The Pilot on Our Tandem

Pottering along a country lane recently I saw a couple on a tandem cycling in the opposite direction.  I am fascinated by bicycles.  I peer at commuters’ fold up bikes on the train, watch them closely to see how, in a moment, they fold them up ready to carry into the carriage.  I would love to have a go on a recumbent model – although I’d be quite nervous taking it out in traffic clogged streets.  And as for a Penny Farthing…..

But, for me, the ultimate bike is the tandem.

Here’s why.  I first saw riders on a tandem the first time I rode the Capital to Coast charity bike ride from London to Hove (60 hilly miles).  One of the charities involved in the ride was Norwood – a charity for people with Learning Difficulties.  A volunteer was the Pilot – the rider in front, and a person using the Norwood services rode behind.  I use the word ‘rode’ loosely.  I saw a number of these tandem pairings during the ride – one overtook me on a steep climb.  I never saw the back riders pedalling……

Thinking of those tandem riders makes me think of my wife.  I wrote about her in one of the early editions of this blog, called ‘The Long – Suffering Spouse’.  You can find it in the archives.

She is my Pilot.  True, she is not a cyclist, as such.  Her bike sits stubbornly in the shed and refuses to budge.  She prefers the sweaty passion that is Bikram Hot Yoga; which is fair enough.  But she is the one who rides in front most of the time, pedalling uphill, changing gears as need be, and signalling as and when forks in the road appear.  I, on the other hand, mostly resemble those back – riders I recall from the London to Hove rides.  Happy to balance on the back seat holding the hndlebars, but not turning the pedals much.  On one of those rides I was overtaken by one such Tandem.  I can still remember the flexed forearms, the heaving chest and the puffed out cheeks of the Pilot as he turned the pedals for both of them.

We all need a helping hand from time to time.  And so does the Pilot.

Over the years I have regularly attended Peer – led support groups. From time to time, a partner, parent, spouse or sibling will come along, too.  They come for various reasons: to support someone who is nervous about attending for the first time, to understand better what the loved one is going through, and, more rarely, for support themselves.

Since the NHS and Community Care Act 1990, which revolutionised mental health care in ways that could not have been forseen, the support for sufferers by their families and friends replaced the Long – Stay Victoirian (mostly) asylums.  These were often situated on the outskirts of towns and cities, away from the public gaze.  My point here is not to digress onto the benighted path of the history of Psychiatry, but to emphasise the changing complexion of care for people living independently in the heart of the community supported by – if they have them -  family and friends.

While support for sufferers of mental health problems has grown, developed, shrunk, receeded, and re – invented itself over the past 22 years, can the same be said of the needs of people who care for and support these same people?

Living with me certainly means coping with a steep gradient most of the time, hairpin bends and unannounced steep descents.  And I’m the only one wearing the helmet, the cycling gloves and the padded shorts.

The Hum

 ‘There is not yet a single word, but the poem

can already be heard…’

- Osip Mandelstam

It takes all night to turn the page -

no offence to the poem – its image

sets up so bright a mirror

the room moves towards it, vaster

for all the darkness I’m left sitting in.

By mid-morning you were fathoming

how to decant me from one vessel to another,

his to yours, replace the stopper

and drink. But what you drank was laced

with a distance, like moonlight traced

back to the moon at her most explicit,

so much so you have to listen for it

close to my mouth. Then, in that way you have

when you persist, like a siderostat,

in fixing me in your view,

what I’ve kept hidden becomes visible to you

Rachael Boast (1975 – )

3 Blokes on Bikes

Recently, I went on bike ride  in the West Sussex countryside with a couple of mates.  They knew the route better than me (I had never ridden around there).  The sun was out – for a change – but my mood felt pretty blustery.  I had been looking forward to the ride.  We hadn’t been out on a ride together for about a year.  I was riding my tourer (complete with cumbersome bike lock in the pannier), my friends were riding a (seldom used) hybrid, and a very attractive Italian racer, respectively.  But as the date for our outing in the countryside had drawn closer, so my nerves had started to jangle.  The weather was playing up, I hadn’t been out on my bike much because I was concerned about my racing thoughts, impulsivity and generally feeling fraught.  That morning, on my way to meeting my friend with the seldom used hybrid at the station, (our friend on the Italian racer was riding nearly 20 miles up and over several stiff climbs to meet us at the start of the route) I pedalled my way gingerly round the park en route to the station for a few miles to get my mental muscles tuned up.

By the time we met up at the start of the ride, my mood had eased somewhat, and as the day unfolded – punctuated by a couple of pub stops – my mind cleared and(sometimes) I rode out in front.

We all ride different kinds of bikes.  We all ride differently, for different reasons.  But we ride together, nontheless.  I dare say we get different things out of a ride like that, too.  That doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter that a financial advisor, a postman and a somewhat flaky mental health worker aren’t Best Friends – texting eachother every day, down the pub every weekend, and generally carrying on.  It’s enough to get together once in a while – we won’t be leaving it so long this time – and do something we all enjoy.

And yet.

I’ve written about the importance of gathering people around you- supporters – to help you to continue to be at your best, to keep a benevolent eye on you, someone to lean on when the need arises.  It all sounds so sensible, so obvious. 

And yet.  And yet there is something in me (and I doubt I am alone in this) that wishes those people, those friends, doctors, colleagues away.  Solitude is someone who asks nothing of me; accepts me for who I am; who stays by side as hope, belief, love, desire, slip away. 

Why Brownlee Left

Why Brownlee left, and where he went

Is a mystery even now.

For if a man should have been content

It was him; two acres of barley,

One of potatoes, four bullocks,

A milker, a slated farmhouse.

He was last seen going out to plough

On a March morning, bright and early.

By noon Brownlee was famous;

They had found all abandoned, with

The last rig unbroken, his pair of black

Horses, like man and wife,

Shifting their weight from foot to

Foot, and gazing into the future.

Paul Muldoon (1951 – )

‘Put Me Back on My Bike’

‘Put me back on my bike,’ are certainly not the dying words of the British cyclist Tom Simpson as he lay on the Mount Ventoux on the afternoonof 13 July during the 13th stage of the 1967 Tour de France, but they speak volumes, not just for a drug – addicted world champion cyclist, but for me, too.

I have written about Tom Simpson in a much earlier edition of this blog, but I want to return to his story this time, because the circumstances of his death speak to me in my all too vibrant and shimmering life, at the moment.

A combination of factors brought Tom Simpson to that fateful stage of the Tour de France that day.  The primary factors were the fact that he was one of the world’s premier cyclists of the era (having won the World Championships two years previously) and his frenzied desire to win.  It is this frenzied desire and the extremely hot weather that day on the slopes of a mountain that, after leaving the shady foothills offered no cover at all, and a merciless glare.

Today, I identify with Tom Simpson.  Delusions of grandeur?  Tom Simpson was an elite racing cyclist, for sure.  I am not.  However, what I do share with Simpson at the moment is that frenzied desire.  To win bike races, no; but to find out about lots of things, be intersted in everything that is going on around me?  Yes.  To be full of ideas – for days now for this humble blog.  Yes.  Today there are elections of one sort or another going on in France, Greece, Italy and Serbia.  O.K., so I am a Francophile – I should be interested in who will occupy the Elysse Palace.  But local elections in Italy? A lack lustre general election in Serbia?  And all this shallow interest in world affairs is shooting across my mind at 80 mph.  That’s the kind of frenzied desire I’m talking about.  Put me back on my bike like this, and who knows what speeds I will reach careering down the hill I live on, on my way to the station in the morning?

Simpson was suffering from a stomach bug, massively dehydrated, and had been seen drinking brandy in the foothills of the Ventoux.  When he died medics found amphetimines in the back pocket of his jersey.

Tom Simpson was clutching his handlebars so tightly when he fell off his bike that day that they had to be prised away before he could receive treatment.  Race medics tried in vain to maintain his breathing with an oxygen mask to no avail.  Heart massage failed, too.  His last words, heard by two men at the scene, were a desperate exhortion to his team mates: ‘Go on! Go on!’

And it’s that that worries me at the moment; the same driving force, out of control, detached from reality, sending me spinning to who knows where…and it feels sooo good.

Fragment Thirty – Six

I know not what to do: my mind is divided – Sappho

I know not what to do,

my mind is reft:

is song’s gift best?

is love’s gift loveliest?

I know not what to do,

now sleep has pressed

weight on your eyelids.
Shall I break your rest,

devouring, eager?

is love’s gift best?

nay, song’s the loveliest:

yet were you lost,

what rapture could I take from song?

what song were left?
I know not what to do:

to turn and slake the rage that burns,

with my breath burn

and trouble your cool breath?

so shall I turn and take

snow in my arms?

(is love’s gift best?)

yet flake on flake

of snow were comfortless,

did you lie wondering,

wakened yet unawake.

Shall I turn and take

comfortless snow within my arms?

press lips to lips

that answer not,

press lips to flesh that shudders not nor breaks?

Is love’s gift best?

shall I turn and slake

all the wild longing?

O I am eager for you!

as the Pleiads shake

white light in whiter water

so shall I take you?
My mind is quite divided,

my minds hesitate,

so perfect matched,

I know not what to do:

each strives with each

as two white wrestlers

standing for a match,

ready to turn and clutch

yet never shake muscle nor nerve nor tendon;

so my mind waits

to grapple with my mind,

yet I lie quiet,

I would seem at rest.

I know not what to do

: strain upon strain,

sound surging upon sound

makes my brain blind;

as a wave-line may wait to fall

yet (waiting for its falling)

still the wind may take

from off its crest,

white flake on flake of foam,

that rises,

seeming to dart and pulse

and rend the light,

so my mind hesitates

above the passion

quivering yet to break,

so my mind hesitates

above my mind,

listening to song’s delight.

I know not what to do:

will the sound break,

rending the night

with rift on rift of rose

and scattered light?

will the sound break at last

as the wave hesitant,

or will the whole night pass

and I lie listening awake?

Hilda Dolittle a.k.a H.D.  (1886 – 1961)

Trench Foot

During a ride of about 5 miles or more I start to need to wiggle my feet a bit; during longer rides a certain numbness seeps into the soles of my feet, and the attempts at improving the circulation become more determined.  The same goes for the other parts of my body that rest on the bike, it’s mainly a comfort thing, rather than a loss of feeling.

The last time I went to my G.P. before I was diagnosed with depression, back in 2001, I ‘auditioned’ her by showing her a problem I was having with the skin on my feet.  She diagnosed it, and recommended a cream for it.  The following week I was back there telling her I was a basket case – that I had all the symptoms of depression.  And so the treatments began.  And my feet? I did nothing about them, the skin irritation continued for years, until finally, feeling better, I did go to the chemist and buy the cream I had been recommended.

Depression takes its toll mentally, for sure.  But it takes its toll physically, too.  A few editions ago I wrote about the person I used to support who lost all his teeth due to his inability to look after his most basic physical hygiene.    We become prone to infection, tire easily, headaches, nausea.  And that’s without even starting on side effects of medication.  I can remember hallucinating as I walked down a pedestrianized shopping street as a result of one batch of tablets – the name of which is long forgotten.

My feet are fine now, thank you very much; but life has felt like I have been ‘living’ – I use the term loosely – in a trench for a while now.  Rats scuttle across my brain, disturbing thoughts ping off my helmet. Everywhere looks and feels like the fields of Passchendale circa 1917.  And every day, slack and slow from lack of sleep, I go over the top and stumble on with a full pack on my back into the gentle rattle of the guns.

Sounds dramatic?  So immersed am I in the history of the Western Front in the first world war, my family have sometimes joked that I am the reincarnation of a fallen soldier from the ranks of the Austro - Hungarian army.  Be that as it may, why am I so connected with war, and the trauma it heaves around with it?

I wasn’t even there.

In the final volume of her World War 1 trilogy, ‘The Ghost Road’(winner of the Booker Prize 1995) Pat Barker puts it like this:

‘The other expression was the trench expression.  It looks quite daunting if you don’t know what it is.  Any one of my platoon could have posed for a propoganda poster of the Brutal Hun, but it wasn’t brutality or anything like that.  It was a sort of morose disgust, and it came from living in trenches that had bits of human bone sticking out of the walls, infreezing weather corpses popped up on the firestep, flooded latrines.

Whatever happens to us it can’t be as bad as that.’

It’s the war within.  The blast and smoke of my mind, as acrid and deafening as anything the Somme on 1 July 1916 had to offer.  A bit much, that comparison?  Men (and plenty of boys) died out there.  Yes, and in the U.K. today suicide is the most common cause of death in men up to the age of 35.  I’m 47, by the way.  Do you detect a whiff of anger in the statistics I quote?  That’s just a hint of the swirling red mist that obscures my view and burns, burns, burns in my veins most days.

And what (I hear you thinking) has any of this got to do with my life on a bike?

Quite a lot, actually.  The way I pedal, the rhythm I generate, the speed, the sheer motion speaks of how I am feeling.  I haven’t been out on my bike for a couple of days.  For ‘out on my bike’ read ‘eaten or drunk anything’.  Cycling is something I must do to keep me going – literally.  So why aren’t I out and about, even to do a circuit round the park at the bottom of the hill?

Philip Larkin says a question like that ‘…brings the priest* and the doctor/In their long coats/Running over the fields.’  In my case, I am not involving the clergy or the medical profession right now.

* O.K., a Rabbi, in my case

The Dug-out

Why do you lie with your legs ungainly huddled,

And one arm bent across your sullen, cold,

Exhausted face?

It hurts my heart to watch you,

Deep-shadowed from the candle’s guttering gold;

And you wonder why I shake you by the shoulder;

Drowsy, you mumble and sigh and turn your head…

You are too young to fall asleep for ever;

And when you sleep you remind me of the dead.

Siegfried Sassoon (1886 – 1967)

Le Grimpeur

….is French for ‘the climber’.  It is how elite racing cyclists are described who conquer the fearsome mountain stages of bike races in the great European Tours.

I also fancy myself as something of a ‘grimpeur’, too, living nearly half a mile up a…hill.  It’s not quite the Pyrenees, but you get my drift.

In an early edition of this blog I wrote about the famous Luxembourger Charly Gaul who won the King of the Mountains jersey in the Tour de France twice – oh, and the yellow jersey of the overall winner, too.   You can read that edition by clicking on this link: http://puncturerepairkit.wordpress.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=27&action=edit

When I first entered the interminable drizzle – damp miles of the pedal – grinding world of depression back in the Spring of 2001, I found a free  CD among the pages of my newspaper (I was barely up to looking at the photos, let alone reading anything).  It was a CD with a handful of taster tracks to promote the album of a singer I had never heard of. (The singer’s name was Neil Finn, the album was called One Nil)

I put into the CD player and pressed ‘play’.  I was way beyond actually listening to any lyrics in those days.  The music, the yearning, the hope and despair flooded my sodden mind.

Little did I realise it back then, but he was singing for me.

How long was it before I actually heard his words?  Listening to someone in mental distress is a key part of aiding their recovery, as slow and lugubrious as that may be.  I certainly wasn’t listening to much of anything back then.  I do recall my psychiatrist nodding approvingly as I told him how I was sleeping, and sleeping, and sleeping all day, every day.  He smiled, and told me that was what I needed to be doing.

In September that year the climb back to my better self began.  My children’s class teacher asked me to come on a class trip to a local Stately Home.  I was to dress as a Victorian gent. I spent three weeks – I did precious little else - growing a pair of impressive, thick sideburns to enhance the look.  The following week I started volunteering listening (yes, I had begun to get my ears back) to children practice their reading one hour per week.  And that was the most activity I could manage in those days.  I continued to volunteer there for the next three years.  During that time, I gave up my job, was on the aptly named Incapacity Benefit for 3 years, and slowly, but surely turned the pedals, crunched through the gears until I was in sight of the summit.

I’m in the foothills of the mountains again.

The Climber 

Beside me now are strangers to my eyes

They might be getting crazy might be wise

Were stranded either way

In such a lonely place

 I’m looking out for you

Among the flies that wait in line for days on end

And nights so cold and always so intense

I try to reach the top most every day

In hope I turn my face up to the sky

The cover hangs so low I see no sign of life

Nothing springs to mind

Among the flies that wait in line

For days on end and nights so cold

It’s always so intense

And here we are

 Theres a smile between us and its going on

You and me have always gotten through

 Anyone can tell you that its true

You feel it every time you drive away from home

The headlights hypnotize and they take you off towards the sea

Into the night you run away with thoughts you cannot hide

 Vacant eyes can’t describe my hunger

For your billowing arms….

 Neil Finn (1958 -)

You can watch a video of this song  - just search YouTube for ‘Neil Finn The Climber’.

My Local Bike Shop

Over the years, when I notice some wear and tear to my bike, for example that the teeth on the cogs had worn down, I pop in to the shop and they fix it. When this happened to my bike’s cogs in June 2009, meaning that the chain would start to come off causing me aggravation, I was on my first cycling holiday (on the Isle of Wight) when this began happening, and I was constantly having to up-end my bike to put the chain back on the cogs. In fact the title picture on this blog was taken during that trip.

I have written before about the need to gather people around you to provide support when things start to go awry. My local bike shop is one of my key supporters. It’s not part of a major bike shop chain offering a dazzling array of the latest lycra kit and the staff don’t wear a uniform and name badges.

 

What they do offer is a personal service. Over the years I have got to know various members of staff. They remember my bike’s idiosyncrasies, the kind of cyclist I am, my likes and dislikes.

They make me feel valued.

More recently, my bike computer has started to play up. So, I dropped by the shop to see if they had any ideas as to why this was happening. While they poured over the screen, changed the battery and spun the front wheel round and round, one of them noticed that my brake pads were worn down.

They certainly are worn down, and so am I. Brakes slow you down, and can bring you to a stop, too. With the Passover festival and some annual leave owing to me before the end of the financial year, I have taken a couple of weeks off work. By the time you read this, I will have been back at work for few days already. One of the most distinctive things about relapse is the inability to see the warning signs yourself. This is somewhat ironic, since I am paid to help others to spot their own signs that things are on the slide, and support them to put supports in place to halt this sort of thing from happening. Irritability about minor things not going my way leads to what doctors sometimes call ‘fast feelings’. My emotions going from nought to sixty in a flash. No time for reflection, or the opportunity to get things in perspective and stay calm, maintain my equilibrium.

There are other ways that worn down mental brakes can have an impact. Namely, impulsive behaviour – with often disastrous consequences. I am relatively lucky insofar as my impulses go. Often times people with mood swing disorders will spend the rent/mortgage on a holiday to Chile, arriving at the airport without having taken the trouble to take a suitcase with them. I’ve been known to buy a book or two (really only a book or two, I promise), and I’ve read them – not given them away, or stashed them behind the sofa.

Sleep provides a natural brake to my ‘monkey mind’ as it swings amongst my mental branches. However, with the end of my holiday and the return to work (always a bit of a shock to the system!) I have been up later than usual (past midnight last night). Tired, yes, but my mind is whirring, too. Whirring, whirring like someone in a ‘spinning class’ at the gym. Lots of energy and rhythm, but not going anywhere.

Tonight I’m getting an early night.

Sowing

It was a perfect day

For sowing;

just

As sweet and dry was the ground

As tobacco-dust.
I tasted deep the hour

Between the far

Owl’s chuckling first soft cry

And the first star.
A long stretched hour it was;

Nothing undone

Remained; the early seeds

All safely sown.
And now, hark at the rain,

Windless and light,

Half a kiss, half a tear,

Saying good-night.

Edward Thomas (1878 – 1917)

‘Thinking begets thinking…’

…is a quotation from Dickens’ masterpiece ‘Oliver Twist’.  I have spoken about unhelpful thoughts, rumination, as well as approaches such as Cognitive Behaviuoral Therapy and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy that seek to help us see our thinking patterns and habits anew.  Dickens’ words made me think of what it’s like on my bike.  Yeah, I know, a one track mind, right?  Just as one thought gives birth to another, so my ‘feet mechanical’ as Emily Dickinson famously put it, drive me in one direction.  If one thought really does give birth to the next what hope is there for us to re – evaluate, examine or contradict our unhelpful thought patterns?  Psychotherapy – ‘the talking treatment’ – examines the present, that’s for sure.  But it goes further back, too.  What Mindfulness, and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy aim to do is coax the mind to do is acknowledge our feelings and thoughts, sure.  But it doesn’t stop there.  These two approaches share a common strand.  Once thoughts and feelings have been acknowledged, greeted, so to speak, the idea is to see them on their way by focusing the mind on something else, be it physical sensation such as breathing, or ‘helpful’ thinking, thoughts about where we want to go, what we want to achieve, and how to go about it. Back in the dim days of the mid – 1980s when I was a student of the Dark Arts of Philosophy,  I read the work of that collosus of critical thinking, Bertrand Russell. These days I can barely recall a phrase or a proof that he articulated so lucidilly on every corner of Western Philosophy.  The phrase I can remember from this pacifist philosopher (he was jailed numerous times for his anti – war activities) was this: ‘people would rather die than think, and they quite often do.’  While thinking about our thoughts and feelings, understanding them better via a range of talking treatements, and approaches such as A.C.T. can be effective in helping us recovery our mental balance,so to speak, I have come to the conclusion that thinking is over -rated.  In an earlier edition of this blog I wrote about what Dickens called ‘dry – rot in Man’.  He was talking about depression and insomnia.  There is a curious phenomena among some depressives (I count myself among them) some of us tend not to cry.  During my bleakest times in the mid – noughties I hardly shed a tear.  I slept, for sure.  I slept and slept and…. But I was as dry as shrivelled as a prune most of the time.  I think Dickens had it right when he described – through the mouth -piece of a buffoon in ‘Oliver Twist the benefits of tears thus: ‘It opens the lungs, washes the countenance, exercises the eyes, and softens the temper,’ said Mr. Bumble, ‘so cry away’.  Crying provides relief – it is a synergy of the emotions and the physical.  The jagged breathing, the heaving shoulders, the shuddering frame; the inability to speak.  Dickens describes it like this; as ‘a pleasing melancholy’. In my experience there is a mingling of pleasure and despair in my mood swings; but I don’t want to think about that right now. That’s for another time. Like last week, there’s no one who puts it better than Larkin; so here it is again. Days What are days for? Days are where we live. They come, they wake us Time and time over. They are to be happy in: Where can we live but days? Ah, solving that question Brings the priest and the doctor In their long coats Running over the fields. Philip Larkin (1922 – 1985)