Later this month I will be taking part in a group exhibition called Formations at Regency Town House on Brunswick Square, Hove from Weds 21 Oct to Sun 25 October as part of the Photo Fringe festival. The other artists included are Lucy Carr-McClave, Brian McClave, Jemma Treweek and Tom Wichelow.
I will be showing a selection of medium format photographs from an ongoing series shot along the cliffs between Brighton and Newhaven. Some of the images appeared in the EDGELAND zine.
On the Saturday and Sunday of the exhibition I will also be doing a pop-up zine & print shop at the exhibition where a selection of photo based zines and prints will be for sale.
The night has started to dissolve into day as I hand over my passport a minute or two after 5am. Pedalling towards the town a large bulbous moon, brighter than all the street lamps, hangs low in the sky. I climb through hushed streets towards the coast road to the east. Away from Dieppe the sky is a turquoise and peach watercolour. I know these roads well but really only in the dark or by dawn twilight. Roads etched deep with recollections of rides past, to Rouen, to Amiens, day long long loops out from Dieppe or down to the Loire and beyond, once to Gent by evening and ultimately to Copenhagen. The landscape an old friend. The dips and turns known, that roundabout there, crossroads, the barn on the left opposite the agricultural supplier. When to click down a gear, get out of the saddle for a few pedal strokes.
A flittermouse skedaddles across my eyeline. Pylons and turbines, gathered in social groups, fizzing and whirring with chatter as they stride across the fields. A blood orange sun momentarily appears above the horizon, then evaporates into cloud. At Fresnoy-Folny I take a left, down a lane not ridden before, to visit a trio of château d’eau I’ve only ever seen across the fields from more distant roads. These are the ones that started the whole randonneur round the water tower project.
Dropping into the next valley I spot what I think is a baby deer hightailing it along the boundary of road and field, but it’s too small? When it darts into the barley and I see a pair of long ears bouncing out of the crop I realise it’s a hare. One or two corners later a vole scuttles along a gutter and into the grass whilst a kestrel hovers. Over a ridge through the Forêt d’Eu past Second World War bunkers and gun placements, reminders of a sad and violent past, like the war memorials in the villages here and all across northern France.
Turn left towards the smell of warm bread at the lights in the town in the Bresle valley. Sit on a bench awaiting a chausson aux pommes to cool down enough to risk biting into. Stuff a pain au chocolat in my musette for later.
Long straight walls of flint and brick and ornate ironwork gates protect overgrown estates and mansions whose glories lie in the past. A stern brick church looks over a village. I’ve crossed departments and regions, from Seine-Maritime into Somme, from Normadie into Picardie. I’m unfamiliar with this particular combination of roads apart from the bit through the centre of Oisemont. Both bars are closed so no opportunity for coffee. Luckily back down in the Bresle valley the PMU is open in Senarpont. Half the distance ridden and only 9am, don’t need to rush, plenty of time for a coffee and the stashed pastry. I’ve already earmarked a bakery in the next village for a musette top up.
I climb back through the Forêt d’Eu, further south along the ridge, more broken World War Two concrete hidden amongst the trees. Beyond there hills undulate shallowly, in and out of woodland. Too early for galette et cidre for lunch at the converted station on the once train line now cycle path at Neufchâtel, so another coffee whilst I wait for the kitchen to open. There’s plenty of time. Only 40 kilometres back to Dieppe and ferry check in is almost five hours away.
Up the big S bends to pick up the D56 all the way to Arques-la-Bataille, autopilot engaged. Rejoin the Avenue-Verte for the last handful of k’s back to Dieppe. Time for a visit to a supermarket and a drink or two at the yellow bar on the corner by the imposing catholic church before heading back to the port half an earth’s turn since leaving it.
8am Saturday morning and North London still having breakfast. Neatly terraced houses, quiet parks, a handful of runners, some dog walkers. White vans and red buses. Vicky Park and the Olympic Park, stadiums and modern office blocks. Exiting the city over canals and forgotten rivers, entering the scruffy bits in the margins of the A-to-Z. The inbetween places, not quite anywhere, neither here nor there. Railway arches and lock-ups. A cycle lane next to six lanes of stinking traffic for longer than is pleasant. A long line of riders stretching ahead and behind. Bunching up at the lights. Long straight stretches of roads that remind me of the outskirts of Eastern European capital cities, Sofia or Belgrade. Urban wasteland, weeds pushing through broken concrete and chicken wire fencing, nature reasserting itself. A zigzag ramp over a railway line onto Rainham Marshes. Greys replaced by overgrown greens. Traffic noise fades…
I relax but realise I’ve lost power to my front mech. Ah dammit, I forgot to charge the gears. 160km left to go with limited gear changes. Don’t know how many so I’d better be sparing. At least Essex is flattish or at least I think (hope) it is. Along the bank of the Thames, giant warehouses and cranes opposite. A cruise ship docked down river by the Dartford Bridge. Turn inland, back over the A13 (Trunk Road to the Sea) and then the M25. Glimpses of pretty Essex, handsome churches, pubs on greens, whitewashed timbered houses. It’s all a little bit 1930’s period drama, half expecting Miss Marple to appear from the doorway of the village shop.
Then it’s back into the liminal spaces, on the edges, in the gaps. Ring roads and underpasses, out of town retail parks. Leisure centres and car dealerships. Confused cycle paths, traffic lights and hopping curbs. Shiny tractors and a space age water tower. And flags, so many flags and not because of the football. These flags aren’t celebrating the World Cup, they are telling to world to go back home, that it’s not welcome. This is fucking depressing. I consider calling it a day and jumping on a train back to London.
My mood improves as I get back into pretty Essex even though the ratio of flags to houses will remain high for the rest of the day. The sun is shining and I stick some happy tunes in my ears, try to ignore the fluttering hatred. Right angle bends all the way to the eastern edge of the land and an ancient chapel that’s stood here since Saxon times. Go back far enough and we all came from somewhere else.
The rear mech has also lost power, I’m now stuck with one gear. Turn around and retrace the left straight right straight left straight and repeat. Roads wrapped around old field boundaries I presume. When I hit the southern coastline of the Dengie peninsula I turn back into the wind towards London. Essex starts to undulate but at least the trees shield me from the headwinds. Lines are less rigid, lanes more wiggly. Gently swooshing curves past a vineyard. An avenue of trees, vaulted ceiling of verdant greens fracturing sunbeams. A packet of crisps and water bottle refill in the shade of a tree on a village green.
Toot Hill, I’ve been this way before, years back riding from Cambridge to Brighton via the Tilbury-Gravesend ferry. Descending from the low hills the roads lace themselves back through London’s arterial roads. A long straight run through satellite towns that blur into one another, I think Epping Forest must be to my right. Queues of cars at lights, stop start stop start. Burrow under the North Circular and roll down into East 17 and the final stretch back to Tottenham.
“All The Things I Like About Audax…and one thing I don’t”, based on an old post Stamp Collecting, that came about after being invited to give a talk about audax at Glasgow Zine Fest last month.
A 35mm photozine based on a ride in Normandy a couple of weeks back visiting a couple of monasteries whilst zigzagging along the Seine using commuter ferries.
The third one will be a book and A2 fold out map about the lanes of East Sussex (with bits of West Sussex and Kent too). Currently finishing a hand drawn map of Sussex lanes minus big roads and towns, as well as spending time in the letterpress studio playing with names of lanes.
Hammer Rookery Churchsettle Buttons Snape Yew Tree
From the flatlands behind the Downs up to the High Weald. Sunlight splinters through foliage, dazzleship patterns strewn across my path. A buzzard looms out of the shadows, lollops away low, tallons almost scratching the tarmac. Microfiche whizz blur pause whizz blur pause recollection of many rides over the years. Memory and lanes deep dug into the landscape. Mad Jack Fuller country, up to the observatory and needle, drop to Kipling’s house. Pub lunch and a pint, civilised audax rules, no need to rush. Suicidal squirrels times three, the third almost did for both of us.
Thursday 21 May. DIY audax based on The Reliable perm. 102 kilometres, 102 words.
Bracken unfurls skywards, sun salutations, as bluebells fade. White speckles, firework sparkles of blooming cow parsley. Box cut hedgerow all splintered angles and jagged shadows. A spaceman stands beside a silver space pod… oh hang on, a beekeeper next to a battered Ford.
Shepherds Hill Five Chimneys Limekiln Forest Brinkers
Surfing ridges, seeing backwards and forwards, where I’ve been, where I’m heading. Mayfield sits high across the valley. Church spires break ridge lines. Possibly in Kent until I see martletts on a village nameplate. A goldfinch flits whilst a buzzard soars in slo-mo.
Sheepstreet Fontridge Churches Hill
Up and down, this way and that. Always turning away from places I know I’ll visit shortly, after one more hill.
The Reliable, Grimpeurs du Sud audax perm. Friday 8 May. 117 kilometres, 117 words.
The tide must have dragged the ferry across the Channel as we’re kicked off earlier than usual, 4am. Another hours sleep would have been nice but stars speckle the sky indicating promising weather for the day ahead. A gentle climb twists out of Dieppe over the cliffs.
A sweeping pulsing cone of light in the blackness ahead as we lean into hairpins we can’t see. Turning inland we swerve a hedgehog feasting on squished roadkill. A little further along a hedgehog bum shuffles into the grass verge. A fox is silhouetted against street lamps ahead.
Lanes cleft into the land and darkness, the smell of earth. A cockerel crows somewhere in the valley we’re climbing away from. The dark melts into light slowly. A field full of tractors. Perfect lines scored across brown fields. An orange fan opens on the underside of a cloud as the sun lifts from the horizon.
A bell clangs in a brutalist church. Coffees and pastries amongst boxes of tomatoes and lettuces whilst listening to village chatter. Two water towers and twenty kilometres later sitting in the sunshine outside a patisserie enjoying a couple of quiches. We’ve been awake for hours and it was a long wait for those first pastries. Our bodies absorbed them quickly. There’s still a hole to fill.
Gentle rollercoaster roads weft between bright yellow and vibrant green fields. Zigging and zagging this way and that, the same place names on signposts, never too far from somewhere we’ve already been. A buzzard floats off to our side, rising and dipping mirroring the telephone cables slung between tall wooden telegraph poles.
Another town, another PMU bar. “Deux grands cremes s’il vous plait.” The gentle scrape of a Euro on scratch card behind us. A little dog scamper-slides across the tiled floor. TV news sounds better when you don’t understand all the words.
Brickwork patterns, stones set in stripes, timber frame grids. Another print project starts to form in my imagination. Across a field a water tower we passed a couple of hours ago.
Back into Dieppe for lunch on the square next to the huge church. Looking through stained glass windows to another set beyond, colours and light merging to create a temporary third image.
Out through the suburbs on the other side of town to loop around other plateaus and valleys. More familiar places. A couple more water towers to find before a glass of wine on the harbourside and the ferry home.
170 kilometres, 17 water towers. New zine Chasse Aux Châteaux d’Eau #2 available at BigCartel.
Pevensey Levels, reeds yield to the wind. Shingle scattered road by Cooden Beach huts. Turn under the railway bridge, north to Whydown Road and Straight Lane. Unfamiliar roads until I pop out in Hooe. Horsewalk back across the Levels. Herstmonceux Castle and Windmill Hill. The South Downs rise beyond the flat lands I’ll visit shortly. Rollercoaster lanes to Horam, shotgun cracks the sky. Crinkle cut shadows and hedgerow blooms. Flatlands around Ripe. Cheese sarnies and fairy cakes in a village hall, before bits of former commutes. Say hello to the Long Man as is tradition. Gravel track detour through the woods to finish.
Towards the end of last year I read Horatio Clare’s book We Came By Sea about the ‘small boats crisis’ but from angles not usually portrayed in newspapers and broadcast media, i.e., humanity and generosity. Throughout I kept thinking of Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot and more pertinently something a Kurdish kebab shop owner in Austria said to us during the Transcontinental in 2017, “We all live under one roof”. I’ve reposted the original blog post telling the whole story below.
Today I made a letterpress print of this phrase which I’m selling to raise money for the Royal National Lifeboat Institute. If you’re interested in buying one all the details are over on my Instagram.
Dilman
We lean our bikes against the window of the kebab shop and plonk ourselves at a small table near the door. A young couple sat at the counter chatting and smoking glance over but ignore us. A quartet of older women and a man sat at a table in the corner look over with inquisitiveness mixed with either disdain or pity. I’m too tired to tell. I can’t remember the last time we slept in a bed or had a decent wash. Last night we slept on some benches next to a cycle path in Italy. We’d missed a proper meal due to some faff trying to find a way around a race banned road and a washed away bridge. Eventually last night’s dinner consisted of peanuts and M&M’s and a can of Fanta. Since then we’ve ridden through a chunk of Austria towards Slovakia, some 250 kilometres including a 1600 metre mountain pass. We’ve been riding in unbelievable heat. We must look and smell dreadful.
It’s about 8pm and it’s starting to get dark. We’re in a town called Zeltweg. The plan is to eat and rest for a short while before continuing as far as possible by midnight and then bivvy for a few hours. We order some drinks and scan the menu for whatever takes our fancy – chicken wings with rice and a kebab for Jo, potato salad and chicken wings and rice for me. The owner of the shop looks at us in some bemusement. He says that the wings and rice is a big meal without the other wstuff we’re ordering. We say this is OK.
When the food is ready the owner gestures us towards a table in the opposite corner, “It’s larger, more room for all the food.” We shift to the banquette seating around the corner table and settle into our food in determined silence. Damn, I’m hungry. Did we stop for lunch today? I remember pastries and fruit and yoghurt in the car park of a Lidl just after we crossed the border from Italy. And there were ice creams near the bottom of the mountain pass when we both felt a bit bonky. Was that it? Ah hang on there was that disappointing sandwich thing next to the lake near Villach. I continue to shovel food into my face. The ladies at the table next to us glance over now and again with what is almost certainly a mix of pity and disgust. They can probably smell us from this distance. Some others enter the shop, sit at the counter and order beers. They chat and occasionally look over at the two filthy cyclists shoving food into their faces.
A middle-aged guy strolls over and asks us where we’ve been. We start to explain about the race, that we’ve ridden from Belgium via Italy since last Friday night, that we’re heading for Slovakia. He looks at us askance, Italy? Slovakia? He relays this information to the others at the bar. There is chatter amongst the locals but little interest other than from the owner. He asks how far we are riding each day, we say around 250km. There is a look of shock and then laughter. He says he couldn’t ride a bike one kilometre. They look at us as if we’re idiots. They could very well be right. We start to think about leaving and riding on.
There’s a flash of lightning outside and a crack of thunder, it starts to hammer down with rain. Maybe we won’t leave just yet. The owner says wait, we can stay as long as we need. The interested local wanders back and forth asking about the race. I say we’re aiming for Bratislava by tomorrow and then on to the High Tatras mountains. The women on the next table leave. I open the race tracker on my phone and show the owner the route of the race, zoom in on our dots at his shop, “This is us”. We see that Jonah (#tcrno5cap81) is out in the storm on the road we came along earlier. Bloody hell I wouldn’t want to be out there. It wasn’t a particularly busy road but cars and lorries tanked along it. I think back but don’t recall seeing any obvious cover until you got to the first of the villages a little way south of where we are now. We see his dot move when I hit refresh. I hope he finds shelter soon, maybe the kebab shop we passed a few kilometres before finding the one we’re in now. His dot seems to have stopped in the previous village. I hope that the kebab shop there is still open for him.
The local is starting to weird us out. We unsuccessfully try to avoid his interest. He tells us the rain won’t stop, we won’t be able to ride again tonight. He says he has a flat he is renovating around the corner, there’s water but no toilet, we’re welcome to use it, he can get the key for us. I notice the owner looking over our way, away from his conversation with those at the bar. He says “Don’t worry, you can stay here for as long as you like” and brings us two bottles of water. I lie back on the bench seat…
The next thing I know is I am being covered with a blanket and Jo is laughing. I don’t know how long I’ve been asleep but I sit up and see everyone smirking. Apparently I’ve been snoring for a little while. The rain seems to have eased but not stopped. Jo says the road is still flooded. We discuss what to do. The only sensible option seems to sit it out for a bit longer and hope it stops soon. I have no idea what time it is but it’s getting late. The locals start to drift out of the door. We start chatting to the owner some more, we tell him which countries we have ridden through and where we plan to ride, crossing Europe through ten countries. He tells us he is a Kurd from Lebanon, that he lived in Leicester and worked as a plasterer for a couple of years before moving to Austria. He gestures towards the sky and says, “We all live under one roof,” before repeating we can stay in the shop for as long as we need. We thank him but say we need to leave soon, it is against the rules of the race to accept outside assistance. The last of the locals leave. It’s nearly midnight, the shop should be closing. The rain has eased. We ready ourselves to leave. He hands us further bottles of water so we can fill our bidons. He repeats we don’t need to leave, he can leave us in the shop, we can help ourselves to drinks from the fridge. We can call him when we are ready to leave and he will come back to let us out. I don’t really care if it’s against the rules, I would happily stay but I know that if we did we want to be back on the road by 3am. Slovakia is still a way away. It wouldn’t be fair to call him at that time of the morning, particularly when he’s already stayed open longer than normal because of us. We thank him for his kindness and generosity and finally make our introductions. He says to call him Dilman handing me a menu pointing at his name and phone number, telling us to call him if we need to. I tuck the menu in my pocket and we thank him again.
We ride away from the shop in the damp but at least it has stopped raining. We look for somewhere to bivvy on the road out of town. We scope out a church and the trolley park outside the front of a supermarket opposite. Further on we pass a pizzeria with a covered veranda out front with tables and benches. There’s a wall around it so us and the bikes will be hidden. Perfect. We lean our bikes against a table and start to unclip our bivvy kit. The door to the restaurant opens and a young guy stands there in his pants looking at us wondering what the hell we’re doing. Ah crap.
“Er, we were just going to rest here for a while, is it OK to sleep here for two hours?” I ask, hopefully. He says, quite resolutely “No.” Ah crap, again. “You can’t sleep here…” and tapping his chest with his hand, “it is wrong in the heart, you sleep inside.”
We’ve already declined one offer of unbelievable generosity this evening, it seems churlish to turn down another. Having woken up this poor guy thinking he was being burgled it would be ridiculous to say no thanks and ride off. We say outside is OK as we’ll be leaving again in a couple of hours. We’re too tired to try and explain the race and the rules. I doubt very much he cares, he’s probably just glad he’s opened the door to two idiot cyclists and not someone about to turn his restaurant over. He repeats “No, inside” and shows us the push bar lock on the door. We can shut the door behind us when we leave and it will lock itself. We push our bikes inside and apologise for waking him. He shows us where the toilet is and produces a mattress which he lays in on the floor. He points to some cushions piled up on a chair and says we can make another bed from those. He points to the fridge and the tap and says we can help ourselves to drinks. We thank him and apologise again as he disappears back to bed.
We make ourselves comfortable and I set an alarm for 3.30am.
Two new zines about the South Downs are now available in the UK via my Big Cartel shop or in person from me at zine fairs. I’ll be at the Glasgow Zine Festival in May and I’ll post news of other events here and on Instagram.
HIDDEN Photo zine with essay 24pp plus cover, full colour print 12ogsm uncoated pages, 250gsm uncoated cover A6 stapled booklet
SOUTH DOWNS iPad sketches and scribbles and notes transcribed from photos and notebooks from the last decade or so. 48pp plus cover, full colour print 120gsm uncoated pages, 300gsm uncoated cover 148mm x 148mm stapled booklet
