On the Road Bike (23 page)

The thing was this: Ian had genuinely been chosen to carry the Olympic flame through York. As one of the country's leading fundraisers, he deserved the recognition and was overwhelmingly proud to have been nominated. On reading of what he thought was my selection, and being a sweet, generous soul, he was delighted for me, and replied via Twitter to my announcement: ‘Congratulations, Ned. A great honour.'

I had instantly deleted my tweet.

I was horrified at the misunderstanding, and ashamed. I had no idea what to do about it. So when we sat in the pub that day last April, I had to come clean.

‘I'm not really carrying the torch, Ian.'

‘I did wonder about that. And so did my mum. She kept asking me when you would be doing it.'

Just for a moment he looked wounded. Then he smiled. With the weight of that confession off my shoulders, I could listen with a cleaner conscience to Ian's story.

We had spoken a few times on the phone since our initial meeting at the Cycle Show. I had started to follow his story with interest, and to keep abreast of his plans. Things had been very tough through the winter, but the ambition to set out from Land's End with a team of fundraising riders continued to figure large in his thinking.

‘Last year it would have been a good plan for me to ride it. But this year, it's obviously gone wrong. In September I was as well as I've ever been. But in December I was starting to have small seizures.'

They operated again, for the fifth time, on his brain tumour.

‘I don't know anyone who's had five operations,' Ian tells me. ‘This one's changed a few things. My hearing. My eyesight. I struggle . . .'

‘It got to my scan in January, and I went in thinking I'm all right. I'm going all right. The doctor said “How've you been?” I said, “I cycled fifty-four miles on Saturday.” She said, “How did it feel?” I said, “It was a bit like the pedals were going round and I was a bit spaced out. But I was all right.”'

She'd listened to him. But then she'd cut him short. ‘It's bad news.' The cancer was growing very aggressively now.

For a while, Ian was laid low by this newest prognosis and entered a very dark phase. Naturally ebullient, he found himself brooding, depressed. But the planning for the big ride continued. His son Sam, aged just fifteen, was involved too, announcing his intention to join his dad on the ride.

‘We talked about my diagnosis. We shed a few tears. And he said, “What about the ride?”'

Then Ian had to tell his son he wouldn't be able to join him. Reality had plans of its own. With Ian's eyesight so restricted (he kept kicking the dog by mistake because he couldn't see it beneath him) and the risk of seizures greatly increased, he reset his targets and limited his ambition to joining the team of riders on one ‘stage' only. That day was to be 1 August, Yorkshire Day. That was when they planned to ride from Leeds to Stockton, some sixty-five miles.

‘That's the day I am definitely planning to do. I'll do that day, whatever. The only thing that'll stop me is if my bike falls apart, which I'm not planning on. I won't be getting off my bike that day. I don't do getting off.'

‘Of course I want to stay alive. But not just existing. I need to keep happy in my head.'

Time spent riding a bike, to Ian, had taken on a different meaning.

‘You can sort out everything on your bike, can't you? I don't know if there's anything else I've ever done that's like it. Staying alive's not enough. It doesn't float your boat, as they say.'

We talked about his riding. He tended to go out alone, so as not to be distracted by having to make conversation. Sally Anne worried, but understood what it was that the bike gave her husband: necessary release.

Then, after she had left us alone in the pub to go for a business appointment, Ian looked intently at me.

‘I couldn't say this with Sally there. It would have upset her. But if it ends when I'm out on my bike, well, that's not the worst thing. That's not the worst way.'

A little while later I tell Ian that I have to catch my train.

He walks with me for while, through the busy station concourse. We shake hands. And then we head in our different directions.

Over the summer, things changed quite quickly. I was kept informed by some caring folk at the hospice to which he had now been admitted.

On 21 July, the day before Bradley Wiggins was to win the Tour de France, I got a text from Ian.

All around my bedside for 5 tomorrow afternoon to see our man come in in yellow. Had a good day today. Picking up. Ian :)

He saw Wiggins win. But that was the last I heard from him. The next time his number rang, it was a friend who was contacting me instead, to let me know that he was dead.

He had gone at 11.30 in the morning, on 1 August 2012. Yorkshire Day. His team of charity riders had visited him the previous evening on their way from Land's End to John O'Groats. Five days later, four riders completed their journey in his name. They sent me a picture. They were standing in front of the famous road sign at John O'Groats, all of them smiling.

Ian is survived by Sally Anne, and his three children, Keisha, Hannah and Sam.

At the time of writing, the charity that Ian Meek founded has broken his target of £100,000. That money will fund a research student for three years at the Leeds Institute of Molecular Medicine.

And I have had occasion to consider my position.

Sometimes bike riding is wonderfully pointless. But sometimes, as Ian Meek showed me, it is both wonderful and purposeful. There's room on Britain's grey and windy roads for both.

SIMON MOTTRAM WAS
striding now, neatly stepping down a steel industrial-chic staircase, and then walking along a corridor neutrally plastered, and in other places pleasingly displaying the sandblasted yellow warmth of London stock brickwork. Recessed lighting twinkled discreetly in the stairwell, and where windows opened onto the old warehouse space, spring light flooded in, mixing in the air with the smell of coffee and the gentle tapping of Mac keyboards.

This was the house that Simon built, a monument to taste, a love poem to design, a hymn to merino wool. I was entering the heart of cool, with the patron saint of Rapha as my guide.

I had not asked for a guided tour but was enjoying it nonetheless. I drank it all in, amazed at how easily it conformed to my preconception of just how the Rapha offices should look: the rooms full of designers smiling mystically at computer screens, or seated, leafing through a book of photography detailing Neapolitan bathing houses of the 1950s, presumably summoning the necessary inspiration to start to put together Rapha's next bib-short design feature. Simon introduced them all by name as we walked on, and I nodded my hellos, feeling crumpled and ill-fitting in comparison with this svelte squadron of hipsters.

‘This is Josh. He's working on toiletries.' He may not have actually said this, and there may not actually be a Josh working at Rapha, nor indeed a separate toiletries department. But you get the idea.

‘Hi, Josh.'

‘And over there's Sven. He's socks, but not just socks. He does gloves, too.'

‘Right. Gloves. That's good.' This conversation about gloves though, was for real.

‘What do you normally use?' Simon looked at me, with curiosity and amusement. Josh and Sven looked up from their work and waited on my answer. I was under glove pressure. I glanced down at my bare hands, irritated by the stubbiness of my fingers and the slight traces of dirt under my thumbnails.

‘What, me? Oh. I'm not really . . .' Simon looked suddenly sad, or maybe even a little cross. ‘I keep losing them.'

‘We need to sort you out with some. I must get onto that. Don't let me forget to tell Laura you need gloves before you go.'

We walked on. He elaborated, with some passion, on the theme. ‘You should have stuff that is beautiful. You shouldn't have to compromise and wear some shitty polyester that falls apart. You should have the best stuff ever. You're going to die on those climbs.' It sounded like a threat. But he paused mid-stride and smiled sphinx-like at me. ‘Why should you wear some shitty, scratchy shorts?'

I had no answer to that. Why indeed.

Needless to say, Simon did forget to mention it to Laura, and I was in no position to remind him that he was going to mention to Laura that she was going to sort me out gloves-wise.

Rapha's clothing is undeniably beautiful. They may be fabulously easy to mock. No, I'll correct that. They
are
fabulously easy to mock: expensive, exclusive, pretentious arrivistes, purporting to be something that they are not. They are designed, say their detractors, for dentists in Surrey. And no one likes dentists from Surrey.

But, boy, can they stitch! I have owned a number of their garments, and, with the possible exception of some rather odd knickerbockers and a duck-egg blue turtleneck jumper, my usual shabbiness has been enhanced utterly by pulling on their merino perfection. Perhaps I will look back on my Rapha years with the same horror with which most people now regard the fad for stone-cladding in the 1980s. But I doubt it.

But here's a good time for a disclaimer: I have been ethically compromised by Rapha down the years. They were the first people ever to have deemed me worthy of receiving free stuff. It just arrived, in a box.

Moreover, since that initial offering of swag, Simon Mottram has kept quite a supply of gear heading in my general direction. And, if truth be told, I have no idea why. There have been no more than two or three occasions over a period of some five years that I have worn any of their clothing in front of the camera in a compliance-baiting act of commercial bravado and naked self-interest. So quite why the parcels full of Rapha clothing continue, sporadically, to appear on my doorstep, I don't know. I can only conclude that perhaps Simon Mottram is a generous man, a nice chap, if you will.

I looked at him, the nattily bearded emperor of all he surveyed, concerned at my glovelessness, and he smiled beatifically back at me. Then it dawned on me: We had a ‘relationship', I guess. Perhaps, in some unfathomable way, this was what marketing people meant, when they talked of ‘partnerships'. Perhaps I should show more direct interest in the product.

I am not very good at handling situations like this. Once, a major motor manufacturer (all right, Ford) rang me up to discuss building a ‘partnership'. This, they went on to tell me after some initial guff about creative relationships with selected characters in the media, would involve giving me a brand-new vehicle.

‘Thank you. That'd be very nice,' I told the smooth-sounding man on the other end of a conference call, my mind racing to work out where the catch lay in getting a free car for no good reason. I wondered if I would end up looking like the local pro at a golf club, or a county cricketer, the doors and bonnet to my Ford emblazoned with the name of a local garage. No, I resolved, I would be my own man, not a slave to the corporate machine!

‘I'd better be honest with you from the outset. I'm not even remotely interested in cars.'

‘Not an issue. Not important.' The voice didn't even break stride. ‘We'll put together a proposal for you, and get straight back to you.'

Needless to say, I never heard from them again. The honesty thing hadn't been quite the right tactic after all.

Simon Mottram was rushing on. He wanted very much to show me something he had left on a shelf in Dispatch. We hurried down the steps to the ground floor, past rows of bikes hanging vertically from butchers' hooks. Almost all Rapha's staff commute to work by bike, he told me proudly, and then explained how they had a contractual entitlement to a certain number of days off if they wanted to sign up for a ride or participate in a race. We pushed through into another beautifully restored old warehouse where a further platoon of bright young things were packing up orders for customers all over the world. They looked up as we walked in and smiled at the boss. He returned their smiles. I smiled too, but couldn't quite manage to replicate their insouciance.

‘Here it is.' He scurried behind a shelf that groaned with packing cases and reached to the ceiling. Then, from behind the boxes, came a sigh of disappointment. ‘Ah. But it's not in the proper packaging. Maybe I shouldn't show you after all.'

‘I'd like to see it, Simon,' I said, truthfully. I had no idea what I was asking to see, but judging by Simon's evangelical excitement, I was expecting it to be pretty special.

He poked his head round the side. ‘But you won't get the full hit.' A pause. ‘Oh, what the hell. But promise not to let on that you've seen this, OK? It's not been launched yet. We've not gone public with this yet.' He vanished again. And then returned with a shoe box. He bore it as you would a newborn, with slow deliberate steps, and deep pride.

In the shoe box, was a shoe.