On the Road Bike (22 page)

The rider will sweat, and will love every drop of it. It will be a morally unimpeachable one-week pleasure/pain cruise.

Recent trends in celebrity endorsement have upped the ante considerably. It is now virtually unthinkable to launch a charity bike ride without the presence of at least two members of the 2003 World Cup winning rugby team on board, or failing that, a footballer/comedian/TV presenter or two. People are clamouring for a bit of the charity action. From hospices to homelessness, cot death to Alzheimer's. The great crises of western life find expression here, with cancer taking centre stage.

Therefore this conversation would be distinctly unorthodox in 2012: ‘I'm thinking of riding to the South of France.'

‘Great idea. Who're you doing it for?'

‘Me.'

I can't say I knew Ian Meek well, but the last I saw of him was in a pub in Leeds railway station in April 2012.

It was lunchtime, and busy with travellers grabbing a pint and a pie, as well as regulars, who for some reason had chosen this noisy, darkened Wetherspoons to drink themselves wobbly one weekday morning.

I made my way through the crowd towards Ian. Sitting at a high table in the middle of the pub, and joined by his wife Sally Anne, he had changed significantly to look at since we'd last met. He had the same soft smile, the same infectious chuckle. But the scar on his right temple was unavoidably prominent and he now wore two hearing aids. His eyes were sometimes watery and, every now and again, his cheery features would suddenly, visibly, wilt and he would look very tired.

But otherwise he was in good spirits. Just recently, he had seen his psychologist, who had been concerned that Ian had started to brood, to turn in on himself. The doctor had been surprised to see him smiling.

‘What's changed?' he'd asked.

‘I'm back on my bike,' Ian beamed back at him.

‘Is that the only thing?'

‘Yes. I'm back on my bike.'

There had been weeks, very recently, when he'd been unable to venture out. As our conversation twisted and turned into life, he recalled those dark days when the doctors had told him (not for the first time) to leave it alone.

Then Ian tells me, to my considerable alarm, that a telephone conversation with me had turned things around. It seems I'd told him over the phone to ignore the doctors and do what he wanted to do, not for a minute expecting him to take my half-baked advice seriously. I had only said it because it sounded like the right thing to say, what I would have wanted to hear in his situation. But, however it came about, and whatever my accidental role in it had been, it seemed to have worked.

‘I used to be too frightened to even go and get my hair cut. I wasn't me. I would never have had the confidence to come into a place like this and meet you and buy a drink. But now I'm back to being me, and it's all down to me getting my bike out and riding to my sister-in-law's with my nephew's Easter egg. It's put the biggest smile on my face ever.'

And to prove it, he smiles. Broadly.

‘My mum was worried. She said, “Who did you have out with you on the ride?” I said that God was by my side. She said, “Well God ain't going to pull you out of the water is he, when you go straight in the river?”'

He splutters with mirth. It's hard not to join in. And somehow, the Bristol accent of his youth has seeped through into his laughter.

He grew up the son of a carpenter and a nurse in Yate, near Bristol.

‘I used to have a Commando with cow horn handlebars on it. I used to go everywhere on that thing. One Christmas, Dad said, do you want a racer? And he got me a Raleigh Winner. It was the most amazing present ever.'

I laugh with Ian at his memory of this, in the particular way that near-strangers (this was only our second meeting) can only do over a shared heritage, in this case the horrifying cliché of a seventies childhood. Although I never had a Commando, the ‘bovver boys' in my village all rode them. The saddle was long and, like a motorbike saddle, turned up at the rear. The handlebars were modelled on a Harley Davidson. They had attitude, but as a means of getting you from A to B you might as well have been on a clown's bike from the local circus.

It didn't matter to Ian. He loved it. When he was eighteen, he and a bunch of like-minded mates discovered mountain biking the first time it became popular. They took the train into Bristol with their savings and each came away with a new bike, which they rode all the way home.

His was a Specialized Rock Hopper. I nod as he tells me this, even though I have not the faintest idea what one of those should look like. I get a more accurate picture of how young Ian must have looked rattling through the Forest of Dean on his frequent overnight stays in the woods when he tells me he wore a Toshiba Polka Dot jersey. ‘It was horrendous really.' This time, I nod with a little more conviction.

By the age of twenty-two, he'd given up mostly on cycling. More adult stuff had come his way, as it does. Now he had a young family, mouths to feed, responsibilities to discharge. Every day he went to clock on at the Courage brewery in Bristol.

‘At first I had a job knocking shives.'

‘You did what?' It sounded quaint, skilled and obsolete. It sounded like you'd be expected to Morris Dance all the way to work and all the way back. ‘What's knocking shives?'

‘Knocking the caps into the casks of beer,' he explains patiently. I wonder briefly if anyone behind the bar at Wetherspoons would have the faintest idea what he was talking about. ‘But then I got a better job as a brewer. I was a fermentation operator.'

In 1994, quite suddenly, he was told that he had a brain tumour. At first they told him it was benign. But he knows now that they were simply shielding him from the inevitable.

‘It was malignant. They just told me it was benign because there was nothing to get rid of it. I could have all the money in the world and go to America, and they still couldn't do anything to get rid of it. It's just in completely the wrong place. It's too close to my brain. It's too high a risk for them to try and take it all out. I could end up a vegetable. There's nothing that they can do.

‘They told me I wasn't allowed to drive any more. So I said, “How am I going to get into work?” It was twelve miles away. I'd have to get the bike out. I hadn't really got a choice. The doctors were saying I shouldn't really be riding a bike with a brain tumour. So I said, “Are you going to come and pick me up then and drive me to work every day?”'

Life went on its course. In the winter, if he was on an early shift, he'd leave the house in the pitch dark at 4.15 a.m. for a 5.30 start. Twelve miles there and twelve miles back. In the summer, when he was feeling more vigorous, he'd throw in an extra twenty miles by following the path all the way to Bath and back.

In 1999 the Courage factory closed and the family moved north when Ian took a job with the John Smith brewery. They settled in Tadcaster, within cycling distance of Ian's other great love, Leeds United and Elland Road.

All the while the tumour bided its time. He would occasionally check in for a ‘de-bulking' operation, to shave off the more easily accessible tissue. But over fifteen years he remained fit and well. And he cycled to work every day.

Then, suddenly, in 2009, the doctors had news.

‘My brain tumour changed and became terminal. It changed to a Grade 3.' Ian pauses, and momentarily loses his way. ‘I'm just trying to think . . .'

His sentence peters out. Sally Anne, who throughout our talk has been holding his hand, steps in to complete his sentence.

‘It becomes more aggressive as the grades go up and they struggle to control it as much. And that's when it turns to terminal.'

Ian's smile lights up the table at which we sit. ‘So we crack on. We're doing all right, aren't we?'

Ian Meek is a year younger than I am. Wetherspoons is thinning out, the lunchtime crush is subsiding.

The first time I met Ian Meek was in October of 2011, six months or so prior to our meeting in Leeds. Mick Bennett invited me to make a personal appearance at the Cycle Show in Birmingham. Hilariously, this involved some commitment to cutting a ribbon to open the gates and posing in a semi-official capacity. It was one of my first professional engagements where I was obliged simply to turn up and be me. I was deeply flattered and mildly embarrassed. I could only assume that a number of refusals had led to their last-minute booking. No one has ever contradicted that version of events. And, after I arrived too late to cut the ribbon, I wasn't invited back the following year.

Not since I had been dragged, inexplicably, to the East of England Show by some family friends in the mid-1980s had I visited a trade fair. There were certain similarities between the two. Where Britain's premier agricultural show featured the latest tractor technology and seed developments, so the Cycle Show had bikes and power gels. Thousands of people made the trip to the NEC in Birmingham and then paid for the right to stare at bicycles they had no intention of buying, let alone the means to do so. It was like witnessing a great annual migration of ruminant mammals, which, on reaching the lush pastures, opted simply to gaze fondly on them, and not to feed.

Salesman: ‘Ever ridden Titanium before?'

Punter: ‘Not enough torque in the frame for me.'

Salesman: ‘I see. Tried a more aggressive geometry?'

Punter: ‘With an oval ring? You're kidding me.'

This is only an approximation of how I imagine a conversation about bikes to go. I tend to tune out after the initial reference to lugs.

I made a brief appearance on the Cycle Show stage alongside esteemed cycling writers like Will Fotheringham and Jeremy Whittle (during which I tended to agree with whatever opinion the last person to talk had expressed), and then I headed for the Condor stand, where I was to sit at a trestle table signing copies of
How I Won The Yellow Jumper
.

I was worried that there would be an all-too-awkward entire absence of people. This had the potential to become my Alan Partridge moment, where he sets up a stand in the middle of Norwich and flogs copies of his autobiography
Bouncing Back
while wearing a market-trader's headset and microphone.

Mercifully, there was enough enthusiasm, or possibly enough disenchantment with the phenomenal prices being asked for pushbikes, to ensure a decent flow of people passing by my little stand. Folks stopped and chatted about all sorts of things: the Tour, Cavendish, Boardman and, more often than not, their own, often quite prestigious racing careers.

I had never met so many amateur stars, so many men and women who had spent a lifetime driving to rainy, secret, windswept time trials up and down the country in the hope of improving on the previous year's 34th place. I marvelled at their industry and the depth of their attachment to this peculiar, lonely sport. I wondered also what it was they sought in talking to me, a self-confessed outsider. Maybe it was the novelty. Perhaps I was like a first-time guest at a tedious family Christmas; some bewildered new partner that a cousin brings along. Such interlopers tend to get set upon by the regulars, all too stultified by the over-familiar nature of their own kind.

I was busily talking to some confused twelve-year-old kid whose dad had pushed him in my direction clutching a book he would never read, when I noticed a tallish, slimish chap standing just to my left, carrying a brace of plastic bags like pheasants from a successful poaching raid.

‘I'm planning on riding Land's End to John O'Groats,' the poacher told me. Here we go again.

‘Wow,' I said, insincerely. ‘That's quite a thing.'

Over the course of what was now becoming quite a long day, this man hadn't been the first person to tell me that he was riding from Land's End to John O'Groats. So, trying not appear as underwhelmed as I felt, I returned my attention to the lad who still looked baffled and still held his dad's book out in the general direction of a complete stranger.

Charity riders. Again! Various different fundraising adventurers had repeatedly accosted me that afternoon. Some had booked flights to Grenoble and were going to tackle Alpe d'Huez in the spring (while raising awareness of prostate cancer). Others were already in full training for the following year's Étape du Tour, in which people get to ride a mountain stage of the actual Tour de France route. So the John O'Groats ride (or LEJOG to give it its full, ghastly acronym) struck me as neither particularly imaginative nor meritorious. I had only a certain reserve of interest in these acts of well-meaning endurance, and it had long since run dry.

But the poacher wasn't put off. ‘The thing is,' he said, ‘I've got to do it. I want to raise £100,000.'

‘That's a lot of money,' I offered. Rather obviously.

‘I've got an inoperable brain tumour,' he replied, rather less obviously. ‘I haven't got long to live.'

I put down my pen, and looked squarely at the man for the first time.

There was something about his honesty. An openness of approach, a quiet, watchful appreciativeness. Calming company, Ian Meek. Six months later, back in the Leeds pub as I stirred my coffee and listened to him talk, I understood that I had a confession to make.

Irony never translates well on Twitter. That's why people use the little symbol ;-) after their sarcastic barbs. There's a world of difference between saying ‘All I want for Christmas is the new One Direction album' and ‘All I want for Christmas is the new One Direction album ;-)'. In fact, they are the polar opposite of each other.

And so it was that when I tweeted ‘Delighted to announce that I have been chosen to carry the Olympic flame through the Blackwall Tunnel' nobody realised that it was supposed to be a joke. It was barely a joke anyway (although I did like the image of the torch being bravely carried aloft through London's dingiest tunnel. But, I freely admit, it wasn't funny, and what residual humour there was flew straight over most people's heads. Certainly, Ian Meek took it at face value.