On cycling with my Dad

📍Chiang Mai, Thailand (Issue 206)

On our return to Bangkok

At the end of November my Dad turned 64. I was lucky to be cycling with him from Bangkok to Chiang Mai—one thousand hot kilometres north.

As we peddled, I enjoyed being reminded of the villages and towns around Inkberrow, my childhood home: "This morning has gone on long enough," Dad said, "it feels like we've cycled to Stourport-on-Severn." It had been a slog, but we were not too far from our lunch stop: "Four miles? Only four? Well, that's to Evesham, as if we're heading to tennis on Sunday morning. I can do that." Another time, he'll note that our destination (among rice paddies) "is about as far as to Shell Ford"; he murmured another time, "This is going on and on and on! If we were at home, we'd be peddling past the Brazier's house about now". Sometimes, when we were close to our homestay, "not much further than The Bird In Hand" (one mile) or "as far as Droitwich? Hec, I'd rather get my teeth pulled out than have to visit Droitwich" (eight miles).

All this made me laugh as we weaved along. His reminiscing took me back to those quaint wooded English lanes lined with elm and oak. How romantic! However, we weren't cycling around Worcestershire but around national parks filled with Asian elephants and tigers. We weren't eating shepherd's pie but instead Pad Thai by the kilogram. We were hot! In late November, Thailand is warmer, flatter, and less grim than Worcestershire. We kept the mountainous Khlong Wang Chao National Park to our west and rode flat lushous plains. Green banana fronds and palm trees were rampant and hung limp above slim tarmac roads that weaved between rice paddies. The paddies glistened and shimmered in a blinding emerald green; we avoided the massive rocks, more monuments than hills, wich spring two hundred metres above us from the otherwise flat farmland as if dropped there. And with their pointed red roofs and gold spindly ornament, Buddhist monasteries adorn our route; we often see a distant gleaming white Buddha dominating some valley or silent cops. It's magical beyond expectations.

Thailand is the hottest I've been since South India. We dehydrated very fast but have found salvation. At every junction, in every village and town, there is a 7-Eleven (image of one, and once you’ve seen one you’ve seen all of them!). Two are often next to one another, both full of customers!

These little franchises are immaculate and air-conditioned. They serve a mean iced cappuccino with condensed milk, low-fat cola-flavoured ice creams, and miniature yoghurts with miniature spoons... I could go on for pages. After two dozen sticky kilometres, my ten minutes in the 7-Eleven freezer reinvigorated me.

We spent twenty days together, knitting and weaving our way from rice paddy to rice paddy, between corn fields and under a sun that sits too close to the top of our helmets. Dad's regular references to home—"This cafe is like Webbs of Wychbold!", a Worcestershire garden centre—remind me that we can't escape our context; nurture and nature have a tight grip. We buy flight tickets, take trains, cycle a lot, and change what we wear. And yet those apples can't escape the tree they fall from.

I reflected that we not only don't escape our parents, but we are more like our parents than we care to admit. Whether it's nurture or nature or karma, it's strong stuff. Often, I might nearly say something, and Dad reached the same phrase before me. I have the same ticks and mannerisms. I'd laugh at the same bad jokes. We have the same nose! All this, and I've not lived at home since I was twelve, so I must have been malleable before then; heavily conditioned up to my increasingly bushy eyebrows. Many of my friends, my dear readers, are having babies or have recently freshly minted babies, and they will end up like you! It's inevitable.

Birthdays always make me think. Sixty-four years old seems a long way off for me, many kilometres—many decades. It'll be here in a second, and I hope I can fish out this blog post and reflect on what my thirty-year-old felt in Cafe Amazon in Hat Siao on the tarmac heading to Chang Mai.

Perhaps the most precious moment, and most mundane, of the cycle with my Dad was sitting on the floor outside a 7-Eleven, on the warm concrete, eating cheese toasties, drinking an iced cappuccino and inhaling water so cold it made my spine freeze.

Scooties zipped, the traffic buzzed to and fro, the sun inched across the blank blue sky, and life stood still.

It—life, that is—almost exhaled.

There was nowhere to go and nothing to fix. The universe stood still, unstained and shining bright, in that nameless parking lot.

My shoulders relaxed, and the ice in my cappuccino cooled the palms of my hands.

I felt the ground beneath my feet.

Like a waterfall falling forever, or like the multitude of 7-Elevens we pass, or the turning of the bottom bracket of our bicycles, these moments fold into infinity. Therefore, there might as well only be one perfect moment in it all.

And at that moment, and the door beside us slid in and out and in and out, wafting cold air-conditioned air across us, I lolled back and remembered that sooner or later, I'll be sixty-four, and not long after that, I'll ride my last kilometre, visit my final 7-Eleven, and it'll be over.

All the busyness—all the panic of getting somewhere! All wasted! The panting and stress for nothing at all! Where have we been hurrying to? I don't have a good answer for that question, and I hope I never will.