The alarm goes off at 4am, and there’s no negotiating with it anymore. No sluggish crawl out from under a hangover, no bargaining for another fifteen minutes under the pretence of just checking the weather. I’d watched England grind out a 2-1 win over Norway in the World Cup quarter-final the night before, a proper late one, and still I was awake before the alarm had finished its first cycle: clear-headed, caffeinated in spirit if not yet in fact, and already thinking about the ride ahead.
The caffettiera did its usual bit of quiet magic on the stove while I got my things together, and I filled the flask before it had even finished hissing. Seven years ago, this morning wouldn’t have existed. Not like this, anyway. Not with a bike waiting outside and a hill to climb before the sun was up. Back then I’d have surfaced two or three times overnight, dehydrated, and finally drifted into something like real sleep right around the time I now set an alarm for.
It was a cooler morning than we’ve had for a while, around 15 degrees, which in July counts as a small mercy and in riding terms counts as close to perfect. Thirty minutes or so to Ivinghoe Beacon, scattering rabbits and one extremely unimpressed pheasant along the way.
I skipped the car parks and took the road instead, leaving the bike just past the cattle grid on Beacon Road, then talked myself up the steep trail to the summit. Ten minutes later I had the whole top of the hill to myself, the clouds only just starting to break up. I found a flat bit of grass and got comfortable, in the way you can only really get comfortable when there’s nobody else around to witness it.
Up there, it genuinely feels like you’ve left the planet, which is fitting, because you technically have, on camera at least: this exact spot doubled as the planet Kef Bir in Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker.
I poured the coffee and took the first sip watching the light come up over the Chilterns, and for me, that’s really what all of this is about: some time to think, a clear head, and being switched on enough to actually notice what’s in front of you. From up there you get the landmarks laid out like a map: the Whipsnade Lion, carved into the hillside in the 1930s, the eight-hundred-year-old Edlesborough Church, and the seventeenth-century Pitstone Windmill, with the birds doing slow laps around all three like they were checking on old friends.
After an hour or so I headed back down to the bike. Traffic was starting to build and the world was properly waking up around me. I took the long way home, a quieter, more rural route, and spent most of it thinking about the sobriety side of all this rather than the riding side. There have been a lot of mornings like this one. Here’s to plenty more of them.
