this is how i felt this morning~i opened my eyes, looked out of the window and all i could see was a thin slice of our neighbours roof, colored with moss and lichen and the trees and hedges that make our back garden so secluded.
any traffic noise from the centre of the village and the main road linking us to the other villages in the forest does not reach this far so all i could hear was bird song for the multitudes that visit our garden.
today Evangeline will be back on the road and i am trying to decide whether or not to go and buy my basket~i imagine i will for i have never not had a bike basket.
i was taught to ride at the age of 5, not by my dad, but by our neighbour at the time, a police force colleague of my dad~i always remember my stabilisers being taken off of my little bike and it being passed over the fence, with me following in the same way. in less than a day i was zooming up and down our garden and from then until i passed my driving test a good twenty years later, i went everywhere i possibly could by bike.
we have a college here on the edge of the village and this is where i went at 16, cycling in with my books in my basket, later on with a new group of friends we would go between our classes to a friends house that was placed perfectly for college, the village shops and 'the jugged hare' where we used to go to drink and listen to the jazz of the 'real ale and thunder band'. we even took our bikes when we spent six weeks one summer living in a beach hut at mudeford spit
any traffic noise from the centre of the village and the main road linking us to the other villages in the forest does not reach this far so all i could hear was bird song for the multitudes that visit our garden.
today Evangeline will be back on the road and i am trying to decide whether or not to go and buy my basket~i imagine i will for i have never not had a bike basket.
i was taught to ride at the age of 5, not by my dad, but by our neighbour at the time, a police force colleague of my dad~i always remember my stabilisers being taken off of my little bike and it being passed over the fence, with me following in the same way. in less than a day i was zooming up and down our garden and from then until i passed my driving test a good twenty years later, i went everywhere i possibly could by bike.
we have a college here on the edge of the village and this is where i went at 16, cycling in with my books in my basket, later on with a new group of friends we would go between our classes to a friends house that was placed perfectly for college, the village shops and 'the jugged hare' where we used to go to drink and listen to the jazz of the 'real ale and thunder band'. we even took our bikes when we spent six weeks one summer living in a beach hut at mudeford spit
the beach huts can only be reached by a small ferry from mudeford quay or a trip round to hengisbury head...we opted to getting a train to the nearest train station, cycling to hengisbury head, loading our bags into the little 'noddy train' that travels down to the spit and then cycling down to our hut ourselves.
later i would cycle the seven miles daily to my place of work~slogging up hills and freewheeling down the other side.
...i continued to cycle until we moved to bournemouth~i had a bike which i took with me and as our flat was too small to keep it inside my bike lived on our second floor balcony, thinking of course it would be safe. but no...it was stolen one night or one day and no-one saw a thing.
so now i am back to where i started, in the same village where i learnt to ride all those years ago, with a different bike but the same excitement!
2 comments:
Hi SD! I hope this works as I seem to have problems leaving comments on blogs. It sounds lovely where you live. I think that you should definitely get a basket for Evangeline and I wish you many happy sunny days spent cycling around the New Forest. x
Neat! I've never lived any where you could ride your bike-to get around. The price for living far out in the country I guess.
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