Day 1 - Aldermaston to Farmfest
I surely learned that I do have an awful lot of stuff, even though I live in a single room in a shared House. Getting all the stuff I need for a six month journey into four bags wasn't nearly as difficult as getting all the belongings that I was leaving behind into some state of order. Plus I had to make sure that there was no smelly laundry or forgotten food items that would invite unwelcome microbes and organisms in my absence.
But eventually I was able to close the door on it all and I have to say it was a very welcome moment, one I have been dreaming of for a long, long time, and I'm happy to say I was able to do it with a sense of gratitude for the privilege of a comfortable life.
Looking around the room before I left, my eyes fell on a sweetie jar that was given to me by my most recent partner in romance, the gorgeous Arunima from Wales. She had filled the jar with little pieces of paper containing proverbs, wisdom messages and love notes. It was a most beautiful gift that I have always treasured and I have still not read all the messages in there. Today was surely a moment when I should consult her oracle.
"Listen to the wind, it talks.
Listen to the silence, it speaks.
Listen to your heart, it knows"
With all the doubts and uncertainties I had been having during the final inescapable moments of preparing for the trip, this was a message I really needed to hear and it will surely be my motto for the journey.
So out
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the door I went, to visit my neighbor Stuart, who has taken a great interest in my plans and wanted to see my set up before I left. Here we both are, photographed by my work colleague, Mikey.
I'm heading to the Catholic Worker Farm in Rickmansworth for their Farmfest fund raising festival being held over the bank holiday weekend. My usual route would be along national cycle route 4 which goes along the Kennet and Avon canal but this is a winding and very tough surface not suited to a heavily laden touring bike. I took the A4 to Maidenhead instead, much more direct, with a relatively smooth surface and wide enough for traffic to get past without me holding everybody up. Most commercial traffic takes the motorway so this turned out to be a good choice.
At Maidenhead I turned off into the jubilee River cycle path through the Dorney wetlands to Slough and Windsor. The Jubilee River is a man made flood relief system and is a great example of how off road cycling routes can be developed to connect urban areas.
It's a short traverse across Slough to join the Slough Arm of the Grand Union Canal which is another hidden gem of our industrial heritage which has become a little pocket of tranquility amongst all the noise and haste. Here is where it joins the main canal just south of Hillingdon.
The Grand Union Canal has a special significance for me as I was born on it's banks in a little village called Boxmoor in Hertfordshire way back in 1956.
Back then the canal was still used for freight and I can just about remember the distress of my older sisters when they found out that Ginger the mighty and gentle barge horse would no longer be passing by our house drawing his regular burden of freight along the canal.
Today the canal is busy in a different way, and teeming with the activities of householders pursuing a very inspiring way of life, afloat and adjacent to the fixed assets of industry and conventional housing.
The canal is incredibly picturesque and took me through the Colne valley national park to my destination at Lynsters Farm and the festival.
One of the residents at the refuge asked me why I had chosen Algeria as the destination of my journey. I had to think a bit about this cos I've almost forgotten! But it came to me instantly while I was listening to the amazing music at the festival. It was the deep impression that was made on me when I first heard the music of the Amazigh people of the Atlas mountains. This was in a film called "Exiles" by Tony Gatlif which documents the journey of a French boy, the son of a pied noir refugee from Algeria, to discover the scene of his ancestry. It turned out he got a lot more than he expected from the journey, as I have done myself already.
