Shreds of black cloud loom in overcast skies

Ten years is a long time. It's a long time to still be mindful of events a decade ago and, if by coincidence, which it may well not be entirely, a long time certainly in which to hold a grudge. And it's a long time to labour under the misapprehension that one can hold a grudge against oneself. Is that even possible?

It is two years—two years!—since I wrote about a journey to buy a bicycle for a small boy who has since grown out of his balance bike so completely that his little legs—legs that soon had the measure of the bike's seatpost at full extent—are now quite capable of running, jumping, and propelling the rest of him up the very juniorest of climbing walls. What of the balance bike but mere memories, of the face that at once lit up at Christmastime and lit up again as his gaze quickly moved onto something else again minutes later. A bike that, in fact, he opined to me that he kept falling off. Best laid plans, it seemed, were at the mercy of the bumpy track and unfriendly road that lay beyond the safe confines of his house and driveway. That lovely little Islabikes Rothan has since been replaced: a birthday present from yours truly being a proper pedally bike, with bright red paint. Not, of course, before I had taken it to bits to regrease and rebuild. The small boy meanwhile shows every sign of growing as tall as his daddy.

It is a year and a half, already, since I moved house: out of the city and into the almost-but-not-quite-country, the village being very nearly connected to the city by slivers of contiguous housing developments whose growth, like the small boy, knows no bounds. But for all my faults I'm still working where I'm working, and therein lies part of the problem, for my commute length more or less doubled, and I spend ever more time riding in order to get anywhere. It only took a year or thereabouts for me to become bored with the same old routes: the same high speed traffic that may or may not be trying to kill me, the same unending hills up which I sweat and grimace, powering 35 kilogrammes of carbon fibre; supposing good weather and/or unusual amounts of energy at the end of the day I might ride the long way home and add five or ten miles to the distance. "BigTown", as the prolific Sally Hinchcliffe puts it, begins but three miles away as the bus drives, and four miles as the car drives, but random journeys to the railway station are now an expedition that requires planning of clothes, timetabling of movements with recovery time for traffic lights and traffic jams; and the vagaries of everyone and their dog trying to do the same commute at the same time requires unearthing myself from bed at a time of the morning that before would have marked a further hour and a half's sleep. It's not all bad, though. I have a nice view, a quiet street with nice neighbours, shops I can walk to in a few minutes, and supermarkets that are a few minutes by bike.

But moving house also meant moving away, not just from people but from the big scaredy tabby cat that I've known and loved for 12 years. I have no facility for a cat flap chez Bex, just acres of double glazing and certainly not the wherewithal to shovel money at Rockdoor. Not having the big boy here nearly breaks my heart.

We bookmark our lives by significant events: starting uni, graduation, starting work, changing job, having children, moving house, having your boobs cut open,…or crashing your motorbike.

It really is that long ago: ten years, and for half of them I've put a ton of miles on the big machine that once upon a time I was putting my heart and soul into repairing. Together we've worn out chains and sprockets and tyres, and we've adventured all the way to, er, Loch Lomond. A long lost tailor in Nottingham doesn't count. My grand plans of Croatia are still an idea, but ebbing away as quickly as the tomfool deadline to leaving Europe advances. It took me a long time to face sitting on a motorbike again, yet the desire hadn't gone away, and indeed, the theory and practice hadn't either. Velma the VFR came, and I spent too much time and money fixing all the stuff the previous owner didn't. I sold my car, tooled around for a year or so on two wheels and later sold up, for Velma was never more than a stopgap.

Yet, I am still burdened by the memories of that terrible afternoon. I'm no longer haunted, but I am burdened, that I should have so easily exceeded my limits, and in doing so set in motion a chain of emotional damage that might never go away. Where once I was organised to a fault, I now find myself slipping. Where once I felt powerful and empowered, I feel suppressed in my abilities. There are possibly compounding factors on which I may not elaborate, lest I open up too much and remove all doubt. I don't have a black dog sitting next to me; if I did it would at least be company. The energy and enthusiasm I had back then, when I decided I would do someting and by golly go right through with it, isn't there anymore, sucked out of me by dented career prospects that themselves were stillborn from so much awkward history when my brain and my outlook was utterly fucked up.

I got through that mindfuck—with flying colours I'm sometimes told, though I rarely believe it—and then I got over my crash, and then somehow I had no more fight in me. That's a long time to be damaged. A year and a half ago, aside from home improvement, the newfound demands of proper lung-bursting training on my bike, watching my heart rate monitor climb and my weight plummet, came to a desperately frustrating end, sliding to a halt on the fourth day on a windswept disused runway in Stockport. When I was meant to be breaking 75mph in a high-tech carbon fibre speedbike in Nevada, I found myself pulling up carpet and painting walls, all the while treading water while watching other people go about their perfect lives in their perfect jobs with their perfect skills.

What, then, of this relentless grudgery? I used to write so much in here, when words flowed out of my fingertips in torrents of angular prose, and I wish I still could. But that particular fight was won long ago and even I have moved on. Not for me is the essay-writing left hidden on some social network that pretends your privacy is worth a damn. I was on the bandwagon way before that: in fact it is 20 years ago this year that I started writing publicly in any quantity. I might have torn up that historical evidence, but here I can still be nobody, with no-one listening, and no-one to tell me that two years is much too long to leave between posts. But what do I write about?

Phil Gould, long the drummer with Level 42, described those halcyon days in the 1980s as like living in a holiday camp, playing the same grinding stuff day after day, the subjects of the songs akin to the bland leading the bland. With nothing to fight for, nothing to spit at and no walls to kick down, what does one do? Shiny pop sensibilities wrote of little other than beautiful girls, guys in sharp suits, and the exciting world of foreign travel, but they came hot on the heels of the bleak years of three-day weeks, high rises with damp problems, drugs, and concrete playgrounds. Those punk years had something to rally against. And they had been preceded by several years of increasingly complex, overblown and hyper-musical songs about swords and sorcery, spiritualism and science, years that were themselves descended from the exuberant positivity of the sixties and technological tours de force. Just as some bands failed to evolve their music while others did to great acclaim, albeit with some turkeys along the way, perhaps I need to find my angle again. What do I have to be angry about? Or passionate about?

It had been so long, so very long, that I had to challenge myself today just to see if I could even still tear it up on my Rickenbacker. My fingernails on my fretting hand are too long, and my strings sound like rubber bands. I hardly play anymore, not just being time-poor Monday to Friday, but soundproofing-poor, with a dividing wall that has turned out to be less capable than I had hoped, and internal walls that make papier mâché look highly engineered. But I've mostly still got my chops.

So what then, of this relentless grudgery? There was never anger: I'm either too laid back or too tired to ever be angry for very long, but depression is perhaps merely anger without enthusiasm. There was shock, and there is sorrow, overlaid by the sense that for all this time I've berated myself for making a stupid decision so long ago, and being desperately mindful of its effects ever since: effects from which I cannot seem to escape.