our chat, munching bits and pieces, unscrew our flasks, drink our coffee. The course guvnor offers some too, to keep the helpers happy . He is using his van to fetch and take stakes and warning boards. For such pleasant behaviour he was dressed in white in 2012 and held aloft the rolled up metal grid, aka an Olympic torch.

I wonder how much our Whitehall moguls, aka elected representatives, care about money snuck away from Rural Grass Roots to fund Metropolitan prestige!

Cross country is one thing that encourages team-ship. It costs nothing but a chunk of your club membership to run 5 X's in the later months of one year and in the earliest of the next. Your finishing place counts for club points Shame it is no fun for the mud averse!

This was the final event of 5 at Oswestry. League events are ideal for the consistent.

Lucky ones were indoors dispensing tea, coffee (instant) and donated cakes.

Unlike fell racing, the real mountainous xc stuff associated with annual farm fairs, X-country evolved, as did like Saturday athletics with respect for the Lord's Day. It gave track athletes something to do in the boring grey of winter.

Athletes specialising in Road racing, which really took off in 1980 with the marathon boom, may still use this short hard outing before the long one on Sunday: 12-20 odd miles, before another week of town lighting or head-torches: another week of evening training for the marathon.

In our case,UK, probably The London at April's end, when even daffodils may have come and, all but a few, gone

All this winter activity is mirrored in cycling. After the rise of mountain biking, cyclo-cross (road biking with knobbly tyres) is making a comeback. Since TV picked it up it is even more widespread. There are fewer woodland tracks with brambles and roots to sharpen up your skills. Instead, to suit TV cameras, but boring riders silly; they must run back and forth, back and forth, across a flat field with red and white tape strung between stakes. Until that is, a gust of wind wraps a tape around the mechy bits of a bike. This is the equivalent of a runner gathering a stick between the legs and stumbling. In either case it can bring down the unaware and unlucky alike.

Seasons change. So does the sport. With the European emphasis on cycling, where even urban Norwegians will cycle to work on snow, it is an irony that track cycling has largely moved indoors to swish Velodromes. Sometimes sculptural masterpieces. You might find yourself eschewing a hot walk on a Welsh mountain with shady forests on a July weekend and instead watch a British Masters' championship in more controlled conditions, while blue sky teases.

A younger rider will never know what it is like to ride the Pursuit at an Easter Monday meeting in Coventry. I once cheered by a snowy clubmate . Snowflakes fell heavily. Neither he nor I could see his opponent cross the line on the opposite side of the track.

All this stuff is two-way. The press need something else but football to write about in winter. The unpaid club reporter must supply the words.

Then there is this slack bit while everyone trains.

Cyclists battle with ice, snow and floods: avoid slithering cars.

Runners run over hills, through bare woods, muddy fields, trying to avoid tetchy new cow-mums; and ewes whose precious off-spring, literally do so, sometimes all four feet at a time. Or, if you are hunched over with a rucksack, they come running to you. Food? food? food? I may be too friendly, but I hear daa, daa, daa.

I whine back, with fond Lou Reed thoughts, It wasn't me, it wasn't me,

I didn't grow up with sheep. Coming from East Anglia's corn fields, how would I understand them ?

The local paper and radio need to fill the space: the part time unpaid journalist has to make future speculation just to keep the space (or time-slot on radio) going.

It is bit like the scene common to civil servants where the budget of money and holidays must be finished to co-incide with tax year.

Use it or lose it, that is mirrored in competition too. Race or not. Keep at it.

Now that television has its hold riders don't wander through sheltered leaf-strewn woods, nor tangle with plucking brambles.

Instead they might arrange to have their trouble next to an advertiser's banner, so that the name is prominent.

Money just makes another thing of sport. Always has, and …

Anyway the point of the title is yet to come, as I was about to discover.

A newcomer next to me commented, marvellous isn't it? All this voluntary help costs nothing.

We both still ride bikes, it seems. For fun. We chat.

CTC Audaxes?: a simple route to follow, answer a few questions on the way, maybe in cafes, and as much tea and cakes as you want at the finish. Single figure fee, with insurance coverage by the CTC membership for members..

or Sportifs ? The Sportif has a route marked out with arrows. Paid workers set out the course and tidy up afterwards. Double figure fees. Often seen as races by wanabees, unaware as yet of a code, of the subtle tactics.

We found we were both old fashioned.

The senior men now approach. The early ones are notably quicker.

A red and white vest goes by. A Whitchurch Whippet.

I blurt to a club-mate (but loudly over a gust)

How long have they been in the North Wales League?

A couple of years, I think someone replies.

There are 3, my new acquaintance says.

This non sequitur, if that is what if you might call it, is only half heard in this frightening tree-bending breeze.

Turns out his son comes by. I am in my chat mode. This man intrigues me. It is the subtlety of his accent.

You're not from Shropshire by the sound of it.

He wasn't going let me play my guessing game.

I come from Cheltenham.

Cheltenham, Eh ? I used to live there; just one year. When I was 3.

oh yes, where ?

Granley Road. I've got a picture of me at the crossing to the allotments.

( I can't make out what I was clutching. Whatever it was echoes my right hand draped on the post chamfer. Toy? Blanket? It may be my puppy that grew into my ever-loving, ever-loved ragged mongrel. The pet they put to sleep in my absence on my first cycle tour in France in August 1953). It it was opportune. I was so full of that adventure that it softened the blow.

Granley road? Not far from me. It's all changed there now. What did your dad do?

Had he visions of my dad working in the now nearby GCHQ?

(If you go to Google Earth, as I have just done, you can see this triadic clutch-like, chuck-like building. That gated crossing is 

now a bridge. You too, can see a pic marked Turing Stone. That's worth another look, as there are more stones.

What did my dad do? Signwriter, I replied .

I did not say that this was the cream job for an employee painter and decorator normally using a milk of distemper. Emulsion paint was yet to come.

Moonlighting signs was more rewarding as it cut out the boss' share. He died in 65. I was on teaching practice in Chippenham.

I did say however,

His apprentice still raves about him. It was because of my dad he went on to become Head of the Gloucester Fire Service. And all on account of his being able to paint a badge on a piece of hardboard.

He leaned forward. A little conspiratorially, I thought.

Oh yes ! What was his name? This apprentice.

Herring ton ...with an e

oh yes... Reg ? Gotcha! I'm a mind reader.

I watched his eyes. That was a joke, they said. All the same I was half expecting this to happen: Coincidence Is Me. Happens all the time.

(Normally you might say I would be flabbergasted - or in my case skinnygasted, as I had my dad's physique).

He had been a Runner on the Somme in WW1; he returned as a stretcher case, was met by mum at a hospital. Mum was desperate to leave Downstairs Service.

They set up home in his childhood area, Camberwell. He then walked the streets looking for work by day, and teaching himself signwriting by night. He also read Dickens and the Ragged Arsed Philanthropists.

Yes, Reg used to do cartoons for the House Magazine .

That evening I rang Reg, now well into his 80s. After enquiring as to his health and that of his wife and family, including a god-son I have not seen since the Christening, I told my story,

Those cartoons, yes, often I was a bit too honest... He still had his West Suffolk accent, his adenoidal smiling drawl, but was also eloquent,

...and I incurred the displeasure of some .

I have spent a few years in education, and still wonder. Those were days when you could go in one end of a Victorian Council School at 5, come out of the other at 14. He continued.

Like your dad said, it's not what you know, it's who.

As ever, you leave school, college etc but your education is just beginning. It's up to you. What do you want from life?