Unanswerable questions

My mum's parting words to me as I left Stratford this morning were, 'Don't aquaplane.' I don't know what to do with advice like that. It's like saying, 'Don't fall out of a tree.' The randomness of Mum's advice is because my parents have been seized of two unanswerable questions since I decided on this trip: Why is he doing it? and Will he survive? It's easy to dismiss parental fretting as worrying over nothing, and sometimes dismissing it is the only way to get on and live. But what is 'Why is he doing this?' if not an attempt to understand their son, and what 'Will he survive?' if not their love for me: my parents' fussing over their family is because they want to understand and love my brother and me. (It also means that their favourite worrything, 'Does David have a girlfriend yet?' has been suspended for the duration - praise be). This morning my dad - maybe a bit proud of me and maybe a bit concerned - wanted to ride out the first half-mile so we crossed town together. When he said he would go back, I shouted cheerio and carried on, but I should have stopped and given him a hug, meaning 'thanks' in the wordless language of fathers and sons.
The drizzle set in for the next couple of hours as I picked out a route on back roads past the motorway mangle of Birmingham. When the rain gave up, I stopped for lunch by the church in Coleshill. A suited woman on her break was sitting on the other bench eating a sandwich, alone with her thoughts. I imagined that we had the same fundamental preoccupations but existed in different worlds today, each of us buried under different sets of rules. Perhaps somewhere a mum and dad worry over her as well.
There weren't too many hills today but a strong headwind made cycling hard work, even on the flat, although I managed to reach Ashbourne (another fairtrade town) and the Peak District in the end. I found a campsite at the top of a hill under an orange sunset, all for just £5.
Thanks for all the text, email and blog messages - the journey is mute solitude for most of the day so the occasional greeting feels like contact from afar.