Of the ten journals which I've posted here, all but two of them date from the last five years during which we've been living in Bedfordshire in the East of England. Any previous readers of my journals will be familiar with (and likely somewhat tired of) Potton and its surroundings as the usual base of my travels. More recently, for almost two years we've been living in the shadow of the pandemic - meaning nearly all my rides have been in the pastoral local countryside of Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire and Hertfordshire. 

We moved to the East of England for work purposes. I was almost completely unfamiliar with it until I moved here - I'd never even visited Cambridge until 2011. Growing up in the South West, I had no sense of the east of the country at all - the north and west had a distinct identity to us, and the south was the home of London and the prosperous home counties, but the east was a void to us. So it's still something of a surprise to me that I have the East of England to thank for the resurgence of my cycle touring. 

My interest in cycle touring goes a decade and a half, but after finishing as a student it was put on the back burner for a good five years. I still did day rides, but never bothered to upgrade my student bike and didn't do any overnighters or anything else that could be described as "tours". Work came first for several years. It was a curious combination of factors, good and bad - moving to Potton, with its greatly superior wooded and rolling landscape, a certain amount of dissatisfaction with work, and a disinclination to sit around the house and stare at screens in my spare time - that led me to seriously think about touring again.

So I dusted off my mechanical skills, and bought the parts for and assembled a touring bike. I'd made a few mistakes building it, and my fitness will never be like it was in my mid-twenties when I could ride 120+ mile days loaded - but it was so reliable and comfortable to ride, on the ribbons of tarmac across the fen or the sandy tracks through the woods in Deepdale, I loved it. I booked an elaborate set of ferry crossings, and rode to the the centre of Sweden and back. I was hooked.

Riding and cycle touring became a refuge for me, and the pandemic has focused and intensified this need. While, as I've mentioned before, our situation is very fortunate compared to many, it has still been increasingly hard. For a year and a half, we did not see friends or family whatsoever. Virtually every day was spent sitting at home, including Christmas and New Years' day, which we had planned as a big reunion. The winters, when it gets dark at 3.30pm and any distinction between staring at a screen for work or to "relax" is completely eroded were the worst. Work acquired an aspect of particularly futility. My health deteriorated and I spent most evenings gazing into a daylight lamp.

The silver lining has been though living here and cycling here I got a feeling for the East of England as a region in itself. In getting to know it - particularly in the enforced localism of the last 18 months - I've come to see what's distinctive about it, and to love it. The imposing flatness of the fens; hidden woodlands where you can camp undisturbed; the huge and irregular fields of wheat and barley; hares, foxes and herds of albino deer crossing the landscape beneath barn owls; a thousand dirt tracks crossing parts of the country so obscure most people who live outside don't recognise the names of largest towns - all a few miles outside high-tech and cosmopolitan Cambridge, the fastest-growing city in the country.

I have never been anywhere like it, and the landscape has made an impression on me stronger than any after those of my childhood. I've felt incredibly attached to all the pretty tracks, nooks and forgotten corners I've discovered. When a fence is put up, a road is expanded, or a field developed I feel a genuine - and not particularly rational - sense of loss.

I don't like to dwell on the negative, and a huge amount of positive has come out of this. Even the collapse of confidence on that other bike journal site was similarly a blessing in disguise - it encouraged me to download my proto-journals from that site, edit them, and get back into journaling on this welcoming platform.

Even being the most positive we could, it was clear me and Caroline needed a change. After a particularly trying week, an opportunity came out of the blue. My mother, who lives in Cornwall, had also neared the end of her tether - she had been separated (shielding, actually) from her grandchildren (my sister's children) in Devon for a year and a half, was tired of missing them, and had decided to sell-up and move back there.

Initially, the thought of losing our footing in Cornwall was a distressing one. We thought about buying the cottage and financing it by letting it as a holiday home. Then one day, Caroline turned to me in Cambridge market and said - "why don't we just move there? Sell the house and move. We've been working remotely for two years anyway".

It has been hard work getting everything ready - I learnt how to replaster walls and reseal bathtubs, and at the end my health took a major dive, that has been a long time coming, and I had to stop working for a few weeks. But we are now all set, fingers crossed.

So, some time next year, we will be moving back from the East to the deepest part of what is known in the UK as "The Westcountry". Specifically, we will be living in Hayle which might be known to cycle touring types as

• About 15 miles from Land's End (and 5 miles from the more famous resort town of St. Ives)
• The second town on the LEJOG route, after Penzance
• One bay around from Carbis Bay, which hosted the G7 conference of world leaders last year.

Heart

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In South Devon, the landscape I grew up with has changed as well. Most of the details I remember have gone - though I can walk around the lanes with my eyes closed, and I still have sleeping dreams about how it looked when I was eight or nine and would freely explore the village with my friends. It's not so much nostalgia for things in the past - it's more a process of them becoming more particular to me. They live in my head now, if nowhere else.

Soon Potton will become the same for me. I am reminded of Karl Ove Knausgaard's words on leaving the island where he grew up and knew every corner of, when the tense shifts for the first time in the novel to the present of him writing as an adult:

After the removal van had left and we got in the car, mum, dad and I, and we drove down the hill and over the bridge, it struck me with a huge sense of relief that I would never be returning, that everything I saw I was seeing for the final time.  That the houses and places that disappeared behind me were also disappearing out of my life, for good. Little did I know then that every detail of this landscape, and every single person living in it, would for ever be lodged in my memory with a ring as true as perfect pitch.

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In this journal, I'll collect together some thought on our move, and start to explore West Cornwall after we move.