Groundhog grey: give me wind, give me rain, give me sun... anything other than the bland indifference of riding into the grey

Give me wind, give me rain, give me cold, give me heat, give me something to feel against my skin. I can’t ride into the bland indifference of grey any more.

Plummett Grey (credit: Unknown)

I am blithely cursed by being both English and a cyclist, so all I can talk about is the weather. Alongside tutting about what it was like yesterday and what the forecast is for the next five minutes (let alone tomorrow) being the national obsession, as someone who spends an appreciable amount of their time outdoors and likes to walk to the shops, I spend too much of my spare time browsing the collection of weather portals on my phone, always with hope but usually with a huff of disappointment, shuffling and scrolling across the multiple timelines and trying to come to a vague consensus as to what might be shifting across the sky.

I get the news I need on the weather report. Temperature, precipitation and wind direction are my perpetual worries over any interest rate hikes, mortgage payment worries, gas prices or whatever the current Facebook tinfoil hat-frenzied fear might be. Although living in a temperate zone surrounded by a thousand pockets of hill hugged micro climates in a world that seems to be imploding in a predicted capricious way mean an obsession with weather patterns can easily turn to sleep stuttered nights.

I am generally pragmatic about the weather. One of the reasons I go outside on a bike is to experience the breeze, the wet, or that cold burn it might throw at me. I can endure the yin of shit weather if I keep in the back of my mind that at some point there will be the joy of the yang. Not that it needs to be suffered through as a prerequisite to be enjoyed, but part of the joy of living where I do is the content change, hence the hand-wringing obsession with the forecast. Consistency is boring, the last refuge of the unimaginative and all that.

What can absolutely crumple me, though, is the apathy of the flat grey day, that absence of anything elemental. This stagnant overcast can effortlessly wither me and draw me down to wallow in its vortex of nothingness. I might as well be on my bike staring at a mouldy garage wall.

Moles Breath Grey (credit: Unknown)

There is nothing that can protect you from the grey. No clothing that can shield you from the all-pervading ennui. If it’s just cold you can put extra thicker clothes on in increasing levels of technological blubber, expense and coverage. If it’s windy you can proof yourself with even fancier fabrics, and for at least half the ride it can be something to be rejoiced in. If it’s wet you can justifiably just stay indoors, go to the hurt shed, or make a brave face of it and come back with apologies to the washing machine and most of your bearings, rationalise the amount of money you’ve spent on kit and a gritty anecdote or two.

The lethargy of grey it isn’t kept at bay by a gilet, Gore-Tex or tugging on another layer. It can permeate both body and head with equal ease, and suck all the enthusiasm from bone and brain as effectively as any lazy easterly piercing through you, cutting to the quick in all senses. The 10º and flint grey days are the ones that can wilt me to a low sigh that goes from clip in to clip out. I have stood at a junction before, staring at my shoes and the slate reflection in a puddle wondering what I am doing with my time, apart from despondently wondering if I’ve spent a long night with a sucubus and forgotten about all of the fun stuff.

Unfortunately these dreary ashen days can stretch across endless miles of time, making pedalling into the putty a featureless chore with only maybe the prospect of mizzle to add character to the ride. A tedious moisture which can’t even be bothered to summon up the enthusiasm to be proper rain.

Scrolling through the memory file of miserable experiences, an unfortunate percentage of them have been on pewter plate days where the grey has permeated socket and soul to make me both sluggish and unresponsive, and legs as concrete as the sky. But just being grey is no valid excuse to cancel a ride, as it’s not 'too' anything, apart from being too anaemically tedious. With a lack of any wind or rain or heat to fight against, there’s just the continual punching against the sucking inertia of riding into the miasma of Elephant’s Breath to endure.

Pale Slate Grey (credit: Unknown)

But I live on a grey island, where grey is engrained so deep within our psyche that people buy large grey cars as a demonstration of affluence. Houses are stripped out and 'rejuvenated' with don’t-say-that-number grey tones inside, and a flat character-obliterating grey on the outside. There might be some kind of metaphor here about the pallid grey that permeates everything from the sky down and can wisp around listlessly to seep the fire out of me in a shadowy damp osmosis, but I’ll leave that for another day. Another weary grey day. Tomorrow then...