Tom & I

I woke up fuming today. I FINISHED my tea and eggs, threw my bicycle down the stairs, and made for the hills (with, if I recall, some fairly vague plans to destroy them).

It’s an enduring image isn’t it; the solitary English youth in his starched shorts, buckled shoes and long summer socks, flaxen hair bristling in the spring breeze, his pannier laden with a wrapped pork pie and a corked jar of fruit squash, peddling awf across valley and vale to explore Tiddlesworth or some such leafy hamlet of this, this sceptred isle, and as you and your glamorous debutant speed past, begoggled in your gleaming new motorcade, on the wind you catch his young soprano tones, screaming, screaming homophobic slogans into the cold, cold wind, interrupting himself only to gesticulate indecipherable threats to you and "all the other bastards" and to hock rabidly onto every raised double-yellow, into every sunken drain, onto every passing pedestrian.

Like masturbation, once you’ve started with anger sometimes there can be no turning back from oblivion, and indeed, once you’ve crossed two lanes of on-coming traffic and mounted the pavement to bawl a two minute “Aaaaaaaaagggggghhhhhhh!” into the face of a pensioner with a disagreeable hat, you’ve in a sense shot your load. She wasn’t entirely without blame; her guide dog had an unnecessarily shrill bark, and the hat really was quite disagreeable (actually, the colour red, I’ve learned, has been proven to incite anger in otherwise placid convicts, so I was, in a way, really only a victim of circumstance - just imagine how angry I could have been forced to feel if the dog hadn’t broken her fall and any wounds she sustained had started gushing unstoppable torrents of blood! I would have been scientifically justified in feeling absolutely furious!).

Regardless, any feelings of frustration unvanquished by the pensioner incident were metaphorically beaten to the ground with pick-axe handles by some good old-fashioned physical exertion – a pudding-shaped hill had planted itself squarely in the middle of the footpath like a shit, leaving me and Tom Cruise (my bicycle) no choice but to conquer it on this uncooperatively gusty March day. Reaching the top of the shit, or hill, we were rewarded for our climb with some spectacular views of the shining jewel in Sussex’s geological crown: Patcham Golf Course. Coincidently, a great-uncle of mine was once awarded an actual Sussex Geological Crown for his team’s victory at a Le Mans-style twenty-four hour archaeological ‘dig-off’ in a flood-lit field just outside Telscombe. Furthermore, some years later he discovered that the victory legally enabled him to address himself as ‘Geological King of Sussex’, something which he demands of me with absolute consistency to this day; “More beetroot, Geological King of Sussex Great-uncle Rudyard?” etc.

The windswept golfers Tom and I passed do not warrant description here, one golfer differing so very little from another (Q: Does the word ‘golfer’ ever need expanding on?). Skirting the fairways as considerately as my mood would allow the landscape began to lose my interest and for a period I couldn't quantify my thoughts turned to the impression an airborne golf ball would make in a man’s head. My memory returns at hole 15, with black clouds congregating on the horizon and me turning, cold and cagouleless, to retrace my route down the darkening hillside.

As always the downhill stretch was the real cherry of the jaunt; Tom Cruise groaning and bucking between my pumping haunches, me taking the lead (the arrangement that works best) holding him steady with a white-knuckle grip, thrusting forward and back atop him, our two frames entwined, unified in one common cause.

Swooping into a small trough at the foot of the hill we leapt, plateaued, then halted with a finely carved skid. As we collapsed onto a twinkling outcrop of daisies the sun burst through the cloud cover and a fine spring rain began to fall about us, and there under that fine canopy we lay, hot, breathless, and entangled, Tom's backwheel ticking revolutions amongst the tall grass, my mobile phone vibrating rhetorically against my twitching thigh.