Wheels Around Glasgow

I came across this little book in Partick Library yesterday, Wheels Around Glasgow, about Glasgow's 'heyday' of smoke, smog, and slums.

Have things changed? I found myself asking.

Well, the smoke is more undetectable, but it's still there with the massive increase in private transport since those days. When I see old photos of car-less streets I smile. Nowadays, our streets are full of cars, parked and moving, and little else. Indeed, as I walked down to Partick from Byres Road I zig-zagged through the streets of Dowanhill, and came across a street that exemplified this car-scenario. It was the western end of Fordyce Street, a dark and narrow corridor replete with more cars than you can shake a clamp at. A desperate situation in terms of town planning and healthy living.

I always find myself comparing this dark hole of a situation to the airy lightness of a carless society, where there is no pollution, no noisy engines, no roads per se but paths and waterways, where the wheels around 'the city' are emphatically powered by one's own steam, and if you have no steam, then tough, you'll have to take a backy. Or perhaps inhale the fundamental truth, that if you cannot get somewhere by your own energy, then you cannot get there. To concoct some conveyance device that not only deprives you of your own vital energies (and the synergies that erupt from these) but which literally poisons the air you breathe and kills the distance between here and there, is not only a form of cheating and self-delusion, but it is also a kind of madness that disembodies the human from itself. Cars may well be the most convenient of transportations, but there are also, existentially speaking, the most lethal.

Now dismembered and disembodied from space itself, the human becomes something of a construct, a package that can be decorated, -bubble-wrapped, and flat-packed. Great for capitalism and commerce, but not so good for health and wholeness, and the planet as a whole.

I then find myself asking if things have really 'improved' since the slums, and the smogs of old Glasgow.... 

A Burlingham-bodied Leyland Royal Tiger Coach outside the offices of Lowland Motorways in Glasgow, bound for 'The Three Lochs' (Lomond, Long, and Gareloch). It certainly beats the 62 to Faifley!

Smooth Operator

As I am now without bike (it got liberated two weeks ago from outside my flat) I am obviously looking for some kind of replacement. My old Cannondale which now sits atop my kitchen cupboards, stripped to its beautiful svelte chassis, stands as an example of a bike that rolls, and which was perfectly suited to my own five foot nine inch medium frame. The Trek that replaced it was a 29" wheel version compared with the 26" of the Cannon. Just too big. Another scam in my mind to upset the cycling market (in then same way that supermarkets shift their products about every so often) so that people will be jump-started into buying. I was convinced by the nice guys at Alpine Bikes (now no longer) that the 29" was the future. 

It's not.

26" has always been the present. 

But it seems that they are phasing these wheels out in favour of larger ones. Doesn't surprise me really, in a world beset by size...

So, in memory of the Cannon, and of wheels that fit.... a small memento of a blue gold dream...

Small is beautiful!

 

Wheely

It takes great courage and faith to follow your own way.... the organic way, the living way of the alive and the universal... of the cyclical and the natural...

Just remember - the universe isn't expanding or contracting....

It's breathing.........

Transfiguration on the B818 & Other Sketches

Learning to drawn faces (in permanent ink) is a tricky thing....

...Sometimes you get it....

...Sometimes you require facial reconstruction surgery...

...And sometimes you just get real lucky...

Atop Tinto, 2010

This is Glasgow

After a year of beautiful cycling around the shires that perforate and encircle Glasgow, I thought I would put a few of my most evocative photos into a slideshow... especially now that I am without bike.

I am always amazed when I look at my folder of photographs taken when out and about at how utterly bucolic and peaceful this land is, and at how few cyclists I meet on these quiet unbeaten roads and paths. It is this spaciousness and peacefulness, not to mention the views from the rim of the valley, that inspire and inspirit, and allow genuine contact to occur.

Glasgow ripples out from where you are, beneath your own steam. This way, by energizing yourself and finding your own way, a place and one's consciousness are not apart.

Locus and cosmos are not separate.

The map is not the territory...

I am.

Ride it LikeYou Stole it...

The other morning, I got a text from my brother (who lives in the flat across the landing from me, and who cycles too) telling me, and I quote: Give us a chap, our bikes have just been knocked.

Man!

Apparently, two young hooded characters had been up here on the top landing around 7.30am hacksawing away as we both lay in our respective beds dead to the world. One of the railings had been sawn right through leaving half of it (as a memento, presumably) on the stair. My lock which was not as sturdy as my brother's kryptonite lock had been taken along with my bike (no memento for me).

At any rate, what alarmed me was not so much the stealing of the bike, as the chutzpa of these young chaps, coming up here to the fourth floor at 7.30am in the morning (when many people are getting ready to go to work) and spending the best part of twenty minutes dismembering locks, railings and bikes. I am kinda glad I wasn't awake. God knows what I would have done had I found some youngster relieving me of my most prized possession. I would have probably just stood there in awe at the gall.

Whatever the case, the bike was insured, and after 18 months cycling it, I found it and its ultra-large 29" wheels just too big for me. In fact, I was talking to my brother just the other day about looking to buy another smaller wheeled bike. Maybe, then, in the Great Mystery of the Cosmos, I caused it to happen....

The other side of the coin is that for a brief moment, those two young men, would have been the most elated in all Glasgow that morning, cycling off into the sunrise (hidden behind clouds), and feeling like a million dollars (I had just washed my bike a few days earlier, for only the second time since I bought it! and my brother's Scott was a tailor-made beauty!). So maybe, the world's happiness increased that day. Without their devious little hands, I would never have met up with my father and brother yesterday morning and taken a trip up to Dales just like old times (when my father took me there as a teenager to get my first bike)....

What is crime after all, so says a character in The Asphalt Jungle, but the left-handed form of endeavour.

It's a strange world no doubt.

 My brother cleansing his Scott...

We had some great times together... So long old friend!

 

The Two Legged Revolution

In Masanobu Fukuoka's wonderful book The One-Straw Revolution, in which he extols the virtues of natural farming methods, he writes:

The ultimate goal of farming is not the growing of crops, but the cultivation and perfection of human beings.

I kinda feel that way about cycling...

Pure cycling.... that does not require the over-accessorizing of the cyclist, that relies on traditional navigation: map-reading, recognizing landmarks, and being aware of the movements of birds and animals; that explores the local from a focussed centre, radiating concentrically...

In a 1982 interview with Mother Earth News, Fukuoka said that 'the real path to natural farming requires that a person know what unadulterdated nature is, so that he or she can instinctively understand what needs to be done - and what must not be done - to work in harmony with its processes'.

To be sure, unadulterated nature is a rarity in a world that has been ordered by man, but there are moments in even the most defined landscapes, of wildness and a sense of the pristine. The tops of hills, or even their slopes, can allow a sense of wilderness to enter, can uncontaminate the self.

And Fukuoka speaks of agriculture as a Way: 'To be here, caring for a small field, in full possession of the freedom and plentitude of each day, every day - this must have been the original way of agriculture'.

Just as cycling is a Way: To be here, caring for a small locale, in full possession of my wits and dynamism, this must have been the original way of human beings.

Icy Ecstasy up behind Howwood

Watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you, because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don't believe in magic will never find it.

Roald Dahl

Even with a broken bottom bracket, cycling under your own steam beats being carried in a car any day of the week.... ;)

The Lochliboside Hills and the Ferenese Hills up behind Glasgow (particularly Barrhead and Paisley, up behind the braes of Glennifer) is mostly rolling farmland but there are a number of spaces that have been left to wild out, let's say. Once you get up behind the braes avoiding all the main roads quite easily, it is a remarkably quiet and inspiriting place... in all kinds of weather. The coagulation and noise that we had been so used to down there in the city disappears entirely to leave you more open to a meditative-spacing out state...

A snow-capped Mistylaw in the distance, part of the Inverclyde-Muirshiel range.

Lochwinnoch in the foothills, looking over Howwood Fishery...

This particular road is one of the quietest I have ever cycled. It's a sort of link road between upper Howwood and the farms up and around Walls Hill Fort. Simply being on it, and especially with the primordial aspect afforded by WHF and the distant snow-capped peaks, is a magical experience. And all this not half an hour from Glasgow by train + bicycle.

Balance: The Bicycle Vs. the Tricycle

When Confucius was asked on his death bed what word if any he would choose to sum up life he said, 'Reciprocity'. He might as well have said 'Balance'.

It is remarkable these days, how unbalanced man has become, how out of kilter he has allowed his self to become with regards to the Earth that feeds, clothes and shelters him. His work seems to consist simply of toil that does not nourish his self, indeed, which acts as a barrier to knowing his self, so that he can make money and 'do things' that merely exacerbate this barricade, distracted as he is by the seductive pleasures that society has devised to keep him slogging away.

The modern world of man is a world of lunacy, a world of concealed directives and subroutines that positively encourage man to unattach his self from Nature and from the Earth. Capitalism then provides the stabilizers at significant cost not just to the person as a financial construct but to the person as a sacred and healthy being in touch with all that breathes. It is a remarkable situation no doubt, one which man apparently cannot see beyond, but one which is not beyond cure.

Balance is the first dynamic you encounter when you learn to ride a bicycle. Reciprocity too. On a bicycle, moving under your own steam, you quickly learn that the cold can be warming, that the prevailing winds both push and pull, that going uphill invariably means there's a downhill somewhere along the way. One learns not so much of pro-cesses as of circum-cesses. This is because we are energising our selves, engaging our own engines, and not allowing anyone to surreptitiously tack one onto us. It is primarily because we have allowed our own internal engines to be compromised that we have lost touch with this circumcessional interpenetration, and our balance. That we have become unstable and volatile. We are, like all these crappy TV shows tell us, like the walking dead, except we do not walk, we are carried.

For those of us who allow our self to be carried (remember that car is short for 'carraige'), and who cannot balance by themselves, for those infants who are too afraid to even try, we require stabilizers. Stabilizers that usurp our own vital synergies. This usurpation causes a bicycle to become a tricycle, and a human to become a man.

Nowadays, a person out walking on their own is a sight to behold. No dog, no pram, no iphone.... A remarkable sight indeed. A man who can balance without the existential stabilizers. However, this is the exception. Just take a look around you, at all those tricycles, all those Sisyphean forms being pulled by dogs and pushing prams because they do not know how to propogate and procreate outside society's hard-boiled super-impositions. Man has become a standalone entity, or at least has become deluded into thinking he is. But of course he isn't. Where man considers his self to be separate from the rest of his species and acts accordingly, the human considers his self not just to represent his own species but to represent all species. This is when the 'special' arises, when this great breakthrough is made. Only then will man revert to human and to a being that is both indigenous and universal, stable and 'in tune'.

Then, attuned to the greater nexus that envelops you, and with all the stabilizers removed, it is simply a matter of cycling....

Beware of any technology that is not your own... External technology disables, internal technology enables.

God Bless the Gulf Stream! Govan to Gourock One Sunny November Morning

It really is a beautiful cycle.... a beautiful metaphor too... cycling out of the city through the countryside down to the coast. It's mid-November, and it's 14 degrees! God bless the gulf stream!!

Living in Govan is absolutely perfect in terms of hooking up with trains or cycle paths to all the compass points around the city. On this particular trip, I take the train from Dumbreck to Paisley Canal (13 mins.), though it is a perfectly good cycle on the National Route.

 Henry the Heron waiting for lunch on the River Gryfe...

 

No dog, no pram, no ipod.... just a bicycle, a body, and an elemental mind.

Fields of Gold, passing Linwood and Brookfield.









Quarrier's Village with the Inverclyde Hills behind... A picture of pastoral serenity if ever there were one!

The bourgeois enclave of Kilmacolm...

40% I think it says, although someone has tried unsuccessfully to spray paint something over the 4 (I think with a 7)...

A pair of goosanders in the bay at Greenock (its partner was just out of picture)...

 
 Greenock Harbour.

What can you say? A mere two hours cycle from Paisley and we're here, in front of the ocean and the mountains, confronting our greater stranger self.

Giro Ergo Sum

The more I cycle the more I realise, in the flesh, the fundamental truth of existence: the dialectic of movement and repose, of stravaiging and remaining...

It is because man no longer moves his self, and allows it to be carried, that man has found himself in a bit of a mess.

I say this in the same week that Donald Trump is made president of arguably the most powerful country in the world. A triumph for Trump perhaps and his brainwashed clan, but a great loss for sanity and for the earth as a whole. It kinda shows you where the man-world is - in a state of absolute desperation.

Why?

The simple answer, though it may seem absurd to say so, is because THEY DO NOT CYCLE!

Think about it....

After or during a long cycle...

I think therefore I am.... yet I cycle therefore I think....

LA in the Sunshine

This morning, buoyed by a mushroom trip that I took last night, and drawn out by that glorious November sunshine, I found myself in the woods of Pollok Country Park listening to leaves fall. Not ten minutes from my humble flat in Cessnock by bike. Amazing! Another ten minutes through the woods and I'm on the platform at Pollokshaws West train station. It's 11.55. The 11.57 to East Kilbride will deposit me at Thorntonhall at 12.10, and from there it's a serene cycle through idyllic country backroads with views down to the city, through the village of Waterfoot, and on and up into the hills behind Newton Mearns, specifically Hazeldean Hill and the back end of Eastwood Golf Course.

Cycling through sun-dappled woods on an empty Friday morning whilst still reeling from the residual effects of a 3.5g magic mushroom trip the night before is a truly surreal experience.

A naked pedestrian bridge over the A726, marked on the map by a thin white line running up from Mearns High School, through a few farms to Titwood, and onto the Hazeldean road. It's a great little tractor path, but beware, if it's been raining it can get a bit muddy...

Gradually I begin to understand this spot and its place in the greater landscape. I begin to feel an affinity with it, until I become assimilated and am no longer an intruder.

Ralph Storer, The Joy of Hillwalking

Flagpoles with attitude: Queen's Park...

Gazing across and through the city to the peripheral hills, notably the knobbly outlines of Dumgoyne and Dumfoyne at the north-western end of the Campsie Fells. Any city where you cannot see hills (or some form of countryside or coast) is not a city but a symptom.

The pond at Queen's Park...

Just across the motorway from this little drumlin in Pollokshields, Gower Street.... a view to rival all views! Having hills like this all over the city means having views that project and telegraph the eyes and mind... A hilly city is a far more interesting place than a flat one.

The Three Wise Humen

NOW this is the law of the jungle, as old and as true as the sky,
And the wolf that shall keep it may prosper, but the wolf that shall break it must die.
As the creeper that girdles the tree trunk, the law runneth forward and back;
For the strength of the pack is the wolf, and the strength of the wolf is the pack.

Rudyard Kipling, The Law for the Wolves




Human, from the Latin humus meaning soil.
Man, the human without the humus, without a soul.
Corporate power is in the body...
Human roots within his own internal engines....

The pathfinder plies his trade into himself.
The brain is the body, the body the brain.
The cyclist is art.
The person who allows his self to be carried, inert.

There's something very different in terms of fluid dynamics when cycling on your own and cycling in a pack. There is a strength and confidence that comes from the latter that does not necessarily emerge in the former. There is also an added motivating force which comes out of being together as a single working coordinating body. I once wrote in a moment of lightness that animals do not speak, rather, they coordinate, and it is here, when cycling together as a small group of three, that you realize this. Talking, when cycling at 25 miles an hour with gaps as large as a hundred metres between you and the next cyclist, is just not practical. Hand signals are not much better when you need both of them on the handlebars. The talking rather comes in teh form of coordination, moving and momentum, and holding the dynamic of the pack.

There are three cyclists to be sure yet there is but one force. When coming down from the hills into the city, this force, with the wind behind and the benefit of gravity, can be quite something, and one wonders when weaving in and out of these big dirty cars holed up at traffic lights, with their overweight and under-oxygenated 'drivers' (flabby bodies, flaccid minds), why everyone isn't cycling. There is plenty of space after all. Glasgow is not London. We have hills and helter-skelters, B roads and back-roads that have had enlightenment conferred upon them by their upgrades, the motorways. Coming down from Glasgow's southern periphery for instance, just behind Newton Mearns, is a superlative slalom that doesn't just hone the body-mind in terms of navigation, but which powers up the bodymind in terms of its openness to the elements and gravity. There are forces here, on a bicycle, that one just cannot fathom when hidden behind a plagiarizing engine that is not yours. The auto-mobile is you, not some machine that pollutes and rapes your matricial Earth, and ultimately, you.

There are moments of exquisite emptiness in this peripheral aura of well-being, in this feeling of great and vital coordination. One enters a more awake state, by necessity, of being. One's wits and coordination are heightened, as is the ability to think on one's feet (or better, to think with one's whole body). A small pack of three, a cycling triumvirate, is all you need to imagine yourself as a member of a great flock of geese caressing the clouds as they travel the planet, each individual taking its turn, quite naturally, to be on point, at the head of the field, powering through.

The nomadic ways of early humans have been surrendered to sedation and illusion. The human has lost its way and become man, an abbreviated version of what he originally is. You get a sense of this, out there is the misty hills of Eastwood, the human, the nomad, the natural and wild one inside... the full force of the pack.

In a world beset by carraiges and being carried, cycling-walking-moving-under-your-own-steam, can be a real revolutionary act.

As can foraging for your own food... healthy natural organic healing food... for the mind, soul, or body.

Flask

It's about time I dedicated a post to my trusty flask. It's a wonderful thing a flask, not just because of that strange sounding word, but because of its ability to retain heat, or equally cold. Anyone who has ever cycled in winter will know that heat-retention is a tricky thing, and so flasks are pretty clever devices. Prior to owning a flask (quite possibly, pound for pound, the best thing I have ever bought) I used to have to find coffee shops en route to pimp my cardio up. To be sure, I enjoyed this process of caffeinated discovery, but it did begin to annoy when I needed a boost but couldn't find any cafes. The flask then seemed the obvious choice....

Atop the Kilpatrick Braes. Nothing beats climbing a hill with a full flask of hot steaming java (and some dark chocolate secreted into one's rucksack)... The bliss at the top, a combination of harvesting those endorphins and smoothing it off with the coffee, is like nothing I have ever experienced in even the most scenic coffee shop. Here, the views, the space, the solitude (which reveals a council of togetherness with all things), collude to make the next half hour or so the most timeless you have (n)ever had. 'Having coffee with a hill,' I once wrote, 'can be a real interesting experience.'

Looking west from the same spot as above. All my cycling excursions I once mused are simply an excuse to find great spots to enjoy good coffee...

 See what happens when your back's turned...

They come from all over. It's that good...!

This is the one that started it a few years ago atop Duncarnock Mount one overcast Sunday in September. I can recall it as if it were yesterday. This is what happens when you energize your self, your experience becomes embedded in the body, without the need for 'memory'. I can almost taste the air that afternoon, and I can certainly recollect sitting there gazing across and through the sacred strath, with java in hand, thinking 'no coffee shop can touch this, the serenity, the space, the aloneness that metamorphoses into an all-one-ness. No art can touch this, nevermind coffee shops. There are no words in spite of my feeble attempts. There is only the breathing, the inhaling-exhaling-conjoining... With a flask in my hand and the valley at my feet, I hold council with all.... How could you not remember that?

Swanning it by the river...