The lambs are getting huge. They've been ever-present on my journey and, from my saddle, I've watched them grow from cute little bundles suckling gently to bigger than their mothers, and feeding with such violent head-butting that they lift her clean off the ground. Sometimes I find myself shouting at them to treat their mothers with more respect. And that admission alone perhaps gives an indication of what more than three months spent alone on a bicycle can do to a man.
The day will come soon when the lambs disappear altogether, and with it a sense of time passing and summer fast receding. I use the term summer in its loosest sense, of course. Ever since I stupidly took advantage of a Boots two-for-the-price-of-one suncream offer two months ago, the bottles have sat unused in my panniers. And yet, as I pedal along in the rain and the cold and south-westerly gales, I keep thinking that this day, this week, this month, must be an aberration, and the barbecue summer is just around the corner. Then I remember that it's September, and I plan murderous revenge on the Met Office and their smiley, autocutie propagandists, while remembering John Cleese's line in the movie Clockwise: "It's not the despair… I can take the despair. It's the hope I can't stand."
The Cumbrian coast, with its brooding cliffs and deserted beaches, and the peaks of the Lake District with their heads in the clouds seemed to suit the melancholic weather perfectly.
I followed National Cycle Network Route 72, through the distinguished, Georgian grid-patterned streets of Whitehaven (allegedly used as a template for New York), through lovely St Bees, thronged with bedraggled ramblers starting Alfred Wainwright's 190-mile Coast-to-Coast walk to Robin Hoods Bay (doubtless plotting their own revenge on John Kettley et al), and then across undulating farmland full of the aforementioned delinquent lambs.
The unmistakable shape of Sellafield's reactor came into view, surrounded by buildings so immense and numerous and sci-fi-city weird that I wouldn't have been surprised if flying monkeys had been dispatched to repel me. I was not 100m from the dome, so dilapidated-looking, so quiet, so terrifying, when my mobile phone buzzed into life, flashing urgently that I needed to insert my sim card. Then, for the first time in the six years I've had it, it decided to run a little demo film I had no idea existed. I tried to turn the phone off but couldn't, so instead just pedalled, really quite quickly, south.
Barrow-in-Furness is one of those strange anachronisms in modern Britain: a town that's still full of factories actually making stuff. Okay, so every factory says BAe Systems on the side, and the "stuff" tends to be weapons but, hey, at least we still lead the way in something. I cycled around the docks, past the nuclear submarines and the warships moored within a stone's throw of the main shopping centre, and headed straight back out of town again.
A cyclist pulled alongside me and we rode together for a while up the Furness peninsula. Ian was on his way home from his shift at BAe. "I make guns, basically," he said.
"War must be good business for Barrow," I said.
"Oddly enough, no," he said. "Countries seem to buy more weapons during peacetime."
After Ian peeled off, the road rose gently and I was greeted by one of the most astonishing things I had ever seen. Below me was the seemingly infinite golden expanse of Morecambe Bay, a vast desert fringed by distant shores, the sheer scale of the sands impossible to comprehend. Time and again, the road ducked into woodland, and each time it spat me out, I felt compelled to stop, staring as incredulously as if I was looking at Mars.
I followed the bay to Morecambe and checked into the 1933 art deco confection that is the Midland Hotel, a place I had longed to visit since reading about its reopening in 2008. It had a "fairy staircase one would willingly climb till it reached to heaven," Country Life wrote back in the 30s. One would willingly have climbed the staircase if one hadn't been cycling all day, I thought, as I pressed the lift button.
Imbued with the spirit of past guests, Wallis Simpson and Noel Coward among them, I ordered a gin and tonic then sat on my balcony high above the bay and, as the sky darkened, watched the desert flood with the speed of time-lapse trickery.
Miles this week 230. Total miles 3,185
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