Numbers

My mother’s favourite number was 17 but she detested 21, maintaining that it was dark and ugly. My father, who revered mathematics, would shake his head wearily as if to indulge her delusion. It wasn’t until years later, when one of my sons declared that each number had its own unique and consistent colour, that I encountered the relatively widespread phenomenon of synaesthesia, which was the obvious explanation for my mother’s remarks. The concept would not have been accepted by my parents, who took the view that all psychology was quackery. In their eyes, it belonged in the basement of the science pyramid at the top of which stood mathematics.

From the age of 8 to 11, I caught the number 75 bus to the only school I attended with pleasant memories, despite once being caned by the headmaster for a minor misdemeanour which tells you all you need to know about the others. During that time, the bus fare jumped from 11/2d to 2d, a scandalous 33% hike, the farthing being so little used by then that a more modest increase would have been impractical.

Mathematics was a subject in which I never flourished. My father’s insistence that I nevertheless took A-level, in the implacable conviction that it was essential for prospering in any scientific discipline, was a mistake. The alternative, biology, would have been a better alternative and opened the path to a more appropriate university course choice.

Another family obsession was prime numbers. Reaching a birthday whose number was prime was considered to have extra significance. When I attained 51, it was several months before I realised that it was not prime but the product of 3 and 17.

Thirteen has long been held to be unlucky, with most American buildings omitting the number from rooms and floors. I discovered a more substantial omission in the Millennium Hotel in New York. One bank of elevators runs from the ground floor to level 25 while a second bank serves levels 30 to 42. As I proved by walking the single flight of stairs between levels 25 and 30, the missing floors do not exist! In a city defined by height, the quirky numbering is simply designed to enable the hotel to seem taller than it is.

  

Love

Love each day as if it's your last, one day you'll be right quoth Woody Allen. 

‘Do you love me? ‘The spoon, loaded with cereal and fruit, pauses before the lips. The right answer will evoke a knowing smile. The wrong one, or a hesitation, will return the spoon to the bowl. Breakfast will be over.

No one would be surprised if you confessed to never having hated, but anyone professing to be unfamiliar with love, as giver or recipient, would be regarded as eccentric or perverse. Yet do we understand what it means? English is celebrated for its richness. If a word doesn't deliver the precise nuance, there are half a dozen not-quite synonyms to choose from. More awkward is when the same word carries multiple meanings. When they are quite distinct, confusion is rare. No one would construe ‘I have a beef with you’ as confirmation of joint ownership of a cow. But when the meanings overlap, that is the territory of miscommunication. My son says he loves pizza. That doesn't mean he is attracted to it as a sexual partner nor that wants to spend the rest of his life eating nothing but pizza (although occasionally I wonder).  In this case, ‘love’ is simply an intensifier, meaning ‘like a lot’. 

Parents love their children which is a shorthand for saying that they would sacrifice many other things in life, sometimes life itself, to protect them. Children love their parents, often caveating that this does not necessarily mean they like them. It means they have a sense of gratitude, often manifested through dutiful care.

The state of being ‘in love’ is well-documented. Intense physical attraction combined with infatuation producing obsessional and irrational behavior when decision-making is impaired or impulsive.

‘Do you love me?’ That breakfast table question, triggered by some imagined slight, momentary inattention or lapse of propriety, probes the partner for a different message. It's easy enough to say yes, but when I say I love her, do I mean the same as when she reciprocates? Am I attracted to her physically? Certainly. Do I want to spend the rest of my life with her? Yes – well, at the moment. Would I stand between her and a grizzly bear? Unlikely. Unpacking the component parts of ‘love’ and holding them up to the light to see if they match our feelings is unlikely to get us on to the scrambled eggs.

Look, we've come this far, we rub along pretty well together, neither of us irritates the other excessively, we often have fun and it's too much effort and too high risk to look for perfection, so yes, I do love you. Or, as David Sidaris confessed, he planned to stay with his partner for the rest of his life as he couldn't bear the idea of going to another gay bar.

Loss

The inflection points at which the number of wedding invitations decreases and the number of funeral invitations increases coincide. At this point, more attention is paid to friends. Like physical fitness, friendship is slow to attain but decays rapidly if neglected. Even the slender thread of an annual Christmas card can pull through the sturdier rope of reignited friendship in propitious circumstances. 

With no digital backup, in the past even the loss of a tattered address book, edge etched with letters of the alphabet for easy reference, could sever a friendship. Work contacts, their status determined by context and poised uncertainly between acquaintanceship and friendship, wither through indifference or relocation. Mass slaughter of entire networks is the byproduct of divorce, when jointly held friends express their allegiance or self-righteousness by taking sides. Long after the wrangling over money and children has been settled, it is the loss of friends which leaves enduring bruises. 

In old age, as the count of friends dwindles from natural causes, the remaining stock becomes more valuable, if only because of scarcity. It also triggers the realisation that the longevity of a friendship has inherent value. As the saying goes, you can’t make new old friends. The grumpy old buffer, tetchy through ill-health, frustration and disappointment, nevertheless shares a hinterland of experiences, joyful or horrific, which form part of both parties’ personal history and identity. 

So the deliberate termination of a four-decade long friendship, must be a decision taken only as a result of the gravest offence. And nevertheless, of this action, three people will suffer. Two at least have their grudge to comfort them, I am left with perplexity.

Hitchhikers

                                                            Hitchhikers

Navigating a roundabout near Bovey Tracey, I spotted an unusual sight. On the bend leading to the slip road, an unkempt figure, backpack at his feet, was waving his thumb. I pulled up around the corner, half-hoping he hadn’t noticed I’d stopped.

When I was offered a place at St Andrews University, I assumed I would travel there from London by train. But in the period between attending the interview (yes, in those days, universities admissions tutors interviewed candidates face to face) and starting the course, Dr Beeching had closed the branch line from Leuchars Junction to St Andrews. Buses were no more reliable in those days than they are today and driving was not an option. I had not passed my test and even if I had, car ownership in the days before Japanese competition forced British manufacturers to improve their quality control sentenced proud owners to weekends spent under the bonnet or scraping rust. On the one occasion I flew, the plane was diverted to Glasgow, landing well after midnight to the annoyance of the friend in Edinburgh with whom I was spending the night and who drove there to collect. It didn’t take long to realise that the cheapest and least inconvenient mode of transport was hitching, in those days an entirely acceptable and widely used option.

Most of my trips between London and Scotland entailed multiple lifts, often no more than twenty or thirty miles apiece, so that accomplishing the journey in one day was ambitious. My most successful hitch was a single lift from Edinburgh to the outskirts of north London. Embarrassingly, I broke the first unwritten rule of the hitchhikers’ code by falling asleep ten minutes after being picked up, thus depriving the driver of the quid pro quo of company during an otherwise tedious journey at the time when fewer cars had radios and CDs had not yet been invented.

A hazard of hitchhiking was exposure to drivers whose primary incentive was to impress with their skill. Having escaped from a maniacal mini driver who gave my girlfriend and I a lift from St Andrews to Edinburgh on a Friday afternoon, we tried to invent a plausible reason to decline his offer when he saw us by the roadside two days later waiting for a return ride.

By the time I qualified for a company car in the 1990s, hitchhiking in the UK had all but vanished. On the rare occasions when I spotted a lonely figure by the roadside, I always offered a ride (probably in contravention of the firm’s insurance policy) and on one occasion bought the traveller dinner, a favour which had several times been extended to me in my hitching days. 

My most recent experience of hitchhiking was three years ago in Norfolk. My companion and I had planned a walk which relied on the local bus service to return us to our starting point. Having miscalculated the timing, she suggested we try hitching. The idea would not have occurred to me and I doubted we would have any luck, but within a few minutes a car pulled up in the adjacent layby. We ran towards it just as a second vehicle stopped. We stated our destination and dumped our bags on the back seat. It quickly became apparent that the driver had not stopped with the intention of offering a lift but merely to consult with the following driver about the route! But by this time we were comfortably ensconced so they had no choice but to accept us.

The decline in hitchhiking can be explained by several factors. Wider car ownership; restrictions on parking near motorways; a general fear of strangers. In an increasingly atomised world, David Cameron’s Big Society initiative of 2010, allegedly designed to ‘help people to come together in their neighbourhoods to do good things’ made no reference to hitchhiking.

My Bovey Tracey hitchhiker placed a rucksack attached to a two wheeled trolley on the back seat and got in the front. I leaned across to offer my hand. 

‘Hi, I’m David.’

‘David’s my birth name,’ he said, ‘but I’m known as Bryn now.’

He explained he was going to Leicester to buy a van. He was well into his sixties and I was surprised to hear he had just passed his driving test. He explained that he enjoyed the life of a tramp and that the van he was buying would be suitable for sleeping in and also accommodate a wheelchair in case he needed to transport either of his parents, both in their nineties. I thought of George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London in which he describes the ‘spikes’ used by itinerants. Rather a different concept of tramping from travelling about in a van. I dropped him at Exeter St David’s from where he would get a train. I wished him well and he seemed pleased that I remembered to call him by his assumed name.

Afterwards I reflected that Bryn’s acquisition of his own vehicle, late in life, marked the demise of one of the few remaining hitchhikers and the decline of a mode of transport which had been a familiar feature of British life until the late twentieth century.

Desire

One of the bitterest ironies of old age is having the time and, if one is fortunate, the resources to indulge one’s childhood dreams, yet lacking the desire to do so. In some cases, it is even worse. Owning a car matured from a teenage aspiration to a family necessity to a convenient but resented liability. 

I developed an early interest in photography. My parents bought me a Kodak 127 for my 10th birthday which was hardly any more sophisticated than a pinhole camera. I recall taking the first role of film, 12 exposures, and then inadvertently fogging it before it could be developed. I went through a phase of commandeering the bathroom which had been part of a rental unit on our top floor as a dark room to develop and print photographs. My impatience and incompetence (foreshadowing the same qualities which ended my brief career as a research biochemist) produced indifferent results. 

There was a shop in Blackheath called Butcher, Curnow which was half a pharmacy, or chemist as we call them in those days, and half a camera shop. On the left, behind a long mahogany counter, were stacked rows of bottles with coloured liquids. On the right, up two steps, was the photography counter. Each day, on the way home from school. I would gaze at the shop window drooling over the unaffordable Pentaxes. At lunchtime, with a similarly obsessed friend, I would visit the local library which subscribed to Amateur Photographer and marvel at the images produced by professionals. 

For my 13th birthday, which occurred while we were spending the summer in Chicago, where my father was working, I received a Voigtlander Vitoret, a rangefinder camera which by father, an optics professional, had selected on the basis of its lens, which he assured me was the best in its class. But without an exposure meter, and in the blinding Illinois sun, almost all of my attempts, turned out to be woefully overexposed. I envied my father’s Konica, considerably superior and sporting an exposure meter. (When I inherited his belongings, I took it to a secondhand camera shop reluctant to part with such a treasure. The owner shook his head sadly when he saw it. Lovely camera, he said, but I can’t sell them. He pointed over my shoulder to a shelf where there were three identical models with a label underneath, saying simply ‘offers?’) 

Five years later, I splurged most of my first term’s allowance at university on a Practika SLR. With minimal funds to buy film, my attempts of photography were minimal. 

Two decades further on and with access to real money, I bought an expensive Canon. This was transferred to my second wife, who subsequently lost it. 

I went through a decade of acquiring a succession of digital cameras, the last of which was stolen, along with my passport and other valuables, in Spain. Since then, like most people, I have managed with a mobile phone. 

I still look in the windows of camera shops. Now that I can afford to buy any model I choose the allure has faded. I read the descriptions, note the prices then shake my head and walk on.

Dartmoor

Dartmoor

In my corporate days, we were exhorted to 'walk the walk, not just talk the talk" which was toe-curling management speak for getting the stuff you'd promised to do done. A prime example of this being observed in the breach is rail companies' implementation of their cycle policies. Supposedly committed to welcoming bikes and striving for integrated transport, instead their cycle space booking process (itself unnecessary in the days of capacious guards' vans) is both labyrinthine and error prone. When I booked my journey to Newton Abbot online, it was not until I fetched the tickets from the machine - for some reason, obligatory once you request a cycle space - that I realised it had only reserved a space on the return leg, not the outward trip. Fortunately, the booking clerk was able to rectify the omission.

The facilities provided on board for cycles are lamentable. Two hooks are suspended in a space the size of a broom cupboard inadequate for accommodating two bikes, and one hook is so close to the ceiling that I was unable to fit the front wheel, admittedly with a 40mm carbon rim, on it. Instead I lurked in the corridor holding my bike in a more dignified horizontal position for the 20 minute journey.

Of the dozen or so waiting at Newton Abbot, most had travelled by car, a few had taken an earlier train while one had cycled from Exeter. The latter feat, a two hour trip, was on an electric bike which, although only a few years old, was already of a design which looked old-fashioned and clunky compared to the latest generation, which are almost indistinguishable from their mechanical counterparts. (And yes, I can’t wait to add one to my collection. The adage, oft repeated among the cycling fraternity, is that the optimum number of bikes is n+1, where n is the number you currently own.)

Newton Abbot is known to its detractors, which includes almost everyone not locally resident, as Newton Armpit. The soubriquet seems unjust once you leave the high street, which itself is no more depressingly unloved than most. Our canal side route took us past attractive waterside terraced houses, although their view of the warehouses and declining industrial units lining the opposite bank meant they fell short of offering a rural idyll. 

Traversing a narrow section of tow path under a bridge, a woman pushing a buggy remonstrated that we were supposed to dismount. I acknowledged the mistake, saying, truthfully, that I hadn’t seen the sign. She was not mollified and continued to abuse cyclists in general and us in particular. My guilt was increased by recalling how incensed I used to become when cyclists refused to walk through the Greenwich foot tunnel.

After the canal, the route wound through wooded slops on an insistent climb, but gentle enough for everyone to keep pace with the two electric bikes in our group, the second being an older bike with a front wheel conversion kit and a battery dangling inelegantly from the handlebars. Our group has only recently admitted e-bikes, bowing to the increasing frailty of members and the growing choice of e-bikes. Apparently, they now comprise 90% of the revenue from new bike sales, although as they are pricier than leg bikes, that does not translate into the same proportion of units sold.

Our coffee stop was at 365 cafe in Bovey Tracey, a converted garage reinstated in 2017 using original, vintage and industrial materials which now caters for cyclists in great style with comfortable sofas and low lighting complimenting the excellent coffee and cake.

One of the pleasures of cycling in a group is the opportunity to converse with fellow cyclists. That conversations are inevitably subject to frequent interruption by the exigencies of traffic or weather can be an annoyance or a relief, depending on the person and the topic. On this occasion, I enjoyed exchanging views on local music events with Tim and even resolved, as a result, to become a member of the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra (a resolution since acted upon) primarily in the hope of nabbing the best seats during the priority booking period.

By the time we reached Moretonhampstead, my GPS informed me we had ascended over 400m but it had seemed fairly effortless, partly, because I cycle at a more sensibly sedate speed when I’m with a group than alone. We sat in the churchyard to eat our sandwiches. Mine, as usual, seeded rye rolls, one filled with chicken and avocado, the other Cheddar cheese and chutney. Very light drizzle started as we were packing up and during the afternoon we periodically donned and discarded rain jackets in response to the changing weather and the incline of the roads.

The roads were quiet, the only encounters of note being a vintage Rolls-Royce, whose width seemed unsuited to Devon lanes, and a succession of 1960s Rovers, presumably from some local rally, whose exhaust fumes lingered long after they had departed.

I had been supplied with approximate times for various landmarks to check I would make my return train. The only one I noted was Jay’s grave. Jay was an eighteenth-century servant who had fallen pregnant by her employer who subsequently disavowed her. She committed suicide as a result, but being thereby excluded from sacred ground, was buried at the meeting point of three parishes.

This was my first time cycling across Dartmoor and it felt adventurous to be in such high and wild spaces. We passed Hound Tor and Haytor Rocks, but the weather was not conducive to lingering and our interaction with the environment was confined to near misses with lambs frisking on the road.

The leader’s planning was perfect and we were in good time for my train, thence home for tea and medals.

Crediton

There is a sweet spot which occurs somewhere between the commencement of retirement and the onset of old age during which robust health, adequate resources and surplus energy render anything feasible. It’s not possible to identify the apogee of that period but it becomes apparent when it has passed. In my case, it appeared in the rear-view mirror during a holiday in Wales last summer when a steep and rocky descent signalled that the balance of risk and reward from hill walking had tilted inexorably in the wrong direction. Similarly, the weekly parkrun, although still pleasurable, brings in its wake stiffness of muscle and soreness of knee, a joint, I am told, which is in any case poorly designed for upright movement.

Cyclists visiting Devon are envious of our profusion of cycle paths and minor roads compared to many other counties and Exeter quayside lies at the nexus of this cornucopia. Southwest to Dawlish; southeast to Exmouth, northwest to Crediton, northeast to Sidmouth. For more ambitious jaunts, the newly restored train to Okehampton makes the Granite Way, and beyond to Tavistock and Plymouth, a day trip, albeit at the mercy of Dartmoor’s unpredictable weather. The train to Barnstable brings the Tarka Way in range and there are many more I’ve yet to discover.

Over the three years I have been exploring the environs of Exeter by bike, I have accumulated a rudimentary knowledge of the features and landmarks. No longer do I lean on a farm gate wondering whether that lump on the horizon is the Sidmouth Gap, only to be told gently that we are looking towards Dartmoor. I can compare the merits of the coffee at our various morning stops and allude with due disparagement to some of the unrepaired potholes boasting geological longevity. Arcane titbits gleaned from the YouTube channel Global Cycle Network fall casually from my lips, disguising that I have only recently learned what a ‘bottom bracket’ is or how to change the pads on my disc brakes.

In the company of new joiners to the group, I am a venerable old hand, in the same way that, as a teacher, it is only necessary to be one step ahead of the class to be revered as an authority. A phenomenon of which I took shameless advantage during my days in front of the blackboard. 

The Sunday ‘B’ ride to Crediton started at the Countess Wear ‘swing bridge’ amid confusion over which side of the road we were supposed to meet. A dozen or so of us, including three e-bikes one of which was a do-it-yourself conversion, set off to Haldon via Exminster. Morning coffee was at a Costa in a service area adjacent to the A38, a site benefitting neither from picturesque scenery nor palatable coffee and conducted in the pall of effluvia from the sewage vent. 

It was the first really warm day and by lunchtime in a buttercup strewn field, I was down to a single layer, plus my sunhat. The Queen’s platinum jubilee is imminent, and I shared my disgust at the whole business of royalty and the fawning induced in a population victim to false consciousness with Gareth, one of few (another being Hermione) who appears to share my views. 

The afternoon route to Crediton was unexpectedly hilly. I can survive most hills on my carbon-fibre framed bike, even if it means stopping once or twice for a rest to catch my breath. The downhills were steep but being dry the anguished squeal my brakes emit in the wet, despite numerous attempts to quell the noise, was muted. Bizarrely, all the cafes in Crediton surrounding the pleasant market square are resolutely closed on Sundays so to avoid a second Costa, we opted for the motorbike café. These motorised brutes have become bigger and louder since the days my class-mate Alan Northcott would go ‘up Chelsea Bridge’ on his 250cc machine to meet co-religionists. But the coffee was surprisingly good: presumably even bikers’ expectations have risen.

It turned chilly on the way home and I relaxed under a hot shower immune to the rising cost of gas.