Bikes, Break-Ins, and a Sardinian Sunset
Updated: 12 minutes ago
Right. It has been a very long time since the last one, and rather a lot has happened — a New Year in the Cotswolds, an actual national lockdown, a break-in, a bike obsession I did not see coming, and two weeks in Sardinia that ended up being exactly what all of us needed. Let’s do this properly, in order.
New Year in the Cotswolds
We rang in the New Year in the Cotswolds with Claire and David, not far from Oddington, where the four of us walked a good stretch of the same route Richard and I did with Gemma back in 2017 — minus the university-application anxiety this time, since that particular battle is long since won. Just the four of us, and considerably more wine than the last visit strictly warranted.
I’d taken responsibility for booking the Airbnb in Bourton-on-the-Water. In the run-up, the host — a man called Gareth, all professional charm over email — was entirely reliable. On the day itself he vanished completely: no number that worked, no response to calls or texts for the whole drive up. By the time we arrived it was dark, the house was unlit, and there was no Gareth anywhere to be found. We eventually found a set of keys in the mailbox, left, it turned out, by the previous guests, because our absent host had double-booked the place and left it uncleaned into the bargain. I spent that first night in a bed with someone else’s long dark hairs still in it, which is a detail I will never fully recover from. Airbnb eventually refunded us one night. We never heard from Gareth again.
The rest of it was genuinely lovely, to be fair — wandering the Slaughters properly in daylight this time, Bourton itself once we’d recovered our dignity, a stop at Broadway Tower on the way home where we watched the deer for rather longer than four adults strictly needed to, and lunch at the Royal Standard of England in Beaconsfield, which claims, with some confidence, to be the oldest freehouse in the country. I have no way of verifying this and no desire to argue with it.
Odds and Ends From the Start of the Year
Late January I finally went and looked properly at the graffiti under the arches below Waterloo station — I’d walked past it for years without once stopping, and the sheer volume of artwork down there is genuinely startling once you actually look.
I also realised, going back through my notes, that I never mentioned going back to the Tate Modern in December, straight after Paris — a proper wander this time rather than the rushed visit years ago. Wonderful variety of a museum, though I’ll admit the concrete foundations in the basement and the exposed beams in the main hall held my attention rather more than some of what was actually hanging on the walls, which either says something about the current state of contemporary art or something about me. Possibly both.
Work also took me to two rounds of the Six Nations at Twickenham — England against Ireland in late February, England against Wales in early March — both preceded by a genuinely excellent Tom Kerridge lunch, which I mention because corporate hospitality has a well-earned reputation for mediocre food and this was a proper exception. The post-match panels, chaired by Jeremy Guscott, had Ellis Genge and Maro Itoje on stage both times. Ellis was a brilliant, engaging speaker — funnier and sharper than his hothead reputation suggests. Maro, who’s tipped to captain England one day, was surprisingly flat in the room, which I found genuinely strange given how the two of them are usually characterised.
Lockdown
And then, on the twenty-third of March, everything properly changed. Working from home. Face masks. Queues outside every shop. Every pub shut. Gemma, midway through her second year, was sent home from Exeter within about a week of it, and suddenly the house had three of us in it again for the first time since she left — which none of us had expected. I hadn’t had her back under this roof for longer than a long weekend since she left, and there was a specific, slightly disorienting pleasure in hearing her moving around upstairs again on a Tuesday morning for no reason at all.
That first weekend, the city went eerily quiet. No planes. No traffic. No pub chatter drifting through open windows. Just birdsong and the occasional siren, in roughly equal measure. It was unsettling and strangely peaceful at once. I started noticing things I’d never paid attention to before — the exact angle the afternoon light hits the houses across the street, the smell of rain after days spent entirely indoors, the sheer luxury of having genuinely nowhere to be.
Richard set up at the dining table for work; Gemma took over the study with her laptop and a permanently full mug of tea; I baked banana bread with what was, by any reasonable standard, an unnecessary quantity of chocolate chunks, and logged in for the odd crisis of my own — site spend across the business slowed to a trickle almost overnight, and a fair amount of my time went into working out which contractors could keep going and which couldn’t. In between, walks around Brockwell Park that I told myself were purely to offset the banana bread, and a startling number of evenings that ended in one of us badly attempting a YouTube yoga video in the sitting room. The novelty wore off eventually. Some of the comfort in it didn’t.
The Bike Thing
When we lived in Mt Eden, all those years ago, I cycled everywhere — to the shops, the pool, the market on a Saturday — the specific freedom of a place where you can leave a bike propped against a fence and expect it to still be there. I hadn’t properly ridden since. Then the world stopped, the traffic vanished, and getting back on a bike suddenly felt not just safe but almost romantic.
About three weeks into lockdown I did what seemingly half the country was trying to do and attempted to buy one, joining a waiting list that stretched into months. In the meantime I made do with the docked bikes, cycling from Herne Hill up to see Sasha or Immy, sitting at a careful distance in a park, and cycling home again feeling entirely restored. There is something genuinely wonderful about getting your nerve back on two wheels when the streets are completely empty. I have footage on my phone of cycling down a totally abandoned Regent Street, through an empty Covent Garden, that still looks slightly unreal watching it back months later — the sort of thing I’d have assumed was faked a year ago. I have also discovered, at forty-five, a small and entirely disproportionate sense of triumph in beating a black cab off the lights, which I am choosing not to interrogate too closely.
Parks, Pints, and the Occasional Indignity
With the pubs shut, the great British workaround duly arrived: drinking in parks. It has been the best unintentional social experiment I’ve witnessed — I have never seen London’s parks so alive, music and laughter and blankets and the odd impromptu dance party. You cannot walk through Brockwell Park on a warm evening without stepping over at least three charcuterie boards and a disposable barbecue someone will regret leaving on the grass.
What I will say, in the interest of full honesty, is that whoever decided the sensible approach was fewer public toilets and more people drinking rosé in parks had not thought the logic all the way through. I have had a small number of deeply humbling moments as a direct result, of the general variety involving a half-dead shrub and a stranger walking past at precisely the wrong moment. Lesson properly learned at forty-five: scope your exit before you need it.
I leaned hard into movement generally as a coping mechanism — morning yoga off YouTube, resistance bands in the garden, a skipping rope I am fairly confident the neighbours have not forgiven me for. Running became the actual sanity-saver. I bought a small CamelBak, which I recognise as a peak-lockdown purchase if ever there was one, and did long runs through Herne Hill and Dulwich, occasionally finishing with a distanced coffee with Sasha on a bench if our timing lined up. One weekend I ran the entire way home from the office, roughly ten kilometres, and could barely walk properly the next day. Worth it, on balance.
Back on Site
Once construction was confirmed essential and allowed to keep going, and once it was clear my new employer wanted to keep me rather than let me go, I moved onto a project out in north London that was just coming out of the ground as I joined. Genuinely strange, walking a live site in a mask, applying antibacterial gel at what felt like every second doorway. One of our clients even commissioned a proper study into which products best stopped safety glasses fogging up under a mask. The answer, after weeks of testing: nothing beats simply taking them off and giving them a wipe. A memorable use of a research budget.
By June I’d finally got off the waiting list and bought a bike — nothing fancy, a decent gravel bike — and managed to get the size wrong, one size too small, so I spent the rest of the summer slightly hunched over the handlebars. Fine around the city. Anything longer, out east for instance, and my back reminds me about it for days.
By July things were opening back up properly, and Sasha’s birthday was marked at Seabird in Southwark, which is lovely, and where a small group of us went reasonably hard on the oysters.
The Break-In
Not everything has been rosé and sunshine. In mid-June, while Richard and I were both at work and Gemma was out on a run, the house was broken into. They smashed the garden door and took the television — the one piece of technology in the house either of us actually cared about. I came home to find Richard already there, the police just leaving, glass everywhere, and that specific pit-of-the-stomach feeling of someone having been in your space uninvited. Neither of us slept properly that first night, both of us jolting awake at every ordinary sound. Weeks later I was still finding tiny bits of safety glass in unexpected places — a shoe, a drawer, once inexplicably in with the tea towels. Unsettling in a way that lingers considerably longer than you’d expect. It has also, I’ll admit, made me properly grateful for how much stability we still have when so many people this year have had so much less.
Sardinia
And then, in early August, two weeks in Sardinia with Julia and Tobias — one of the best trips I’ve had in years, and exactly what all four of us needed after the year so far.
Stepping off the plane at Cagliari into that thick, proper Italian heat was something else entirely after five months of London. We spent the first week in an old villa in Domusnovas, a small inland town — slow days by the pool, a couple of vineyard visits, and one early sunrise hike I did alone up the local hill just to take in the view before the heat set in properly. Tobias attempted an afternoon run once and abandoned the idea within about a kilometre once he discovered what an Italian August afternoon actually feels like.
The second week, in Torre Delle Stelle, was something else again — a villa with a huge outdoor entertaining space and a small staircase running straight down to a beach packed with actual local Italians rather than tourists, always a promising sign. Days were sunbathing, swimming, snorkelling — including hiring a boat out to see the sunken Christ statue, the Statua del Cristo degli Abissi — and long, unhurried dinners with excellent local wine that ran later than any of us intended most nights. Richard and Tobias got into a two-day disagreement about the correct way to structure the days that neither of them will admit to losing. I remain convinced I know who won.
I came home properly rested for the first time all year — not just tired-in-a-different-way rested, which is what most holidays actually give you, but the real thing, the kind you only get after a stretch this hard. I also came home with a sunburn line on my collarbone that took a week to fully argue its way out, which I am counting as evidence I did the trip properly.
Since Getting Back
It’s been a slow return to something like normal since we landed. A few bike rides with Claire through Dulwich and into the parks, which are, if you know what to look for, an absolute sea of MAMILs on a Sunday morning.
Two last things before I sign off. I had my first proper bike accident in London this past Friday — cycling in the marked lane when a van pulled straight out across me, and I slid clean across his bumper with a fairly spectacular expletive before landing on the cobbles. He was mortified and full of apologies; I was running on pure adrenaline and, if I’m honest, considerably more annoyed about being late than about the fall itself, which probably says something about my priorities that I don’t intend to examine further.
And the second: we’re off to Wales next week to hike Pen y Fan and see Waterfall Country. I cannot wait.
Forty-five, apparently, is the year I learned to ride a bike again. Late, but I’ll take it.
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