Pete & Reg's State Of The Nation Tour - Part 1
Posted: Mon Feb 01, 2021 10:35 pm
We had a thread recently about Boris and his “seven mile local bike ride for exercise” – he either rode 7 miles from No.10 out to Hackney or somewhere then back, or was dropped off in Hackney and rode 7 yards then put his bike back in his bodyguard’s limo.
Ever on the lookout for new japes and wheezes, MuddyPete and myself reckoned that if 7 miles was OK and local for Boris it would be OK for us too. Pete thought we should ride 7 miles out of our town then round the whole circumference of a 7-mile radius circle then back home. Bit of a trot for an “out and back day’s exercise” perhaps, so I chipped in that maybe instead choose the four locations precisely 7 miles from the town in the exact north, south, east and westerly directions, and ride to those? Pete firmed this up a bit as we could ride to the northern spot, round to the eastern one, then home; then a second ride would be south round to west and home. I countered with four rides, out and back to each of the compass points. We arranged to do the first one last Sunday, but due to a slight communications error the plan got changed half way through as we will see, in standard BBB fashion.
In the best political traditions, this will be a long-winded and rambling speech so best make a brew first.
A lot of the route would be on-road, so we had changed our political colours to “Roadie Party” or more likely “Monster Raving Loony Party”. This write-up is a joint effort between us, political bullshit-bingo phrases and all – an Uneasy Coalition if you will
. Let Me Be Crystal Clear - don’t expect any Common Sense or Common Decency, but you will see lots of photos of The Great British People. We’re All In This Together ok? Sadly though, There Will Be No Easy Answers. We can do left turns and right turns but definitely No U-turns.
Our Manifesto For Success, therefore, is to journey through this Green And Pleasant Land, UnFettered By Rules And Regulations, only bound by the Limits Of Our Imagination (and the threat of a £200 fine if we stray one iota beyond the 7-miles implied by our illustrious leader). This was the mission upon which we ventured, armed with our Political Roadmap For Success (courtesy O.S.) and our Steadfast Moral Compass.
And if you’re looking forward to some scenic situations, with a few Sunlit Uplands thrown in, probably best look away now. Still, where’s the interest in scenery eh?
Since Pete claims he has to Work Hard To Make Ends Meet and that I’m just a Layabout Sponging Off The Rest Of Society, I took it upon myself to work out some compass points and locations.
The centre of the town is generally accepted as being the market cross, so first we need a GR for that. If we’re going to Do The Job We Were Asked To Do properly we’ll need five figure eastings/northings and ride to a metre square destination – hoping that’s not in someone’s kitchen or wherever! A short while playing with gridreferencefinder.co.uk and we have SP 92141 25063 for the market cross, with its What3Words reference being “vast.pads.expand”.
Next is to find the location of one of the four destinations! 7 miles is exactly 11265.4 metres. So let’s try north: add 11265 to 25063 and we get SP 92141 36328 (“marble.ownership.nudge”). Where is it? The shore of a small pond next to Woburn Sands railway station. Not bad.
East (add 11265 to market cross eastings) gets us a field near Houghton Regis. West… hmm.. just into the water of a pond near Hoggeston… what about South then… ah… talking of water, we’re slap bang in the middle of Marsworth Reservoir! This could be a job for a packraft. Except that all we have between us is an old car tyre inner tube and a kid’s plastic dinghy.
So that’s not really going to work. Need to find a new start point, but it has to have some meaning within Leighton Buzzard or we’re just bending the rules (yes We Do Have Standards!). How about All Saints church. North gives us a bridleway in Milton Keynes so that’s OK, south is now the bank of the reservoir so that’s solved that problem, west is another field, and east is….. sigh…. smack in the middle of the playground of Houghton Regis school. Well I do have an Enhanced CRB so maybe… no, maybe not.
I tried other places including the bridge over the canal (not “significant” enough) and the railway station (it would count as significant because it’s actually in Linslade, and as our town is actually Leighton-Linslade that would make them there folks “on the wrong side of the tracks”, including Pete, Feel Involved In What We’re All Trying To Do Here as well). Unfortunately similar problems ensued – ending up in another school’s tennis court, and the garden of a vicarage, etc. I rather fancied turning up at the vicarage and explaining the whole premise and why we wanted to stand in the middle of their lawn for no reason at all!
Getting a bit desperate now. In a flash of inspiration I looked in the other direction in the town and
300 yards from the market cross is – the Town Council offices, at SP 92407 25181 “guitar.forget.thus”. Well that would be even better because it brings in the political angle (the White House – arf!), which links nicely to Boris’s Politically-Incorrect 7 mile ride. Let’s hope the destinations work…. yes, they do, just, although one could still get quite, er, challenging. But it’s our best shot.
Sunday morning dawned and Pete picked me up from home (each other's "one other person to exercise with"). Fortified With Moral Fibre (and choc peanuts) we rode to the Council offices to take a few snaps of our start point. We’d decided to go for the eastern GR first for no apparent reason, which was in the middle of a field next to the M1 in Houghton Regis at TL 03672 25181 “rots.bags.alert” . At this point I should say we’d inflicted another criteria on the enterprise which was to stick as close as possible to a straight line between our two points, so that we’d be as close to a 7 mile ride as possible. The joke was that we’d be riding “as the crow flies… no, as the corvid flies…. no, no…. as the COVID flies” – tastelessly-hah-hah, geddit??? Pete then cleverly added another aspect to our ride – we’d have to spot nineteen crows/corvids on the ride. Remember that guy who walked between the east and west edges of Wales in a straight line? He did a brilliant job sticking to the line but he didn’t have a bike to get through hedges etc, so we chose “nearest right of way to the straight line”.
As we’re taking a few photos of the Council offices, a lady roadie whom I thought I recognised rolls past so we start to explain what we’re up to (as if she cared!). Here’s a photo of Pete Conversing With A Constituent – and I watched as she got more and more baffled and fidgety, as any normal householder would if you doorstepped them to explain the finer points of the Bikepacking Party Manifesto. Turns out I’d never met her after all hence her baffled look and Pete’s surprised look!
On the outskirts of town we stop to look at a new housing development, or rather the Much-Needed Homes For Hard-Working Families. It’s an ongoing battle to force developers to provide connectivity to existing parts of the town. It’s all very well having pretty cycle tracks around the estate but useless if residents can’t get to town in a direct way. There’s a short section of ordinary path left between the existing cycle way and the new estate one – and all because Nobody Takes Personal Responsibility In This Country Any Longer. I’ll Get Off My Soapbox Now.
In the next village we see a situation where The Villagers Have Taken Matters Into Their Own Hands. A community woodland had been created a while ago but after some dispute it’s time to Blame The Faceless Bureaucrats of the FC. We like the way they’ve put Mr Greenhous’s direct line (great name for a forester!) on the sign so that Members Of The Great British Public can phone in and Make Their Views Known.
Past the Think Tank full of political promises sewage we go….
… and the We Can Have Our Cake And Eat It artwork at the park….
…. to come across Reg’s Battle Bus! A metaphor for the broken-down political, social and economic landscape through which we passed. The steering wheel came off in my hands, honest guv. £350 To Fund BBB anyone? Certainly a potential future BaM spot!
Next to the A5 we found the actual Building Blocks Upon Which Our Great Nation Will Forge Ahead Into The Sunlit Uplands!
Although it seemed that the Milk Tray Man (one for our older readers there) was already using them as a sort of horizontal Lego climbing wall to practice scaling the walls of the house of the object of his affections…
The next section of the route involved a ludicrous detour to get to the other side of a massive roundabout using cycle tracks that had plainly been added “because they had to”. At one point we were riding due west instead of east, then 200 yards south to cross a carriageway and come 200 yards back north again. Still, eventually we reached a new Hidden Gem Of Desirable Living Where You Can Afford (sic)Your Forever Dream Home (so long as it sits in a swamp next to a warehouse complex and a dual carriageway)..
Because the new bridleway through the development was fenced off we had to make a detour, although quite how your average horse was supposed to climb this steep flight of steps is anybody’s guess.
Following our noses with more riding in completely the wrong direction took us over the scenic bypass (the bridge is for riders/walkers to avoid crossing the roundabout in the far distance over 300 yards away!), through a farmyard and back over yet another bridge to where we finally found the only bit of “singletrack” of the whole route…
After a final scramble over a ditch, we arrived at our exact destination only to find someone had obviously had the same idea as us and planted a blue-painted post to prove they’d been there! Surrounded by roads to nowhere, lorry parks, barren building plots, and with the highrise flats of Luton on the skyline we’d finally reached those promised Sunlit Uplands.
Another metaphor: Lockdown. A stake through the heart of bikepacking.. (ooh look, I'm a Stakeholder In Society
)
Mysteriously, next to the post we found the actual lockdown lock itself. Now all we needed was the key.
Homage to Boris duly paid, we set off back west initially through the world-renowned Luton Community Art Gallery, where Young People Can Let Off Steam
Does Pete’s bike look more like an abandoned shopping trolley than an abandoned shopping trolley looks like an abandoned shopping trolley?
The local populace admire the Sculpture Park. What The British People Want Is lots of lamp-posts and electricity pylons (is that a rare Type 34C there? I do believe it is)
Next up was the inauspicious source of the River Lea at the start of its 50 mile journey to the Thames. Reg attempts the first bicycle end-to-end navigation of it…. (the seats are new, where weary walkers can sit and rest awhile and admire the, er, scenic ditch!)
Houghton Hall sits incongruously in the middle of the town of Houghton Regis. You can just make out Reg ringing the gate bell hoping to obtain a new convert to our political party.
At this point Pete explains that the plan is actually to head around the circumference of the 7-mile circle to the southern GR and then home, whereas Reg had assumed we were returning due west back to the start – a typical Political Misunderstanding
. Luckily we were heading that way anyway, and continued through various villages one of which sported a novel outdoor cooker..
Reg rides off into the Political Wilderness…
After arrival at the southern GR – which we shall meet next time – the shortest 7 mile route back north took us to our base at the White House, and our coalition went its separate ways.
We spotted a total of seven Co[r]vids and had traversed a veritable Wide Representative Cross-Section Of Society, and to be honest the State Of The Nation had reduced us to tiers.
Stick with us for next week’s thrilling instalment of….. “Pete & Reg’s Excellent Adventure!”: a greater partnership not seen since “Blair & Brown” and this ride was The Cherie On The Cake
Ever on the lookout for new japes and wheezes, MuddyPete and myself reckoned that if 7 miles was OK and local for Boris it would be OK for us too. Pete thought we should ride 7 miles out of our town then round the whole circumference of a 7-mile radius circle then back home. Bit of a trot for an “out and back day’s exercise” perhaps, so I chipped in that maybe instead choose the four locations precisely 7 miles from the town in the exact north, south, east and westerly directions, and ride to those? Pete firmed this up a bit as we could ride to the northern spot, round to the eastern one, then home; then a second ride would be south round to west and home. I countered with four rides, out and back to each of the compass points. We arranged to do the first one last Sunday, but due to a slight communications error the plan got changed half way through as we will see, in standard BBB fashion.
In the best political traditions, this will be a long-winded and rambling speech so best make a brew first.
A lot of the route would be on-road, so we had changed our political colours to “Roadie Party” or more likely “Monster Raving Loony Party”. This write-up is a joint effort between us, political bullshit-bingo phrases and all – an Uneasy Coalition if you will
. Let Me Be Crystal Clear - don’t expect any Common Sense or Common Decency, but you will see lots of photos of The Great British People. We’re All In This Together ok? Sadly though, There Will Be No Easy Answers. We can do left turns and right turns but definitely No U-turns.Our Manifesto For Success, therefore, is to journey through this Green And Pleasant Land, UnFettered By Rules And Regulations, only bound by the Limits Of Our Imagination (and the threat of a £200 fine if we stray one iota beyond the 7-miles implied by our illustrious leader). This was the mission upon which we ventured, armed with our Political Roadmap For Success (courtesy O.S.) and our Steadfast Moral Compass.
And if you’re looking forward to some scenic situations, with a few Sunlit Uplands thrown in, probably best look away now. Still, where’s the interest in scenery eh?
Since Pete claims he has to Work Hard To Make Ends Meet and that I’m just a Layabout Sponging Off The Rest Of Society, I took it upon myself to work out some compass points and locations.
The centre of the town is generally accepted as being the market cross, so first we need a GR for that. If we’re going to Do The Job We Were Asked To Do properly we’ll need five figure eastings/northings and ride to a metre square destination – hoping that’s not in someone’s kitchen or wherever! A short while playing with gridreferencefinder.co.uk and we have SP 92141 25063 for the market cross, with its What3Words reference being “vast.pads.expand”.
Next is to find the location of one of the four destinations! 7 miles is exactly 11265.4 metres. So let’s try north: add 11265 to 25063 and we get SP 92141 36328 (“marble.ownership.nudge”). Where is it? The shore of a small pond next to Woburn Sands railway station. Not bad.
East (add 11265 to market cross eastings) gets us a field near Houghton Regis. West… hmm.. just into the water of a pond near Hoggeston… what about South then… ah… talking of water, we’re slap bang in the middle of Marsworth Reservoir! This could be a job for a packraft. Except that all we have between us is an old car tyre inner tube and a kid’s plastic dinghy.
So that’s not really going to work. Need to find a new start point, but it has to have some meaning within Leighton Buzzard or we’re just bending the rules (yes We Do Have Standards!). How about All Saints church. North gives us a bridleway in Milton Keynes so that’s OK, south is now the bank of the reservoir so that’s solved that problem, west is another field, and east is….. sigh…. smack in the middle of the playground of Houghton Regis school. Well I do have an Enhanced CRB so maybe… no, maybe not.
I tried other places including the bridge over the canal (not “significant” enough) and the railway station (it would count as significant because it’s actually in Linslade, and as our town is actually Leighton-Linslade that would make them there folks “on the wrong side of the tracks”, including Pete, Feel Involved In What We’re All Trying To Do Here as well). Unfortunately similar problems ensued – ending up in another school’s tennis court, and the garden of a vicarage, etc. I rather fancied turning up at the vicarage and explaining the whole premise and why we wanted to stand in the middle of their lawn for no reason at all!
Getting a bit desperate now. In a flash of inspiration I looked in the other direction in the town and
300 yards from the market cross is – the Town Council offices, at SP 92407 25181 “guitar.forget.thus”. Well that would be even better because it brings in the political angle (the White House – arf!), which links nicely to Boris’s Politically-Incorrect 7 mile ride. Let’s hope the destinations work…. yes, they do, just, although one could still get quite, er, challenging. But it’s our best shot.
Sunday morning dawned and Pete picked me up from home (each other's "one other person to exercise with"). Fortified With Moral Fibre (and choc peanuts) we rode to the Council offices to take a few snaps of our start point. We’d decided to go for the eastern GR first for no apparent reason, which was in the middle of a field next to the M1 in Houghton Regis at TL 03672 25181 “rots.bags.alert” . At this point I should say we’d inflicted another criteria on the enterprise which was to stick as close as possible to a straight line between our two points, so that we’d be as close to a 7 mile ride as possible. The joke was that we’d be riding “as the crow flies… no, as the corvid flies…. no, no…. as the COVID flies” – tastelessly-hah-hah, geddit??? Pete then cleverly added another aspect to our ride – we’d have to spot nineteen crows/corvids on the ride. Remember that guy who walked between the east and west edges of Wales in a straight line? He did a brilliant job sticking to the line but he didn’t have a bike to get through hedges etc, so we chose “nearest right of way to the straight line”.
As we’re taking a few photos of the Council offices, a lady roadie whom I thought I recognised rolls past so we start to explain what we’re up to (as if she cared!). Here’s a photo of Pete Conversing With A Constituent – and I watched as she got more and more baffled and fidgety, as any normal householder would if you doorstepped them to explain the finer points of the Bikepacking Party Manifesto. Turns out I’d never met her after all hence her baffled look and Pete’s surprised look!
On the outskirts of town we stop to look at a new housing development, or rather the Much-Needed Homes For Hard-Working Families. It’s an ongoing battle to force developers to provide connectivity to existing parts of the town. It’s all very well having pretty cycle tracks around the estate but useless if residents can’t get to town in a direct way. There’s a short section of ordinary path left between the existing cycle way and the new estate one – and all because Nobody Takes Personal Responsibility In This Country Any Longer. I’ll Get Off My Soapbox Now.
In the next village we see a situation where The Villagers Have Taken Matters Into Their Own Hands. A community woodland had been created a while ago but after some dispute it’s time to Blame The Faceless Bureaucrats of the FC. We like the way they’ve put Mr Greenhous’s direct line (great name for a forester!) on the sign so that Members Of The Great British Public can phone in and Make Their Views Known.
Past the Think Tank full of political promises sewage we go….
… and the We Can Have Our Cake And Eat It artwork at the park….
…. to come across Reg’s Battle Bus! A metaphor for the broken-down political, social and economic landscape through which we passed. The steering wheel came off in my hands, honest guv. £350 To Fund BBB anyone? Certainly a potential future BaM spot!
Next to the A5 we found the actual Building Blocks Upon Which Our Great Nation Will Forge Ahead Into The Sunlit Uplands!
Although it seemed that the Milk Tray Man (one for our older readers there) was already using them as a sort of horizontal Lego climbing wall to practice scaling the walls of the house of the object of his affections…
The next section of the route involved a ludicrous detour to get to the other side of a massive roundabout using cycle tracks that had plainly been added “because they had to”. At one point we were riding due west instead of east, then 200 yards south to cross a carriageway and come 200 yards back north again. Still, eventually we reached a new Hidden Gem Of Desirable Living Where You Can Afford (sic)Your Forever Dream Home (so long as it sits in a swamp next to a warehouse complex and a dual carriageway)..
Because the new bridleway through the development was fenced off we had to make a detour, although quite how your average horse was supposed to climb this steep flight of steps is anybody’s guess.
Following our noses with more riding in completely the wrong direction took us over the scenic bypass (the bridge is for riders/walkers to avoid crossing the roundabout in the far distance over 300 yards away!), through a farmyard and back over yet another bridge to where we finally found the only bit of “singletrack” of the whole route…
After a final scramble over a ditch, we arrived at our exact destination only to find someone had obviously had the same idea as us and planted a blue-painted post to prove they’d been there! Surrounded by roads to nowhere, lorry parks, barren building plots, and with the highrise flats of Luton on the skyline we’d finally reached those promised Sunlit Uplands.
Another metaphor: Lockdown. A stake through the heart of bikepacking.. (ooh look, I'm a Stakeholder In Society
)Mysteriously, next to the post we found the actual lockdown lock itself. Now all we needed was the key.
Homage to Boris duly paid, we set off back west initially through the world-renowned Luton Community Art Gallery, where Young People Can Let Off Steam
Does Pete’s bike look more like an abandoned shopping trolley than an abandoned shopping trolley looks like an abandoned shopping trolley?
The local populace admire the Sculpture Park. What The British People Want Is lots of lamp-posts and electricity pylons (is that a rare Type 34C there? I do believe it is)
Next up was the inauspicious source of the River Lea at the start of its 50 mile journey to the Thames. Reg attempts the first bicycle end-to-end navigation of it…. (the seats are new, where weary walkers can sit and rest awhile and admire the, er, scenic ditch!)
Houghton Hall sits incongruously in the middle of the town of Houghton Regis. You can just make out Reg ringing the gate bell hoping to obtain a new convert to our political party.
At this point Pete explains that the plan is actually to head around the circumference of the 7-mile circle to the southern GR and then home, whereas Reg had assumed we were returning due west back to the start – a typical Political Misunderstanding
. Luckily we were heading that way anyway, and continued through various villages one of which sported a novel outdoor cooker..Reg rides off into the Political Wilderness…
After arrival at the southern GR – which we shall meet next time – the shortest 7 mile route back north took us to our base at the White House, and our coalition went its separate ways.
We spotted a total of seven Co[r]vids and had traversed a veritable Wide Representative Cross-Section Of Society, and to be honest the State Of The Nation had reduced us to tiers.
Stick with us for next week’s thrilling instalment of….. “Pete & Reg’s Excellent Adventure!”: a greater partnership not seen since “Blair & Brown” and this ride was The Cherie On The Cake
