Why and why now

I should explain why I am doing this but my psychiatrist would say not to. Well never mind, here goes, into the deep end.

Since taking up bike riding two years ago seeking variation from the pounding of feet and knees that is running, I have found a new freedom! A bit melodramatic perhaps but riding a bike has a sense of freedom not experienced in any other method of getting from point A to point B.

Another reason is turning sixty and an awareness that capacity to do some things may be on the wane. Better do it now.

Bill Hansen's story about the death of his grandfather on the Western Front a month before the end of the war as he was about his work as an army chaplin moved me to visit the memorials and graves of Northern France. His mother never to see her father. Starting with Verdun where half a million of the flower of France and half a million of the flower of Germany met and died. Such a waste. To visit all this across the rural and rolling hills from the Moselle to the Somme will be an experience. I will follow the Somme from what was the Hindenburg line and the end of the last campaign by the AIF down to Villers Bretonneux. What better way than by bike!

There are the Danes, those marauding warriors that I worked with many years ago in Hong Kong. Well, the marauding has reduced to prowess in drinking Akavite but it is still marauding. A lovely sense of humour with a unique capability to speak English with a wryness and a twinkle.

Berlin, an imperial city, nearly crushed, always daring, the forty years, grim, isolated and uncertain but now rejuvenated.

Finally there is beautiful France and my very good friend Denis and his family. A friendship over 34 years since Stanford and in spite of the distance still going strong. Perhaps rejuvenated by the arrival of email. He will meet me at Roissey. The test of my halting newly acquired French awaits.