Zeus’s boy makes it thirteen! – George Barker

Our November 2024 touring report comes courtesy of Beacon President, George Barker.

Blatant simulation

“A Hercules! I haven’t seen one of those for years!”

“Ah, yes, well… actually…”

The workman in the hi-vis vest and hard hat jumped up from the footplate of his JCB. “I didn’t think they made them anymore.”

“No, I don’t think they do. You see, the thing is…”

“First bike I ever had was a Hercules. I loved that bike.” By now, he was leaning over the red and white plastic road barrier. A middle-aged stereotype of his profession: muscular arms swinging either side of a near-spherical belly that overhung his jeans, which – with no waist to cling to – remained aloft by mysterious defiance of gravity.

“Going far?” he asked, hitching up his strides.

“No, not really,” I replied, grateful that he wasn’t bending the other way, and glad that we’d changed the subject. “Can I maybe walk past the road works on the grass verge?”

“Yes, sure.”

“Ah, great… it’s just that your mate up the road…”

“Never mind that. Let me move the barrier for you. Bring your Hercules through here.”

“Cheers. Much appreciated.”

Moments later, I was on my way again, feeling only faintly guilty that my smooth passage was largely down to deception. I don’t own a Hercules. I never have owned a Hercules.

What I do own is a titanium frame, which I acquired on the cheap because it was a long-discontinued line. It’s a perfectly good frame. But I got the fidgets every time I looked at its naff logos. As far as I’m concerned, the only legitimate excuse for a bike not being Italian is that it’s made in Birmingham… preferably at least fifty years ago. And I’m a sucker for anything classical-sounding. So, obviously, I was powerless to resist the seductive power of a set of Hercules decals I came across on eBay: stunning, muted gold and red Edwardian designs, which once adorned bikes built almost next door to Villa Park.

Since then, I’ve toured on a machine that purports to be something that anybody who knows anything about bikes can see it clearly isn’t. And, in a way, that’s rather appropriate. Because, actually, I’m not a cycle-tourist. I’m an old geezer who likes sitting around in cafés and pubs, either talking tosh with fellow idlers or quietly watching the world go by. The bike’s just a way of getting from one hostelry to the next. Sure, I could travel by car. But on a bike you feel much more connected to the things you see, the places you pass through, the people you meet along the way.

Oh, and I suppose it’s relevant to this story that I like watching football as well. Don’t ask me why. It’s childish, expensive, inconvenient and more often than not disappointing. But it provides escape and doses out highs just often enough to keep you hooked.

So, off I took myself to Belgium with my unHercules to watch the Villa, see an old friend, and catch another game while I was at it.

Backchatting officials

“It’s warm and dry inside this booth, and I’ve got all day. Now, are you going to persist with your smart-arse responses to my sneering tone and contemptuous looks, or are you going to be nice to me?”

No border official has ever said that to me. But one or two have communicated the sentiment quite effectively.

Over the years, I’ve learnt that the fastest route to destinations abroad is generally via detachment and thought internalisation. It also pays to be, if not economical, certainly selective with the truth. Border officials don’t actually want full and frank replies. The answer to “Are you travelling for business or pleasure” isn’t “Neither”, even when you’re on your way to a funeral. Nor is it “Both”, even if you’re heading for a conference and plan to stay on to see the sights. Such answers serve only to make your counterpart look up and start thinking, which rarely has a happy outcome.

When travelling with one’s bike in a car, it’s fine to give a straight (but unembroidered) reply to the official who looks at your semi-dismantled machine in the back, and asks, “Going to do some cycling, are you?” However, if he then adjusts his focus to the circular bags right next to your wheelless steed, the ones that are about 70 centimetres in diameter and boldly emblazoned “Campagnolo Racing Wheels”, and he follows up by asking “And what’s in those bags?” one’s first instinct is best suppressed.

When travelling on one’s bike, complete transparency regarding one’s plans is inadvisable. You may be acutely aware that the total distance you expect to cover on your non-stop cycling holiday is less than what Alan Weaver does in an ordinary working week. And far less than a single one of John Williams’s audax rides. But it really doesn’t matter that you regard your itinerary as embarrassingly unambitious. What matters is that the average non-cyclist believes that pedalling to Clent is a journey of Odyssean proportions, certainly beyond any person who’s lived long enough to acquire a few grey hairs (and lose them again).

“Where will you be going?” should not therefore elicit any more factual information at the border than strictly necessary. I recommend “I’m going to explore the <whatever> region. My first stop will be <town>.” However, the name of the town inserted should not be your first overnight stop, but your first café stop. Otherwise, you risk your plans being interpreted as implausible, and yourself consequently being viewed as suspicious. And no good can come of arousing suspicion. Only luggage searches. Moreover, the purpose of a chain whip, the function of silicone toe protectors, your reason for having Bushmills in your Thermos flask, and the chemical composition of the white powder you’re carrying are all things you really don’t want to try explaining in your second or third language. Trust me.

On the ferry to Holland, I’d spoken briefly to the young cyclist who disembarked ahead of me at Hoek. But there had been little opportunity to pass on advice.

I was waiting behind him at Border Control for a long time.

Solid defensive display

Don’t go to the Netherlands hoping to see unspoilt natural beauty. There isn’t any.

Not much, anyway. There’s beauty, of course there is. Lots of it. But it isn’t natural. If it were up to Nature, more than a quarter of the Netherlands would be the Netherseas. And a good chunk of the rest would be tidal marshes: swamps and mud flats and patches of low-lying land that floods with every Alpine snow-melt. From an ecological perspective, a biodiversity perspective, it’s probably a shame that that environment is gone. However, it is gone. Long gone.

For thousands of years, and especially since the Middle Ages, humans have gradually been making the Netherlands cultivable and habitable for their own kind. The landscape one sees today is largely a human creation. The only reason you can cycle there at all, as opposed to punting around in a flat-bottom boat, is because of countless sea barriers, sluice gates, pumping stations, dykes, drainage channels and goodness knows what else. To wish the artificiality away, as some first-time visitors do, is therefore to fundamentally miss the point. The artificiality is the Netherlands. Gaze at it, drink it in, connect with it, marvel at its manifestations, if you want to enjoy the country.

Whenever I’m there, I plan my cycling routes to follow the rivers and canals, to hug the coastline, to criss-cross the waterways on bridges and ferries. Sluggish black waters are the nation’s lifeblood, dykes and crossings its sinews and bones, and cold, grey seas its formative milieu. To know them is to know the country at a physical level.

Enjoying November depends on a similar mindset. If your concept of beauty is limited to bright sunshine and vivid colours, I would respectfully suggest that you need to revisit that concept. There’s every bit as much beauty in mist that takes on a luminescent glow when lit by a low, unseeable sun. In curled leaves that fall in a poignant, gracefully random requiem dance to the quiet waters waiting to convey them to eternity. In the impossible richness of ploughed brown earth that stretches away to the ghostly outline of an ancient farm.

Beauty is everywhere and always. It’s up to you to look.

Never a pen

I cycled down the coast of the Netherlands from Hoek, over the Belgian border and on to Brugge. The Villa were listless and ineffective. I deployed the combined forces of willpower and alcohol to suppress the memory. And next morning I set off for Brussels.

Wicked deflections and added time

“Jaagpad volledig afgesloten”

What troubled me about the sign was the “volledig”. It’s one thing to tell people that a riverside bike path is closed. It’s another to say that it’s completely closed. That has a distinct ring of “really, really closed, even to cyclists who are apt to ignore signs like this”.

So I did hesitate briefly. But only briefly. After all, there were multiple wheeltracks through the mud around the barrier. People clearly ignored this sign all the time. Besides, this was Belgium, not the Netherlands. Whereas the Dutch closure sign I encountered (and of course ignored, inadvisedly, as it turned out) on the ride down to Brugge was accompanied by diversion arrows, the Belgian sign beside the Scheldt south of Ghent offered no suggestion as to what one might do instead of using the path.

Add to the equation the fact that a Garmin, while quite capable of calculating an alternative route to anywhere, is annoyingly inclined to propose the most direct way back to the very road you’re not able to use. That and/or completely re-do the entire itinerary for the day, scuppering all your painstakingly devised plans for visiting good cafés, seeing interesting places, and avoiding big hills and crappy roads.

Crucially, it must also be acknowledged that, when cycling from A to B, particularly when A and B are a fair way apart, decision-making is governed by a mulish and irrational region of the brain that thankfully doesn’t otherwise get involved in daily life. (Unless you work in highway planning, of course.)

So I was never going to give that sign more than a passing glance. What cyclist would?

About two kilometres further on, the true nature of the closure became apparent. A very large something was being built on the landward side of the dyke. A crane was swinging overhead, and a lot of loud stuff was going on. There were also interlinked two-metre-high wire-mesh barriers surrounding the site, crossing the bike path and dropping down to the water’s edge on the other wide.

“Oh.

So… you mean… volledig?”

But then, “Aha!”

A runner I had passed earlier approached from behind, then turned off and disappeared between the fields. There must be a path there. And there was: after a muddy slope down from the dyke, a nice, broad, firm sandy path extended for about half a kilometre before meeting a beautifully smooth, traffic-free road running roughly parallel to the bike path I’d been travelling on.

“Perfect! I knew I was right to ignore that sign.”

A little further on, the road ended.

Just ended. Without warning.

I found myself staring at a large, invisible sign that read “Deal with this, you smug bastard.”

Unswayed by my everyday brain’s consternation, my cyclist’s A-to-B decision-making centre could conceive only one course of action. To keep going the same way.

There was a sandy track heading in more or less the right direction, and I could see that at least one cyclist had used it in the last few days. The cyclist had even continued beyond the point where the sandy track lost its Flemish character and became more Welsh: two waterlogged wheel ruts through a muddy morass. Fortunately, the squelch-fest didn’t go on for long. The track just ended. In the same way the road had. Why? And how? Just why and how? I mean, what happened to the motorised vehicles that had created the waterlogged ruts and the cyclist who had recently preceded me? Did they simply dematerialise? There was no indication that they had ever turned around, or turned off.

So neither did I.

I wheeled my bike through long, wet grass until I reached a gateway obstructed by a makeshift wire barrier and a sign saying “Privé terrein!” I was encouraged by that sign. For the very good reason that it was facing the other way, to deter people on the other side of the wire from accessing the “Private property!” on which I was apparently standing. So, by performing an awkward act of bicycle limbo to get myself through the wire, I was sort of doing what the sign-erector wanted. I was getting off their land.

After that, things got easier, with the surface changing in the opposite order to what I had encountered after leaving the dyke. And, suddenly, there ahead of me was the riverside bike path I had left.

“Ha! Thought you could stop a man on an unHercules getting where he wants to go, did you, you Flemish barrier people?”

I enjoyed congratulating myself very much.

Until I got to the point on the path where someone had sprayed “Ga terug!” repeatedly at ten-metre intervals. Daunted though I was by this sight, my tired inclination to compliantly “Go back!” was faced down by the sure knowledge that I couldn’t. I mean, do that last five kilometres all over again, but in reverse? And then work out an alternative way of getting to Brussels in time for the football?

I’m dismissing the temptation to write that I had already crossed my Rubicon. That would be an inappropriate metaphor. It would imply either that Caesar didn’t actually know what he was doing, or that I did. Both ideas are plainly absurd. Nevertheless, it was undoubtedly the case that, at some unnoticed point in the preceding hour, I had passed into territory from which I could not “Ga terug!”

Soon I saw another something taking concrety shape on the landward side of the dyke. More two-metre-high barriers surrounded it, rose up to the dyke, obstructed the path and dropped down to the water’s edge. There were also large piles of what seemed to be festering manure to deter you from even approaching the barriers. That struck me as a particularly mean trick, and therefore had the opposite of the intended effect.

I pedalled to the outer limit of the shouting range of the busy worker ants, then dismounted and took my bike down to the water’s edge, out of their sight. There I more or less paddled around their barriers, slip-sliding my way as I hauled the unHercules over the slimy artificial boulders forming the revetment.

So it was that I finally shook off Ghent’s satellite towns and continued on my way to the Belgian capital. For a thoroughly enjoyable evening, eating, socialising, drinking, savouring the potpourri of languages on the tram, and rediscovering that it’s actually quite enjoyable watching football when you’re not quite so invested in the outcome.

Going route 1

“Mind how you go. The local drivers don’t have a good reputation.”

My host’s frame of reference is, of course, Belgium and the Netherlands. A cyclist whose frame of reference is Birchfield and Nechells might beg to differ. But you do need to keep your wits about you when riding through Brussels. It’s is a bumpy, stop-start, eyes-everywhere business, pressing endless buttons to activate traffic lights, crossing tramlines, flicking from on-road painted bike lanes to parallel paths, and switching from one side of the road to the other … rattling over cobbles and back onto tarmac, suppressing your fear when riding against the motorised flow on a cycle lane indicated by nothing more than stencilled bike icons on a road that’s otherwise one way.

I’m not sure I’d want to do it on a daily basis, but it was fun to experience. And it was fun to get a close-up of a city I’d previously only skirted, a city quite unlike the places in Belgium I’d visited before: much more cosmopolitan, with a slightly Parisian air and a self-aware comportment. Stylish, smart-casual bureaucrats from every part of Europe talk into phones while stepping on and off trams with silent women in traditional Muslim dress. Electric scooter riders weave in and out of queuing taxis and diplomats’ darkened Mercedes.

For me, the direct distance from Brussels to Hoek is about the upper limit of what can sensibly be done on a laden touring bike in a day. So I didn’t have much choice about my route. Straight across the capital, then a bee line north, straight through the middle of Antwerp and straight out the other side. Not much of it was pretty. But all of it was fascinating, entrancing. A visual and cultural feast. The underpasses, the flyovers, the graffiti, the flashy corporate buildings, the dilapidated warehouses, the bicycle highways as wide as a B road and much better paved, the bouncy, narrow non-facilities that formed the way on less salubrious parts of my route.

And eventually back into the Netherlands with its regimented meadows and neat little towns whose immaculate bike paths teem with commuters and schoolkids, many nowadays astride electric bikes, sadly. Nowhere outside the Randstad is very big, but each place is separated from the next by barely a couple of kilometres, so dense is the country’s human settlement. And always another river, another canal, another bridge, another ferry. Until finally darkness fell, and I was riding alone past other-worldly oil refineries and huge container terminals, the inky waters of the Maas lapping at the shore a few yards from the path.

Top bins

“I’ll have the mega full English, please, with a large black coffee. Oh, and an extra portion of beans.”

After a time away, even a few days, even a few days spent in a couple of the closest countries to home, being back always feels a little odd. England quickly becomes as alien as it is familiar.

A young mother enters the café as I wait for my food, leading a small girl by the hand. They’re soon recognised and greeted by an elderly woman at a table, who beams and bends to the child’s eye level. “And how old are you now, darling?”

“Three!”

“Ooh, three already! When are you going to be four?”

“On my birthday!”

Good luck to her when she’s old enough to take a bike through Border Control.

More photos from George’s trip can be found here.

Enjoyed this touring report? Check out the August edition, about a weekend ride to Weston, here.