I haven't wrote my diary for more than a week now. That could mean regret not having anything to read in later years about the week past. There's memory, things remain vivid, but inevitably fade with time. To be honest though, during the week on the road since leaving Granada, I just rode everyday from sunrise to sunset and lay-down every-evening too tired to stir. I have been busy riding north to the port-city, Santander, and now sitting on the ferry bound for Plymouth, with no book to read having finished the book I was on, and such is the dearth of reading material that I read from cover to cover a Daily Express, someone left behind. Not that now I feel any wiser, or can make sense of what's going on in the World better, the tabloid's front and much of the inside pages lambasted in print the occupation of London's Saint Pauls Cathedral, by campaigners against the bankers, giving a slanted view, with no analysis or balance from another point of view. At lease I've got pen and paper and lots of time to belatedly write a diary.
Incidentally there are two other cyclists on this sailing. One, a sixty-three year old man from Cornwall with a career behind him in the Merchant Navy and now active in Green Peace; unfortunately on this trip, he slipped in the shower and broke his ankle a few weeks ago. But luckily he has friends in Northern Spain whom he stayed with while recovering and now is well enough on the mend to make his way home. The other cyclist, from Cornwall too, not originally though as his accent is estuary, and of hard to determine age. But he told a story: he was flying back from New York a long long time ago, and Loui Armstrong was on the same plane. I asked what year that was to which he replied 1963. You most have been a very young man then I said back. He laughed heartily and said eleven.
But perhaps you don't want to read any more, and I won't ask the reader to work their way through more long pages just to find I done much the same; the same daily routine, breaking camp, riding, eating and riding again until afternoon, eating and camping again. None the less I'll be writing some of it up now to amusement myself, as I may just find it interesting reading one day.
THE END.
Thursday 20th Oct: around a hundred kilometres directly west of Madrid.
Liverpool has more listed buildings, historically interesting for whatever reason with a preservation order (I think) than anywhere else in the UK. Here is the famous Liver Building from the early 1900s which was one of the first in Europe to use a steel superstructure and concrete-shuttering. The building next, housed the office of the White Star Line, owners of the Titanic.
The Cavern Club. The original club shut in the early seventies and developers bough most of the row, demolished and built a new office building, but were sympathetic to campaigners wishes to preserve the Cavern. They used much of the original bricks in the reconstruction, which is almost in the exact subterraneal location, as the old club originally opened as a Jazz Venue in the mid 1950s and later made famous by the Beatles.
