Don't believe anyone who tells you it isn't possible to fall asleep while riding a bicycle. Recent events have proven to me that it can be done.
Chronic fatigue is becoming a bit of a problem. However flat the roads I'm exhausted at the end of each day, and however much I sleep I'm still worn out each morning. My 8am starts have slipped to a more leisurely 10.45am, and I've treated myself to a few days of only 30 miles.
The nodding off incident luckily happened on a flat, quiet stretch where I was only sharing the road with sheep. I'd been cycling uphill into a brisk headwind and heavy rain all afternoon, and when the gradient eased and the sun came out I dozed off momentarily. I jerked awake when the bike came off the track, and took a restorative power nap on the grass verge, no doubt to the amusement of passing motorists.
As the odometer clicked onto 600 miles, I entered Scotland with a silent cheer (there were people around) and spent a night in Langholm, Dumfries. Nestled among five imposing hills and bisected by the River Esk, this was formerly the biggest of the border towns and is still known as the Muckle Toon (big town), although with the departure of the tweed industry the population has halved to 2,500 in a century.
My hotel was the Reivers' Rest, named after the feuding clans that marauded through the border area from the 14th to the 17th century. The next day I traced their route along the marshy Ettrick Valley to Eskdalemuir and beyond. There was no sign of marauding bandits, or indeed of anyone else: in the 45 miles of gently rolling hills to my next stop at Innerleithen the only settlement of any size was an incongruously located Tibetan centre and Buddhist retreat.
I exchanged a few words with an Irishman who wasn't a Buddhist and didn't like community living but was having a good time anyway; apart from that I didn't speak to another human all day. The only traffic I saw were timber trucks transporting logs from the farmed coniferous forest which makes much of this borders countryside dark and inhospitable. I watched an amazing machine that can shave and chop a tree trunk in seconds.
After a quick stop at Traquair House, the first inhabited house in Scotland, I reached Edinburgh, the first big city on my route. Given the preponderance of Brazil shirts being sported on Princes Street I decided to watch the England-Brazil World Cup quarter-final in my hotel room. When I emerged for a spot of sightseeing after Brazil's 2-1 victory, gangs of jubilant youths were on the streets singing 'England's going home, they're going home' to the tune of Three Lions.
Blocking my ears to this chorus, I went to meet Stewart Conn, Edinburgh's newly appointed Makar - equivalent to the city's poet laureate. Conn, a former head of radio drama at BBC Scotland and one of the country's finest poets, has lived in Edinburgh for 25 years, and has written widely on Scotland. He writes movingly about life, love and loss, the lyricism of his verse offset by humour and pathos. Here's an example from his 1999 Stolen Light anthology:
Bedtime Story
I don't like that one, Hansel
And Gretel, I told them so, little
Children enticed by a wicked witch
Into her marzipan cottage - such
Goings-on - too fearsome
For words, just before bedtime
Too: keep them up half the night.
They recognise her plight,
Interpret it differently:
- Grandma would be upset, you see
They confide later, from tact,
- It's the old woman who gets cooked.
Filling my panniers with excellent shortbread courtesy of the Makar's wife, Judy, I set off through the suburbs of Edinburgh and on to the Forth Road Bridge. To my right there was a fine view across the firth to the red cantilevered structure of the Railway Bridge. The gantry is still there but apparently the constant cycle of painting and repainting has slipped somewhat in recent years.
My mid-bridge photo stop was an alarming experience: the ground shook as each lorry hurtled past, and the howling crosswind was so fierce that only the extra weight of the shortbread kept me from flying over the parapet. Entering Fife I gulped, and pointed the bike towards the endless mountainous vista ahead.
