Category Archives: Family

Goodbye to Richmond

Posted on by
2

I’m feeling nostalgic, and a little sad. I’m about to say a fond farewell to one of my favourite places, Richmond in Surrey.

Rob and his mum, Richmond, 1969

I’ve worked in Richmond since 2008, but have known this elegant and historic riverside town for over half a century. In the late 1960s I was a small child living in nearby Whitton, during our family’s six year exile from Wales, which ended in 1971 and a return to my hometown, Cardiff.

Rob, Richmond Park, 1994

Those childhood memories influenced my decision to buy a flat in Teddington in 1988, after I got my first job in PR, in London. I loved having Richmond on my doorstep, and enjoyed cycling for a leisurely coffee at Alianti cafe – happily still going strong. And when I began cycling commuting to Holborn in 1989, it was a joy to pass through Richmond Park, which gave me a very different journey to work compared with colleagues enduring the Northern Line.

By coincidence, that second Richmond era also ended after six years when my job relocated to Cheltenham. Yet my relationship with this lovely place was not over. In 2008 I was approached about an intriguing job managing PR for PayPal UK – based just yards from the riverside location of the shot of me and Mum taken almost 40 years earlier. It was a joy to start work in Richmond after three years in a very different riverside office, HSBC’s 42 storey HQ in Canary Wharf.

I had a ringside seat to observe the changing seasons by the river, from my desk. And the contrasts often unfolded over a single morning. During the winter, a riverside mist often cloaked the familiar Richmond landmarks. In March 2016, I took the photo on the left above from my desk at 8.32am, with the historic bridge completely invisible. By lunchtime, the mist had gone and the bridge reappeared, as seen in the afternoon photo on the right.

When the pandemic struck in 2020, I had little idea that it would be another two years before I returned to that lovely office by the river. And with working from home now part of our working lives, I never again spent a complete week working there.

Richmond riverside – a family story

In 2012, Karen and Owen visited me at work, and we decided to recreate the 1969 photo, one generation on. It was impossible to replicate the viewing angle, which I found odd. My mother looked even smaller in the photo than in real life, whereas Karen towered over the bridge in the background. I wonder whether Dad (who I presume took the original) was standing on the wall in front of the White Cross pub? Regardless of this niggle, it was precious to have Owen captured at a similar age for posterity on film – well, pixels – in this special place. PS: I blogged about that 2012 photo here.

Back to Twickenham, Whitton and Teddington

On a gorgeous day earlier this month, I set off on my bike from the office in Richmond to rediscover other local towns that played a key part in my life. I enjoyed, as always, cycling along the Thames path to Twickenham. There was one poignant moment. Back in 1971, we had a family walk over the elegant footbridge seen in the photo above, which leads towards the river from York House Gardens. My sister, aged 17, was off on a school trip to Paris the next day, and Mum and Dad thought it would be nice to go for a walk before her trip. (I remember she brought me back a blue plastic model of the Eiffel Tower!) We often went for a drink at the Balmy Arms on Twickenham’s riverside, which I passed on my 2024 ride. Today, I am the only one of the four of us who is still alive.

Whitton memories

The first home I truly remember – and my first in England – was 12 Ashley Drive, Whitton, near Twickenham. It was a classic between-the-wars semi, with a garage at the back on a lane, which Dad extended when he bought a larger car. I vividly remember my third birthday party here in 1966 with a cake in the shape of a steam locomotive, the year before the last steam hauled express train from London. Dad and I lined our cars up outside the house: his an Austin 1100 (cars were small back then) and my precious ‘wrecker’ pedal car, which Dad found in a jumble sale in Chiswick town hall. I was disconsolate when the drive mechanism broke and Dad decided it couldn’t be repaired. I suspect a more mechanically minded parent could have fixed it, but in fairness my mechanical skills are no better than Dad’s were!

I took the second photo when I took Mum, Dad and Owen to see our old house in 2011, just after Owen turned three.

I started school in September 1968 at Bishop Perrin, a Church of England state primary school a short walk from our front door. My headmaster, Mr Davies, was also Welsh, and was resisting pressure to adopt modern teaching methods. (This was the year after the famous Plowden report into English primary education, which has been mythologised ever since.) At Bishop Perrin, I was taught to read in much the same way as my parents had been in the 1930s, with old fashioned books. It worked – I quickly became an accomplished reader. Mr Davies insisted that he would only abandon his 1930s ways of teaching reading, writing and arithmetic when the authorities could prove the new methods would be more effective. He had a point: when we moved home to Wales in 1971 I was amazed to find that many of my new school friends still couldn’t read properly.

Teddington calling…

The last call on my trip down memory lane was to Teddington, where I bought my first home in England in 1988. Elizabeth Court was a postwar block of flats set back from Hampton Road opposite the National Physical Laboratory, where radar was invented and the famous wartime Dambusters bomb tested. Mine was a sunny flat with a full length picture window looking out towards Bushy Park. Teddington was a nice place to live, with the Thames nearby at Teddington Lock – home of Thames Television – and Hampton Court a pleasant walk through Bushy Park. The only downside was the slow train service into London Waterloo. Today, my much longer journey from Gerrards Cross, Bucks, into London takes as little as 19 minutes compared with the 40 minute commute from Teddington.

Blockbuster memories

The building in the background of the photo above near Teddington station contains more memories. Now an Indian restaurant, it was a shop in 1971. One day that February I came across a wonderful money box, with tubes to hold each pre-decimal British coin. I was desperate to buy it, and imagined dropping my sixpences, threepenny bits and pennies down the tubes, but my mother refused. “It would be a complete waste of your pocket money as we’re going decimal next week!” I can’t quarrel with her logic, reflecting the thrift that came naturally from her 1930s and wartime childhood. But I still regret it. Years later, I bought a set of pre-decimal coins from the year of my birth on eBay as a belated consolation, seen above.

(I blogged about going decimal on the 50th anniversary in 2021.)

By the time I moved to Teddington in 1988, that shop was a symbol of the age: a Blockbuster video store. On many a Saturday evening I’d wander along to rent a film. If I had my eye on the latest releases, I was often disappointed – every copy had already been nabbed., leading me to make a rapid second or third choice. (Not a problem we have in the streaming era!) Like Kodak, Blockbuster failed to adapt to the digital era and today apparently just one ‘Last Blockbuster’ franchise store remains, in Bend, Oregon, USA.

Return to Richmond

After Teddington, I took my bike over the Thames on the footbridge near the Lock. This was my cycle commute to London in 1989-90, past Ham Common and climbing into Richmond Park. On the final stage of this nostalgic ride I made my way back to Richmond town centre via Sawyer’s Hill and down the hill towards the office. So many memories in a 14 mile bike ride.

Here’s the video I made celebrating my Richmond bike ride and the memories it revived. PS: do subscribe to this blog, and to my YouTube channel!

(Not) Hanging on the Telephone

Posted on by
4
Rob and home telephone, London, 1989
Rob takes a work call, London, 1990

‘We’ll never forget the magic of a landline’, Viv Groskop wrote in The Guardian on Friday in a nostalgic article mourning the passing of the traditional telephone. It got me thinking about my relationship with the old fashioned landline. (Not that we ever called it that in the days before the mobile phone took over.)

During my 1970s childhood, our household phone sat on a table in the hall of our Cardiff house. That, and the cost, tended to keep calls short. As a 10 year old I’d developed a curious habit of answering calls with an awkward announcement: “Cardiff 755183, who’s speaking please?” On reflection, this was curious – why repeat a number that the person on the other end had just dialled? And they were about to tell me their identity.

As Groskop points out, we memorised numbers in those days. I still remember my aunt’s number: Cardiff 756796, even though I haven’t dialled that number for over 35 years. You can see my own first home phone in the 1989 photo of my Teddington flat at the top of this post. My number? 01 977 9115. (London’s old 01 code was so iconic that ITV named its London events show 01 for London.)

My London number (by then including the new 081 outer London code) even appeared on Nationwide Building Society news releases as an evening contact number in that pre-mobile era. Yet I cannot tell you my son’s mobile number, no doubt because there’s no need to memorise numbers now we just click on a contact name.

Yet I did have one curious teenage experience when my memory for a phone number went awry. During my O levels in 1980, I called my sister in Wiltshire. I couldn’t understand why I’d got that painful number unobtainable ring tone for a number I called every week. I tried again – only to realise I’d used my four digit WJEC candidate number instead of the Swindon code. One memory had temporarily overwritten another.

Back in the 1990s I’d have long conversations with friends on the phone, before one of us would call a halt by warning of the cost of the call. In time, we’d all sign up to BT’s Family and Friends scheme which offered discounted calls to a handful of numbers. It paid to work out whose number to honour in this way – your most frequently dialled number may not have been the most expensive to call.

Searching for a phone box

Foss Road South, Leicester, 1985
Walnut Street, Leicester, 1985

When I went to university in 1982, I suddenly became dependent on the street phone box. The traditional Giles Gilbert Scott kiosk was a design classic, but standing searching for one with a working phone was a dispiriting experience on a bitterly cold East Midlands winter night. When I found one, I’d usually discover someone already inside, in mid call. After 10 minutes, it was tempting to sigh loudly, or even tap on the door to ask how much longer they’d be. Yet when I finally got in and put in my 2p coins I had no idea if my the person I was calling was actually at home. If I was calling home, I’d give my Mum the phone number of the box, and wait for her to call me back. I remember a curious tone like birdsong for a few seconds when we were reconnected.

Student accommodation rarely had a phone, so we had to communicate in other ways. One exam season I sent a letter to my friends Kate and Helen to try to arrange to meet up (their student hovel was a few miles away from mine) and thinking even then there must be better ways to communicate! These days, we arrange our reunions by Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp.

When I graduated, I took photos of the phone boxes I’d spent so much time in over the past few years. Another world…

999!

My letter in The Times about a broadcasting landline panic

When our son Owen was very little, we got a call one Sunday morning asking if all was well. It was the 999 operator, who explained that someone had dialled the emergency number from our phone. It was obviously Owen, playing with the keypad. We hid the landline in the airing cupboard to prevent it happening again. A few years later this caused a panic when I was about to appear live on Simon Mayo’s Radio 2 show. I’d been reassured that a cordless phone was fine, but just before going on air I was told it had to be a fixed line. I just had time to retrieve the old handset from its hiding place before the interview began. I recalled this panic in a letter to The Times in 2022.

Rob and father Bob, pictured, edit Bob’s Kindle book via Zoom, February 2021

By 2020 the only person I’d speak to on the home phone was my father, for a Sunday evening catch up. Dad would also sometimes call for advice on tech matters, announcing himself when I answered, ‘It’s Dad’. Yet after the pandemic struck we switched to Zoom calls, as he found it easier to hear me there than on the phone. We Zoomed as he lay in a Cardiff hospital bed with Covid in October 2020, and four months later we worked together via Zoom turning his Bob the Blogger web diary into a Kindle book, Pandemic! My care home diary. I was thrilled by the way my then 94 year old father was adapting to new technology – not for the first time!

Back in 1978, Blondie’s song Hanging on the Telephone reached number 5 in the British charts. The lyrics evoke that long-gone era in which making phone calls was an often frustrating experience, as I found in my student years. The irony is that today, when we carry a phone with us everywhere, the last thing we’re likely to do is to call someone on it!

Kenneth Grange: the designer who made the InterCity 125 HST an icon

Posted on by
1
Photo: National Railway Museum, York

British Rail’s High Speed Train caused a sensation when it burst onto the scene in October 1976. Just eight years after the end of steam, Britain’s travellers loved the new train, which as the branding InterCity 125 hinted raced between cities at up to 125 miles an hour. And you didn’t have to pay a penny extra for the privilege.

Speed was the big attraction: in the early years, the fastest service from Cardiff to London took just 1 hour 41 minutes, a speed unmatched by today’s timetable. But the bold design, with its striking blue and yellow wedge-shaped power cars, played a big part in making the High Speed Train an icon, thanks to designer Sir Kenneth Grange, who died this week aged 95. According to his obituary in The Times (paywall), British Rail asked him to enliven the train’s livery, but he persuaded BR he could also make power cars more streamlined, with shades of the 1930s steam loco record breaker Mallard.

Continue reading →

Remembering my Nan, 30 years on

Posted on by
3
Nan at her 100th birthday party, Cardiff, 1991

It’s hard to believe that my grandmother, Nan, died 30 years ago today. It’s seems like yesterday.

She was the perfect grandmother (and great grandmother) – a deeply caring person who loved the company of the younger generations. We in turn were thrilled to spend time with someone born during the reign of Queen Victoria, years before the first aeroplane flew.

I loved listening to her stories, which went back to the 1890s, including her memories of Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee in 1897. More poignantly, Nan recalled fetching oxygen cylinders by hansom cab for her dying father in 1912. That was the year she turned 21, just days after the Titanic sank. Her life milestones seemed to coincide with historic events: Nan got married in 1919, the week Alcock and Brown became the first people to fly across the Atlantic, landing in a bog in Ireland. She herself took her only flight at the age of 92 in 1983 – the short hop from Cardiff to Bristol.

Nan delighted in telling me how her husband Frank, the grandfather I never knew, insisted that one day there would be radio with pictures. Frank almost certainly never saw his prediction come true as television, unless he happened to come across a rare demonstration set in a London store before the outbreak of war in 1939, when the BBC’s fledgling TV service closed for the duration.

With Nan at her centenary party

Nan is the only person I’ve known who lived to 100. Her centenary party in Cardiff in 1991 was a marvellous celebration of a special person, with everyone who loved her crowding the capital’s County Hall.

Continue reading →

‘Don’t tell him, Pike!’ Remembering Ian Lavender from Dad’s Army

Posted on by
Reply

Note: I published this blogpost a year ago, but accidentally unpublished it a couple of months later.

‘Don’t tell him, Pike!’ It’s the most famous line associated with Private Pike in Dad’s Army. Yet it was the officious Captain Mainwaring, played by Arthur Lowe, who uttered it. Mainwaring also regularly called Pike a ‘stupid boy’. Such is the enduring fame and appeal of the classic comedy series that many people born long after the last episode was shown in 1977 are familiar with these timeless catch phrases.

Ian Lavender, who has died aged 77, was the last survivor of the golden cast of Dad’s Army. He was 22 when he joined Dad’s Army – almost 50 years younger than Arnold Ridley (Private Godfrey) and John Laurie (Private Frazer). He played the immature Pike to perfection. It is poignant to reflect that Ian Lavender died over half a century after the passing of James Beck in 1973, who played the black market ‘spiv’ Private Walker. (Spivs were people who traded in black market goods, bypassing the strict wartime rationing system for food and other goods.)

The 1971 film version of Dad’s Army was largely filmed in our village, Chalfont St Giles, Buckinghamshire. Walmington on Sea has rarely been so far inland! The old Crown pub took on the guise of Martin’s Bank (manager, Captain Mainwaring), as seen below. In real life, the building is now empty after brief stints as Crown Coffee, and before that Costa Coffee as I blogged in 2014. It is due to reopen as Durans Bistro later this year.

Continue reading →

No longer sharing my thoughts with my dad…

Posted on by
3

When I started blogging 18 years ago I chose a tagline: ‘Rob Skinner shares his thoughts with the world’. Then I reflected that seemed rather boastful – the world wouldn’t care what I thought. So I added a tongue in cheek qualification. The final line read, ‘Rob Skinner shares his thoughts with the world – or his dad’.

It proved a fair reflection of my limited audience. Dad and I often discussed my blogposts, and I was delighted when he started his own blog as the first Covid-19 lockdown began in 2020. (We later turned that into a Kindle book, as the BBC reported.) One of his own last blogposts, the month before he died, about cinema, was prompted by my reflections on childhood cinemas.

After Dad died last February, I occasionally thought the old tagline was poignant rather than apt. But I was reluctant to remove it. But now, 11 months after Dad passed away, and a year after that father and son blogging double act, seems the right time to do so.

Dad (Bob Skinner) in 2005 outside the house he moved to when war broke out in 1939

Like most people who have lost a parent, I miss the chance to ask Dad a question about a hundred and one things. For example, when I blogged recently (Echoes of 1939) about his evacuation from London to stay with his aunt in Splott, Cardiff, at the outbreak of the second world war, I realised I had no idea how he got to Cardiff. Train? Coach? Alone or with his mother? Sadly, I will never know. But I have a lifetime of memories, not to mention Dad’s written memories and archives.

PS: for the record, a screenshot of this post with the old tagline, before I retire it.

Postscript

Ahzio’s lovely comment on this post – that I should keep the tagline mentioning my father – prompted me to change it to a dedication to both Dad and Mum, former journalists who inspired my love of writing.

Echoes of 1939

Posted on by
2

Some years are associated with tragedy and the horror of war. For example,1914: the year the lamps went out all over Europe (in the poignant words of Sir Edward Grey) at the start of the Great War; 1916: the year of the cataclysmic battle of the Somme. And in Wales 1966: the year of the tragedy of Aberfan.

Nicholas Winton and the Kindertransport

Over the past few days, I have been reflecting on another of those ill-starred years: 1939. Yesterday, we went to the cinema to see One Life, the brilliant film about the life of Sir Nicholas Winton, who played a key role in saving 669 children from the murderous Nazis in Czechoslovakia. He helped arrange for them to be brought to Britain in the spring and summer of 1939. Tragically, the very last Kindertransport train was halted on 1 September 1939 after Hitler invaded neighbouring Poland. The 250 children on board, so close to salvation, were seized by Nazi thugs, and only two survived the war.

The film is heartbreaking and heartwarming in equal measure. Heartbreaking because it highlights the agonies that so many people, especially the Jewish people of Europe, suffered at the hands of the Nazis, and because we are so aware that similar hatred is causing misery once more, especially in the Middle East and Ukraine. But heartwarming because good people like Nicky Winton, his mother Barbara, Doreen Warriner, Marie Schmolka, Martin Blake, Beatrice Wellington and Trevor Chadwick went to extraordinary lengths and (for those in Prague) considerable personal danger to save others. It was especially poignant to see the recreated scenes at Prague’s railway station as parents waved off their children, knowing they themselves would probably never see them again.

Continue reading →

Cycling into 2024

Posted on by
1
Memories of 2023: the Portugal End to End

As another year begins, I’m looking forward to new cycling adventures, including my first bike tour in Ireland since 1996, and my longest ever ride.

But first, a few reflections of my cycling year in 2023. Life events (notably the death of my father aged 96 in February) meant I didn’t get out on the bike as much as I’d have liked. But I beat 2022’s modest total of 2,278 miles: my very wet ride on New Year’s Eve brought the total to 2,648.

As I recounted at the time, those early months were a struggle, as the weather in the weeks after Dad died was awful, and I was also struggling with a persistent throat infection. It wasn’t the best training for a very hilly cycle tour of Portugal, but I coped, helped by Goldilocks weather: almost perfect temperatures after the end of an Iberian heatwave a couple of weeks before we arrived.

The Tâmega valley

I fell in love with Portugal during our 11 day adventure. (You can read my day by day account of the tour starting here.) As always, Peak Tours arranged a wonderful route, which was a perfect introduction to this special country. The first five days were very hilly, and my lack of training showed on the steeper, longer climbs. But I loved the stunning Douro valley, followed by the quirky hill towns of Monsanto and Marvão. And the Portuguese people were delightful hosts.

Marvellous Marvão

It was a special moment when we reached the Atlantic coast at Tavira in the far south of Portugal, after a freewheeling descent from the mountains. It was my second ‘end to end’, after Land’s End to John O’Groats – but a lot hotter and drier! If you are interested in the tour, you can find out more on the Peak Tours website here.

Back to Ireland in 2024

I’m really looking forward to cycling in Ireland again in 2024, 50 years since my first visit, with Mum and Dad in a lilac Hillman Imp. Back in 1996 I cycled solo from Dublin to Rosslare (for the ferry home to Wales), and loved the quiet roads and magnificent scenery, especially over the old military road over the Wicklow mountains south of the capital. (I smiled to find a Morris Minor parked outside Mrs McGuirk’s tea rooms near Sally Gap.)

My 2024 trip is another Peak Tours holiday, from Mizen Head in the south west to Malin Head in County Donegal. We’ll be staying one night in Lahinch, a small coastal town that I remember from 1974, where we bought a bar of Irish chocolate. (Human memory is a remarkable thing…) I imagine Dad had chosen the scenic, coastal route between stays at Ryan motels in Galway and Limerick. I am sure Lahinch has changed in the past half century, as Ireland has cleverly carved a prosperous living since joining the (now) European Union the year before that first visit. I just hope that the weather is kind – but will be prepared for the worst the wild Atlantic can throw at us!

Cycling to Wales – and back

I should be better trained for Ireland than last year’s Portuguese tour, as the previous month I will be taking part in London Wales London, a 400 kilometre ‘audax’ endurance ride. The name is slightly misleading as the start is almost on my Buckinghamshire doorstep in the village of Chalfont St Peter. (But you can hear the traffic on the M25 London orbital motorway from St Peter, so it’s not too misleading.) The ride does enter Wales, briefly, at Chepstow, before heading back into England over the old Severn Bridge.

Crossing the Severn Bridge into England, 2013

It will be my longest ever bike ride, more than twice as far as my previous 103 mile record, so I will need to train my body for the challenge. And my mind – cycling over 250 miles in 27 hours will require resilience, and the ability to keep going no matter what setbacks come my way. I’ve already started keeping a list of the things to take and things to do in preparation.

I’ll report on these and other 2024 adventures in the coming months.

Bittersweet return to Porto

Posted on by
1
Porto’s Dom Luís I bridge

It was a delight to spend a day in Porto before cycling the length of Portugal with Peak Tours. But it was a bittersweet pleasure. Almost a year ago, I spent an anxious 12 hours overnight in the city on my mission to rescue my late father from a hospital in Vigo, Spain.

I took a tram to Campanhã station to retrace my steps that fateful morning in June 2022. Here’s how I recorded the experience at the time:

I was relieved to see the train on the departure board at Porto’s Campanhã station. I joined a huddle of others – mainly Canadian – and waited on platform 13. New departure times kept being shown. Then, alarmingly, the train disappeared from the board. I realised to my horror that it had been cancelled. The only other train was that night! Another realisation – I’d seen just one train. Just as in Britain, the Portuguese rail workers were on strike. That would explain the TV cameras I’d seen. But unlike at home not a single poster or announcement warned travellers. 

Plan B was called for. I walked back to my hotel and was told there was a coach leaving Porto for Vigo at 10.25am. I set off again for the coach station, dragging my uncomplaining wheelie bag behind me. Suddenly, a light drizzle became a downpour that even South Wales would be proud of. Seeing everyone else wielding umbrellas, I popped into a pharmacy asking if they sold them. Nope. I’d just have to get wet.

But there’s wet and there’s drowned in a Portuguese city. As I was sheltering under a modest porch, my phone rang. A Spanish number: I must answer this. It was Dad’s hospital. I spoke to him briefly after a word with Susana, a kindly administrator at his hospital. He didn’t hear a word. But he often doesn’t if I’m sitting opposite him nursing a beer. I said I was on my way to Vigo, sounding more confident than I was feeling.

I arrived at a bus station that made Cardiff’s grotty, long-demolished 1970s terminus look classy. No ticket office – thank goodness for the internet. Seeing the shiny Flixbuses, I looked up their website and in seconds was booked on the 10am. Phew! I went for this departure not the 10.25am mentioned by the hotel on the assumption that if the 10am didn’t turn up I had a second option. But wait! Google told me to set off now as the departure point was a 15 minute drive! I’d chosen the wrong departure point. I was relieved to find changing the booking to the 10.25 was a click away.

I was soon departing Porto, admiring the spectacular bridges over the Douro, including a disused railway bridge designed by Gustav Eiffel. I was relieved when we passed the airport as that confirmed I was going in the right direction. Crossing the Spanish border was another reassuring moment during a morning that had been short of reassurance.

I walked up the hill to the metro station opposite last year’s hotel, heading into the city centre by tram rather than on foot.

Destination 2022: the coach station from which I finally departed for Vigo, and cafe

On this lovely sunny day, I felt a few shivers as I found the coach station, and the cafe where I grabbed a much needed coffee as I waited for the Flixbus coach to Vigo. I felt I had laid a ghost to rest and was now able to enjoy being a tourist in this lovely city.

Back on the bike

Posted on by
1
The joy of a new bike…

Cycle tours are like exams. You need to prepare for them. Just four weeks before the start of my Peak Tours Portugal end to end trip I’m feeling nervous. I’m horribly ill-prepared, but have finally begun training.

I’d like to think I have an excuse. My father died in February, and I simply couldn’t find the energy for bike rides, especially in March’s distinctly un-spring-like weather.

My much-missed Synapse

But this weekend I rediscovered the pleasure of cycling on my new Specialized Roubaix. It reminded me of the revelation of first rides on my original Roubaix, my first road bike, in 2014. This new Roubaix replaces my much-missed Cannondale Synapse, retired in 2021 with a damaged frame after over 7,000 miles, including a wonderful Land’s End-John O’Groats tour four years ago. It’s good to have a fast bike again.

My first Roubaix, 75 miles into a century ride in 2015

Over the next four weeks I’ll try to regain some tour fitness, initially by building cardio hours, then adding increasingly tough hill climbing hours in the ever-hilly Chilterns. (Not to mention my weekly personal training sessions.) I clearly won’t be as match fit as I’d like, but hope to start the Portugal end to end without the feeling I’ve entered the exam hall without a moment’s revision. That’s the hope…

PS: it will be poignant arriving in Porto next month. Last June I flew there en route to Vigo in Spain to support my 95 year old father, and get him home from hospital. That was the start of the final chapter in Dad’s extraordinary story. I am looking forward to returning to Portugal for a very different challenge.