Further to my whining...

By late tea-time I had realised that the pains in my legs weren't going to go away quietly, and that it felt worse when I sat down. I found myself pacing up and down the platform dodging the bursts of rain. That's a definite benefit to losing weight, being able to slide between the raindrops.

What I then did might seem stupid, it certainly got a reaction from the Tynemaiden: I went out on the bike. I kept away from the hills that I've been working out on these past few weeks and just rode a simple loop, out to the cross-roads with the little millstream, along to the junction by the gates for the big house on the hill, past the Gothic two-story crumbling cricket pavilion that is now looking very sad and haunted, past the farm with the little terrier that sits in the middle of the road and barks at the cars, over the railway line, back along the switchback road into the village, under the railway line bridge by the village hall, nearly half a mile from the village, and then back home.

I didn't have a single twinge from my legs in all that time. I was out for about an hour. So I suppose it was just a cramp. The Tynemaiden looked at me suspiciously as I came into the kitchen, sweating and glowing.

"Ah divvun kna wor yers gorrin' yer hid fer breeayns, boot it's neigh gud fer eenythen' boot peerin at thim dorty pikchewers oon yer compeeyou'or, yer poorvoort. Yer'll dee yersel a neastee wrungun' soom da."

I only understand about a fifth of what she says, and mostly I'll either nod and say "quite", or shake my head and say "Haddaway yer shite", (whatever that means).

While I was riding, I kept looking around me, thinking how clear and bright everything looked, and yet how cloud-covered the sky was. There was a strange silvery colour to the sky, and I remembered a play I had listened to on the radio last year while I was driving home from Lincolnshire. It was based on a true set of circumstances; a very cold summer two hundred or more years ago, when the sun hardly shone, the crops were meagre, and yet artists like Turner found a fascinating quality in the light that probed the landscape beneath the wintry clouds in August, and a young Edgar Allen Poe became entranced with the sinister tone that simple things like glowering skies and hungry cawing birds can portray.

"It's around me now," I thought, as I glided through the glistening countryside, scanning the treetops for ravens. I got home expecting to be struck through with a bolt of pure inspiration which would lead to my first successful novel, plus film rights and radio dramatisations. Then I took off the anti-dazzle glasses I wear when cycling to stop the insects that fly with blinding accuracy straight into your face as you whizz between the hedgerows. The eldritch light went with them, and I realised it was yet another self-delusion.

But it was intriguing while it lasted.