CODA 19 – A short tail from Kenny

As you will be aware from the above musical reference this is the last in my series of solo performances & although the Hewlett Packard is not essentially a keyboard of the Rick Wakeman or John Lord variety I do manage to regularly produce some cacophony, discord & bum notes within the written medium!   My final epistle concerns a ride out to Southport recently, it was a long day out consisting of 105 miles & 7 hours on the road, people ask how I cope mentally during this solitary confinement, well it is a considerable amount of time to be alone & can lead to quite vociferous arguments amongst oneself during stressful times & thereafter often evening meals are conducted in stony silence followed by me ignoring myself for the rest of the evening.  As usual my progress involves riding along as many rural lanes as are available, on this ride some follow one’s arrival at Tarleton & are designated ‘Meanygates’, I know not where the name came from but there isn’t a single gate anywhere to be seen, perhaps the farmers were so stingy that they wouldn’t actually pay for any to be constructed?  They are purely long straight roads alongside which grow salad plants, I wondered as I rode along why there is a total absence of gates when suddenly a Transit van tore past me at about 90 mph nearly depositing me into a clump of celery, so there’s the answer to my question, any bloody gate thereabout would be smashed to matchwood in minutes as the van drivers hasten to get their freshly harvested salads to the local market before they go limp!  I later rode through the lanes in the vicinity of Martin Mere which unlike the Meanygate area actually have hedgerows alongside, I ventured around a bend in the road & espied what looked like a piece of material hanging from it then all of a sudden the material moved out into the road in front of me, it contained an entire farmer who had ostensibly been cleaning out a drain in a verdant alcove & having finished chose to step out of it into my path.  Well we were both pretty startled at the sight of each other & instinctively took evasive action, I flew across the white line into the trajectory of another salad van whilst he dived back, presumably down his drain as he appeared not to reappear from it.  As mentioned previously these long rides often cause me to become annoyed about some things & often my ire is inevitably directed towards pandas!  I‘m aware that pandas are endemic to China so inevitably the bloody things must be the source of the pandemic which instigated this, my solitary confinement, indeed the main source of the contagion is known to have come from the Wuhan Department of Zoology accompanied by a small outbreak in the London borough of Whipsnade so that proves it!  The original theory was that the virus emanated from a butcher’s stall in the local wet market which sold bat & equine meat, however, the stall, called appropriately Batman & Dobbin denied this & accused the World Health Organization of blatantly pandaring to the Chinese Communist Party to deflect blame from the real culprits.  I consider bears & particularly pandas to be the major source of evil in this world, their megalomania knows no bounds, who could forget the British Cycling ‘jiffy bag’ fiasco which emanated from the Russian ‘Fancy Bears’, this is what happens when you give bears access to computers, so hardly surprising that the pandemic was the result of a virus introduced into the world by the Chinese backed ‘Fancy Pandas’!   So, rant over, I rode home to finish my last solitary ride before the rules changed to allow us to ride in groups of 6, I can now put away my lap top & await a time when I get to write a Club Ride Report. 

Fin de Cycle  (Your French pun is better than the Italian!.  Ed.)