Forces of nature

I was the last to bed in Cheddar youth hostel last night. There I am, unable to find a light switch, climbing the stairs in absolute darkness. I'm trying to walk with mindful awareness, like Kane in 'Kung Fu' when he walks on rice paper, but the hostel's walls and floors are all wood and I sound like a balrog learning to dance. I'm waking everyone up, no doubt, and I realise that my key is in my room, whichever it is, I just can't remember. In the early 19 Century, a blind man called James Holman walked all over the world unaided - the equivalent distance of a trip to the moon. If it seems too far-fetched, look him up - he's real. He happens to be my hero. Anyway, in a sense I'm emulating my hero as I travel down the landing, bumping into one wooden wall then the other, and then crashing into the end. I feel the brass numbers on the doors, finding 4, 5 and 2 - the other guests hear the balrog brush their doors inexplicably. I settle for room 2 and am just about to try the door when I remember that 2 was my room at Minehead. In Cheddar, 2 is the room of a young German family clinging to their duvets while a balrog crashes into their door. 4! That's my room. Thud thud thud - this is a praeternaturally resonant building - whump! - a door - ah, that's a 4. I try the door and praise God it opens. But what's this - there's a man in my bed. He's thrown all my things off the bed and climbed in. The only thing to do is to climb in next to him and thus cause him voluntarily to leave - a perfect demonstration of nonviolent direct action. Unfortunately, I've only just thought of it as I write this, and anyway the plan has obvious flaws. So I make up another bed and go to sleep. The impostor turns out to be a champion snorer - the walls reverberate, amplifying and deepening the rich bass notes of his nasal roar. He doesn't wake me up but the groaning of everyone else does. Snores, like noses and facial hair, are expressions of God's sense of humour. They are the indecorous revelation of our inner animal. When God laughs, it's best to laugh with her, but that was a minority view in room 4 last night. In youth hostel dormitories, there is always one snorer, whatever the number of occupants. S=1 is as solid a mathematical rule as Newton's laws of thermodynamics. This is because while one person is snoring, everyone else is awake and can't snore. Enough of this nonsense.
This morning I rode up Cheddar Gorge. After Cornwall, the Gorge was what the Americans call a walk in the park. Big new muscles have appeared in my legs. I can feel their newness, as if they don't quite belong to me. Going up hills now feels easier and the bike feels lighter to ride, even though I can hardly pick it up.
On the other side of the Mendip Hills the terrain remained hilly and interesting. I stopped at Stanton Drew to see one of the largest and least known stone circles in the country - about 100 yards across and 4-5000 years old. The stones are huge megaliths about 40 yards apart in a perfect circle. They reckon that circles like this were used for rituals - places to encounter the sacred and mark a centre point around which all things revolved, an axis mundi. In those days we could do little to control the forces of nature and we had to negotiate with them via the gods - mysterious powers like fire and wind that we didn't understand but made understandable by giving them faces and personalities like our own. The stories that we told about them - sacred myths - became the way we understood the world and where it came from. These myths framed and coloured all our experience and through them, order could be found laced through chaos. It's difficult to imagine how a ritual in this great stone circle would have felt. I assume that the surrounding fields would have been forest then - the fearsome chaos of the wildwood - with the circle forming a clearing, a place of order. The village/forest dualism appears in many religious traditions, both as reality and as a symbol for all order and all chaos, respectively. A sheep munched on grass next to one of the megaliths, with no cerebral cortex.
From Stanton Drew I was back on single track roads for a long time, picking my way over the landscape from hamlet to hamlet, then up onto a high ridge, from which I could see all of Bristol laid out below. It was a glorious ride along these tiny roads, many covered in weeds or mud, hardly used.
Down from there and the outskirts of Bath covered the next hillside with a modern estate. 'Little boxes on the the hillside and they're all made of ticky tacky and they all look the same.' Half way up that hill was the site of a fatal hit and run collision on 7 July. Many bouquets, candles and other tokens were arranged at the side of the road, with messages addressed to the young man who died. They said that a lot of people will miss him because they loved him. Someone had strapped a small packet of cereal to a bowl and written on its rim: 'Frosties on a plate at 8'. I don't know what it means, only that somehow it must mean a lot: to someone somewhere it's its own story about someone they loved, and that's how we remember each other: through the stories made when we're together. Road vehicles are extremely dangerous - we forget, or a lot of the people overtaking me do. One day we'll look back and think we were mad to career along at such speed, see so many die and still carry on regardless.
From there the hill went up and up. Bath was way down the valley to one side. When I reached it, down a huge hill, I could hardly see it because God had visited a plague of tourists upon it, including me. I couldn't get near the eponymous bath, although if it's anything like my bath at home, then it can't be much special. There's a new place you can go for a dip in special water (or 'waters', the posh word for water) but it costs a lot - I could tell because the receptionist was wearing a tie and there was no price list. I would have liked to soak the sun cream, mud and dead insects off my body, and sooth the many bites and stings appearing on it, but I guess that's not what waters are for.
Insects are one of cycling's privations. I think that's the word. Thunderbugs dying slowly in the run cream, flies, beetles pinging off the helmet like bullets, gnats jumping down your throat, greenfly, flying ants, bumble bees, mosquitos and midges - all creatures sustained by God's love. The most challenging of God's creatures down this way is a type of horsefly called a cleg. It's an ungainly big brown fly that sort of flaps onto you like a bat, plunges its mandibles - not much smaller than garden shears - into your prone, innocent flesh, and sucks like a Dyson. Look them up - they exist. (They don't sting as far as I know but the females do scratch and pull your hair.)
Now, yesterday I reported on the health of my bottom, which was starting to get a little sore all for the sake of a new ecoboiler for Friends House. The best way to describe it is a sort of chafing difficulty, although today it has been less acute. I'll keep you posted.
And if you haven't sponsored me yet, please make a pledge to justplaindavid@gmail.com - as little as a penny or as much as £200,000. Thank you.
David