157th Varsity Boat Race
Part 2: Greenwich to Cambridge
Distance: 96 km / 60 mi
Sunday morning. I woke up, and it seemed like only a couple of hours since I went to bed. It was. I was not the best prepared I’ve ever been for a bike ride; I think it was a consequence of the pointless farce by which the clocks go forwards, which meant I lost an hour of sleep. It certainly had nothing to do with the late bedtime, loud music, and the sofa that was comfy but ever so slightly too short, and it had nothing whatsoever to do with the wine and coke. Oh no.
However, it was a lovely day, and a 2 minute roll along the edge of Greenwich Park jolted me fully awake, and brought me to the foot tunnel. Again, it’d be nicer without steps, but we can’t have everything in life. Carrying my bike up and down those steps was probably the most strenuous part of the journey! This time, I knew where I was headed, so it was a short ride from leaving the tunnel to the canal.
Travelling to London always shakes my faith in humanity a little, and this time was no exception: the glittering towers of Canary Wharf, the prisons of the wealthy, nestle around and among the run-down tenement blocks of Tower Hamlets like some sort of dystopia, a real-life Huxley novel. I cycled past a young dad, playing with his five kids and teaching them to ride a minimoto on the scrap of sand at the edge of an old slipway; past a Muslim family, looking somewhat incongruous with the man in jeans, a fleece and new trainers, while his wife walked beside him clad head-to-toe in a black burqa, anonymous and invisible in the morning sunshine.
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