I think that it's hard for a person to know that they are fiendish about something, because often their own fiendishness is just such an integral part of their life that they just don't think about it much. But perhaps I am fiendish about cycling. I loved doing it from the moment that I started when I was little. And from the age of about eleven, I used push-bikes more and more because I love travelling and it was simply the easiest way to get around. And then there are the various tricks and things that one can do to while away the strange times that are a person's teenage years.
Cycling in the Scottish Borders has some fond memories for me. I used to do it quite a lot in my later teenage years. We often went off cycling when we had finished a set of exams, so I suppose it was something that we would have looked forward to. Looking back we did some absurd and quite risky things.
But these days due to increasing public awareness of the adverse environmental impacts of the private motor car, the increased cost of fossil fuels and an enhanced awareness of the health benefits of cycling due to public health campaigns and things, there are often much more civilised and traffic free routes on which to cycle. Chief amongst these is the campaign for sustainable transports (SUSTRANS) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustrans).
I used to cycle to Innerliethen quite a lot when I was younger, but the route out of Edinburgh is now much more pleasant and road traffic free, thanks in part to Sustrans. I live some two miles to the South of the centre of Edinburgh, and heading South out of Edinburgh necessarily involves gaining altitude. I left for the pedal up the hill. Quite quickly I was cycling up through the housing estate in which I went to primary School.
Because of the way that suburban housing estates have been laid out in the UK since the Second World War, they are normally ultimately cul-de-sacs to motor cars, but human powered vehicles such as my trusty steed can pass along the narrow track at the top of this hill. Soon I was travelling down hill at some speed. Edinburgh is not only a physically compact city by UK standards, it is also not very large in terms of population, so cyclists can reach the perimeter of the city quite quickly. To the South of Edinburgh lies an area of land where coal was traditionally mined. That all came to an end, some time ago, but the mining towns and villages still remain. Many of them look radically smarter (posher) than they did when I was a teenager.
I joined another Sustrans track at the city boundary and followed it out to a newish out-of-town shopping centre and then into the mining town of Loanhead. Loanhead used to be a hub for my cycling activities, because one of the friends that I regularly went cycling with lived there when he was a teenager. He now lives elsewhere, so I cycled out through Bonnyrigg in Midlothian and re-joined a Sustrans track. I think that it follows an old railway line for a little while. You then transfer onto little quiet rural roads.
Needless to say those rural roads were there when I was a teenager, but on one's first run out, one would have had to consult a map or have been with someone who knew the way unless one was lucky enough to be a brilliant navigator. Not anymore; the fabulous persons at Sustrans have added small blue signs to the existing road furniture to indicate the directions.
In this instance the transition from suburban to small towns to rural is quite sudden. Autumn in the UK is beautiful, and this part of Scotland is no exception. It was last weekend, the second weekend of November 2014 and the deciduous trees were in full bloom, but few of the leaves had yet blown off. Quite stunning. The occasional cottages and farmhouses pass slowly on a push-bikes when one is climbing and glide easily by when one is descending; and in this part of the world, it's really one or the other. The landscape is not flat.
The most memorable part of this ride is a stretch of rural road that I know quite well. And judging by my fellow cyclists on that Saturday, it is favoured by others too. It is not steep, but it's a slow-ish climb for perhaps a mile or two. Then there is about a twelve mile descent into Innerleithen. Often that is great fun and fast nearly all the way. But not on that day. There was a swift wind blowing up the hill and I was pedalling reasonably firmly to maintain a reasonable pace.
Normally I prefer round trips on the bike. But this route is so wonderful that I just re-traced my steps.
