I remember my bike rides around Wigan as a child. First with a Chopper and then a BMX. These rides had no destination and each occasion seemed to find new adventure. Down to the cops woods at the far end of Winstanley, to mounds high ash slag heaps of defunct coal mines and all the way to the Kitt Green council estate… or that’s how my mind seems to remember it. There is a drift in the kind of way kids get on there bike and ride. A form of an intuitive flow and perhaps a creative spontaneity into an emergent world.
I wrote a note last week. Walk, stop, walk, stop. I’ve been doing this and allowing time to see. Being resposnive and mostly experiencing a gratitude.
I have thought to extend this to bike rides. I have an electric peddle bike and have thought I could return in part to this notion of a certain spontaneity. It’s is not possible to do in the way I rode as a child, but intend to bring this stop element I have brought to walking into my eventual bike adventures. I have often driven across the large local islands of Stord and Bomlø and through the window of my car spotted places I have thought would be interesting to investigate, but never to do so. This I look to change. How it will come to play into my practices I do not fully know. It is not a psychogeography or mapping. I think it start very simply. A stopping and asking: What do I see? And occasional asking: What does it mean? And sometime just being in the emergence of gratitude.
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