I was still sick on this day, and managed some morning notes, but nothing else happened except for lying in a heap. The only thing for it was to read a bunch of Mary Ruefle. But after a while even this was too much. Sometimes a person’s writing can be so good that it feels like being stuck all over with pins.

Not being able to do much made for a hopeless day. There was a writing workshop years ago where I was asked, about a story I’d written, ‘Why is this character so orphaned from the world?’ All she was doing was staring at household objects and having memories and running her hands over textured wallpaper, and once over a smooth stone that she thought ‘felt like the back of a whale’. There was no way she had ever felt the back of a whale. The advice was to get her out of the house. So I put her in a car. I remember the struggle of getting her in that car. Was her mother driving? Then the slow, painful describing of the streets as they went by. Even though the protagonist was moving, and the story with it, their movement was so effortful that there was a sense of the world pulling at the car, like zombies with outstretched hands trying desperately to stop it going anywhere. Outside, an old man putting out his rubbish (always, an old man putting out his rubbish). It was raining. All brick paths broken, all paint peeling, all house fronts covered in weeds. I thought it was a sign of good writing to note the savagery of time’s passing. I think I sent my character to a retirement village and back to the safety of a room full of people who could barely speak.

Tuesday

Today I was glad that yesterday was over. I was still sick but it was finally starting to go away. That’s a nice feeling in sickness – when you’re not well, but you’re just well enough to start thinking clearly again. But not so clearly that you can fathom everything.

I began to peck away at my work again, and I started thinking about a time, well over 20 years ago, when I worked at the bookshop Dymocks. This is when it used to be on the corner of Lambton Quay and Willis Street. My best friend Morgan worked there on the weekends, and she’d got me this job. In the beginning, I worked on Sundays and Mondays. I think a lot about the women who I used to work with on Mondays. The women on Mondays were older than me. I would’ve been 19, 20, and perhaps they were in their 40s or 50s, working Monday to Friday. I liked these women, but I was also so afraid of them.

What was it I was afraid of? Their expertise and their knowledge, their fantastic competence. Their withering looks when I buggered something up. Their worldliness, the ease with which they moved around the shop, finding things, understanding everything quickly. They knew how to talk to people – how to be properly courteous, which wasn’t the same as politeness but was a way of being generous and attentive, of seeing the person. I had none of these things. It was Patty, I’ll call her, who I was the most afraid of. On Mondays I often worked with Patty at the front counter. Customers would come in who knew Patty, and it was clear that she was well-loved. But I could barely speak to Patty, was always dropping things and making a mess of changing the till roll and not knowing what the customer was asking for, and I felt Patty’s disapproval. I remember trying to read P.J. Wodehouse, as I had a notion that Patty liked Wodehouse, or at least had read him and had opinions. When I mentioned Wodehouse to her, haltingly, maybe waving Right Ho, Jeeves at her, she said, ‘What? I haven’t read that.’ I have never tried to read Wodehouse again.

There was a day when a new boy came to work. He was a couple of years younger than me and so he seemed impossibly young, a high-schooler. He was put on the front counter with Patty, so I decided to go to the back counter. After a few minutes, Patty came storming up the ramp. ‘I will not work with that mutant!’ she cried.

Again, what was it I was afraid of? It was the way Patty made her feelings known.

(There was also a terrible day when I squashed one of my colleagues in the automatic doors while he rearranged a window display. My task was to alert him to customers approaching, to let him know that I would be activating the door and that he needed to get out of the way. Being afraid to make a noise, I failed to alert him of a customer, and simply activated the door, crushing him. ‘What is wrong with you?’ he shouted.

There are certain things in our lives that we are supposed to be able to laugh about, but I will never ever be able to laugh about this.)

They were grown-ups, at Dymocks. But maybe all I’m describing is the process of learning a job. With that learning came a feeling of being more a part of the place, helped along by drinking heavily with some of my other colleagues, and my fear of the older women began to ease off a little. I remember Patty hand-selling The Da Vinci Code to someone, though I don’t think we referred to it as ‘hand-selling’ back then. It was just recommending. ‘This,’ she said, holding the book tenderly, ‘is absolutely brilliant.’ I think of the sweetness of that recommendation, in that time. I even miss the reaction I had, which was to feel urged to read The Da Vinci Code too, rather than to have any sour, knee-jerk reaction of, But that book’s trash!

And then Dymocks too became a safe, warm place I was afraid to leave. Again, I had to strike out, and again the striking out was a horror, and took a couple of tries.

I am thinking of this now because as I try to write a bit more, I realise that in some way I am always thinking about these older, knowledgeable, brilliant, frightening women, of wanting to please them and connect with them.

Wednesday

Progress was halting today. So let’s talk about notes of encouragement.

Every so often I order some electrolyte tablets or sports gels from this place Sportfuel. Included in every parcel is a note of encouragement. The note of encouragement is for sports, and clearly it’s company-mandated, but I can’t help reading it as a note of encouragement specifically to me in my life.

Each of the notes shown above is beautiful to me, but my favourite is Caleb’s punctuationless ‘Own it Ashleigh’, which I believe would be said in a dark whisper. The other part of this is the names. The names are like the names of people I found intimidating at high school, but here they are, wishing me well in sunny, uncomplicated ways. I’m always amazed at how little it takes – what a snail the brain is – for a day to suddenly sit up at a jauntier angle.

I wasn’t in the audience at the Ockham NZ Book Awards ceremony this year, held in Auckland, but I was so happy when people who I hoped would win prizes win prizes, and especially, especially, Tina Makereti, Nafanua Purcell Kersel and Ingrid Horrocks.

Thursday

Today I put aside my main project, which is about driving and flying. I started writing and rewriting some other things. I wrote in a loud cafe and then in the library. I found myself really attacking a piece, and then another. One of the pieces was called ‘Pinecones’. Another was called ‘The System’. In the afternoon I looked at these pieces again with a cooler eye. It almost didn’t matter that neither worked. I’d felt a sort of glee, like a craziness, when writing them.

Friday

Last week I experienced a surge of courage so I arranged an interview with another driving instructor. The interview was for today. I woke up this morning and regretted everything. Couldn’t I write this thing without interviewing anyone? Nevertheless, we went for a drive on the motorway and made our way up to Porirua. I changed lanes and swooped around roundabouts while yelping my questions about fear and a life in driving instruction. There was one moment when my instructor was describing why, exactly, it can be easy to accidentally cross over into a wrong lane when you’re going through certain roundabouts, and as he was explaining this, we were going around a roundabout, and his description of difficult roundabouts merged with my experience of going around this roundabout in particular. I had a sensation of both rolling around inside a large circular object and having large circular objects coming at me. This moment went on and on and on. Then the explanation ended and I was rolled out of the churn and miraculously onto the correct motorway. ‘Yes! You’ve done it! Yes!’ shouted my instructor. I felt no relief.

In the afternoon I ended up going to the after-hours medical clinic and trying to make sense of the transcription of the morning’s interview while in the waiting room. After weeks of illness my heart had started feeling funny, and all of sudden it really did feel funny – it feels like there’s a high-heeled shoe in a bucket of ice in my chest. Was it all because of the roundabout? Of course, my heart turned out to be completely fine and I just needed a load of painkillers.

On a writing day, I think the ideal number of things to need to do, outside of writing, is one. One thing. There was a time when I thought the ideal number of things was zero, but I think having just one thing, a smallish contained thing, can be useful and energising. Two things, however, is a disaster, and can destroy a writing day, as it did this one.

It felt necessary to leave the house. At the library I found a great desk-and-chair combo, but had to move after ten minutes as a woman nearby was on her phone loudly discussing her home renovations. If she had been discussing any other subject, this would have been fine, but I’ve had to put in place a zero tolerance policy for public discussion of home renovations. I found another seat but it was uncomfortable – the desk too low, the seat too far back. It’s important when writing not to feel like you are being punished too much by your seating arrangements. When at home, I like to be covered in cushions and a blanket and have my feet up on a box under the desk or on a chair nearby. It feels right to become an amorphous, swaddled shape.

I was very stuck for much of this day. A sickness I thought I’d shaken off was coming back in. I tried to find other ways to work on the work without writing – somehow come at it from an angle, or burrow underneath, or hover over it like a seagull over a pile of trash – since writing felt not possible for the moment. And then I had a sudden, terrifying idea that I won’t share here but that I knew I had to pursue, so I started doing the groundwork for it.

Tuesday

The morning: horror. But in the afternoon I finally eyeballed the work, levelled with it, and went into it and shuffled around. I felt better. I had the feeling of kind of roly-polying around in the paragraphs. I seem to have to learn this lesson over and over again: that if I allow myself to just go into the work, almost despite myself I’ll start to shuffle around.

Wednesday

I was looking forward to today, because it was a workshop day. This is the hour-long Zoom with Emily Perkins and Charlotte Wood for the course Elements of the Writing Life, and finally I was organised enough to attend the live session. This one was devoted to ‘traction’. When I read my scribbled notes back afterwards, many lines were in shouted all-caps, as if revelations from a dream: ‘ONCE YOU’RE IN IT, YOU MUST STAY IN IT’.

A little while ago I did some interviews with people I was keen to talk to for my project, including one of my driving instructors. Today I began to sort out the transcriptions. I am stunned anew at the awkwardness and bland blather with which I speak, but am happy whenever I stumble across a tiny interaction that seems to hold – if not the key to anything, then a tiny bit of a voice, or an angle that has some energy to it, and if I return to it later and still find it interesting, then this seems to hold promise. It’s daunting, though, to look at a wall of transcribed text that is more often a sort of skittering away from the subject, a smoothing over and making nice, because this is so how often how people talk to each other. And even the bits that are sort of interesting to you now might not, in the end, be part of any story.

In town I bumped into the designer Todd Atticus scraping stick-on letters off the glass of Unity’s storefront, having finished a kind of performance art piece of designing a book cover in the shop window. The piece reminded me of an event years ago where writers sat at desks in the street and had to complete short stories while fending off the public. But mostly it seemed brave and interesting, and I liked this idea that art-making could be a porous, open process, with ruckus all around. ‘I have been thinking a lot about bravery right now,’ I said to Todd, which was true, but then I lost my nerve and had no further insights to share. The sickness has gone to my brain.

Further up the road I bumped into musician Luke Buda. He was going to see Thundercat that night. I told him about trying to write about driving. ‘Am I right that everything you write is about fear?’ he said. Yes, I said.

I was buoyed by these two interactions, and when I got home I sat down and wrote for a couple of hours. One of my fears is that these few months will not be enough time. I’m moving too slowly to shake off the self-consciousness and loss of confidence that I have let happen to me while working in publishing. The dream is to be able to go fast and reckless, like in one of those Odd Rods cartoons you used to get in packs of bubblegum, where a monster spilling out of a hotrod tears along at such a speed that its tongue ripples back in the slipstream.

Something that was said in today’s workshop stuck with me: Try to take the emotion out of it. Think about the time you have, and what you have to get done, and go for it. I lurch between reactions to this: the advice feels freeing, but impossible, but freeing, but impossible, and finally a thing that might be tried.

Thursday

I should have said yes to the doctor’s offer of a doctor’s note yesterday. ‘No need, I would only be giving it to myself,’ I chortled, but I could have put a photo of it on here.

Went for an ill-advised walk, sucking air through a straw, still hoping in some demented way that I might be able to run the half-marathon in Marlborough which I

have been obsessively planning over the last few months. A kākā was sitting on the trail, looking at me. I stopped walking and it hopped towards me in a series of tentative sideways movements. I held one hand out and it gently bit my finger, as if testing a piece of pasta.

A chest X-ray came back normal. I was a little disappointed by this, after all the fuss and heart palpitations. ‘It’s likely pleurisy,’ said my doctor. ‘You’re a poet, you know this word.’ I accepted defeat and cancelled my flights to the half-marathon.

I read a couple of local book reviews and this was a mistake. I feel a kind of allergy to the discourse, a need to be away from arguments about what is good and what is not good.

Friday

I’ve added a kind of constraint to the morning pages – they’re now ‘book notes’. So instead of burbling on about whatever is on my mind, I burble about whatever is preoccupying me in my project. In this way, I feel I am sneaking up on the work, or at least lowering the barrier to entry.

I finished the new Elizabeth Strout and marvelled at her voice, its clarity and ease. When reading a Strout book, my inner monologue fills up with Stroutisms, often the one that goes ‘Her story was this’ or ‘Here was the thing about [some guy]’, followed a colon, then the unflinching summary. (‘Here was the thing about Spud: he had a hole in his head.’) Certain voices have this effect, where I begin to try, almost unconsciously, to slip into the book’s universe as a side character. Her story was this: she didn’t enjoy most poetry readings.

I also like the way a sudden violence or upheaval arrives in a Strout novel – without fanfare. The way she swerves away from the expected thing, and the soft, warm ground suddenly drops away. There’s a hardness underlying it, or total freefall. In this novel that freefall felt quite close to a heartbreak.

(Against my better judgement, I found myself glancing at some Amazon reviews of the novel. People were shrieking about ‘the politics’ in the book. ‘No one needs to be reminded of the the divisions in our country.’ ‘When will authors learn to stay away from politics unless they write nonfiction???’ Here was the thing about these reviewers: they were miserable and also thought that everyone should own a gun.)

Late in the day, still sick (‘Writing a book, you can be too well for your own good’ – Annie Dillard), I got myself to the desk, calmed down, and remembered (again!) that there is really nothing much to lose.

Monday

How to start? For now, it’s with the morning pages. This daily task has a slightly smug, self-conscious ‘and now I will begin my creative practice’ sheen to it, at least at first. I sit down with my cup of tea and my writing pad and I feel like a sucker. It’s unseemly even to talk about morning pages! But, but. A few sentences into writing these things – and it’s all just diffuse, low-level croaking – all of that falls away. I start to try out some thoughts, turfing out most but running with others for a bit. My only purpose is to try to remember how to think. And to burn through a bit of the ordinary fear that always grabs on in the mornings.

At a launch for a book of short stories many years ago, the launch speaker reminded us that one of the most difficult things about writing stories as opposed to novels was that you had to keep starting again. Over and over, you had to build a new thing and get the reader onboard. It was precarious for a writer, to offer their reader so many exit ramps. The same would apply for any work made up of fragments or short pieces: essays, poems, lists... (A thing I’ve noticed (and like) about a lot of writers is that when they consider the forms other people write in, they seem aghast. ‘I could never write a novel.’ ‘How do you write a poem? My god.’ ‘I cannot imagine writing about my life. I feel sick.’ I enjoy this almost wild panic as writers try to fathom another life of writing.)

Anyway, I think I love starting again. Mostly because I like the feeling of completing a very tiny ‘work’. Sometimes I write a single sentence and I think, ‘That’s enough for me.’

Last week, I was rereading Essayism by Brian Dillon. I was trying to figure out how to organise my thoughts for a lecture about essays to an undergraduate English class. (I was so torpedoed by nerves over giving this lecture that I spent the whole week tussling with it – hence a gap in proceedings here.) Essayism is a searching, sometimes bleak but often joyful book about the form. I go to this book to be reminded that there are no wrong ways for a mind to move, and this feels very consoling when you don’t know what the hell you’re doing. But Dillon also talks about this very business of re-starting: ‘I cannot seem to leap outside the vexing schedule of short texts – every book I write must also conform to the serial production of fragments that could be composed in a day or two. I would never have written anything if I had not hit upon this rhythm of invention and completion; it’s what allows me, and perhaps many other writers too, to keep a killing anxiety at bay.’ But then he goes on: ‘Is that what the essay is, what the essay allows: an excuse for never being able to commit to a lifelong, career-long project?’

I thought about that, and decided the answer for me was yes, and I felt OK about it.

Reserved a copy of Cars and Trucks and Things That Go by Richard Scarry from the library. A sudden urgent need to look at those vehicles.

Tuesday

Because I’m trying to write about driving, whenever there is a mention of driving in a book, I lock in. It’s like Bill Manhire’s famous poem ‘Zoetropes’, only instead of my eye catching on the letter Z it is catching on cars. I am reading the novel Old Filth by Jane Gardam, and I’m very taken by scenes of the protagonist, a retired 80-year-old judge named Eddie Feathers, driving his car: ‘Bloody good car, strong as a tank, fine as a good horse’. After his wife dies, he strikes out from his home in Dorset towards a place called Herringfleet, where an old friend lives; to get there he must drive on the A1, which he’s never done before. ‘He plunged out into the melee of Spaghetti Junction without a tremor, scarcely registering the walls of traffic that wailed and shrieked and overtook him. He admitted a sense of tension whenever he swerved into the fast lane, but enjoyed the stimulation. Several very large vehicles passed him with a dying scream . . .’

On he goes, fearless and oblivious. His driving is clearly insane – Gardam lets us in on this fact quite subtly but unmistakably – and he blasts along the motorway with undimmed focus, his map committed to memory. In one moment he spots a café and zips across the lanes, directly into the path of a truck carrying a load of pipes. ‘A near thing. The driver’s face was purple and his mouth held wide in a black roar.’

Something about this leap into the mad churn, and the way he lets it all wash over him, only ever getting slightly rattled and then quickly regaining his courage or something like courage – it’s frightening and joyous. Maybe I just mean, it’s very satisfying to see this character flinging himself out into the changed world, defying our worries for him. ‘Roads and roads. The traffic went swimming over them, presumably knowing where it was going. Endless, head-on, blazing head-lights.’

After a morning of self-torture – afraid of doing the work, afraid of never doing it – I went to the library, and sitting among other people working helped me to write very badly and fast.

Wednesday

A few months ago I signed up to an online writing course taught by the Australian novelist Charlotte Wood and the New Zealand novelist and screenwriter Emily Perkins. It’s called Elements of the Writing Life. At the time of signing up I thought, ‘Ah yes. Perfect. I will be in my writing life around the time this starts. I will need to know what these elements are.’ Then I managed to miss the first two workshops. Later today, I finally watched the recording of the first one, and it was a revelation. It reminded me a bit of how, when I was learning to drive, I started to imagine the voice of my instructor Sue whenever I drove alone (I still hear it) – its ordinariness and practicality, its gentle, matter-of-fact urging along, as if it is the most unremarkable thing in the world to be crap at something and trying to get better. So, the first workshop, titled Attention, was like this. It was packed with wisdom and practical advice that felt like a great relief. Two small things that stuck with me were Emily noting that it helps to approach your work with kindness and curiosity, and Charlotte quoting the art critic Jerry Saltz, who said in an interview: ‘Go make your bad art, you big baby.’ Excellent. I’d forgotten the usefulness of light insults. I immediately went and bought Charlotte’s book The Luminous Solution.

A while ago I was whining to two friends that one of the things I fear about this time away from my job is that I will find out that I have no inner life. Then we had a good laugh (‘We laugh at your pain!’ said Nick) but I think I was onto something. In The Luminous Solution, Woods writes about her realisation that her inner life – the same as her depressing garden – needs proper tending. ‘What might be called my inner life is, like the space before me, half dead, fragmented, mouldy in some parts, dried out in others. Unbalanced, malnourished, filled with dispiriting mess.’ Thinking about my own – well, yes. There are still some things gasping away in there, but the whole place is bedraggled and some bits have died off altogether. The task ahead is to bring some kind of order and intention back to this place – through reading, noticing, writing, listening – rather than only this anxious, passive cramming in and impatient tearing out.

On Sunday I watched with a good crowd of music nerds the 2002 documentary A Visit to Ali Farka Touré, about the legendary Malian musician. There is a great scene where Touré and others are sitting around listening to Otis Redding’s live performance of ‘Try a Little Tenderness’ on a wheezing record player. Nothing much happens in this scene except reverential listening. The listeners start out smiling, then as the song goes on you see their eyes glistening. When Otis is tearing it up by the end, they’re laughing. It’s just a very beautiful scene of appreciation.

Today’s word count: We seem to have forgotten about this. I’ve decided word counts are a bad idea for various reasons, so let us never speak of them again.

Thursday

The new library is often crowded, and seating is at a premium. Those of us who haven’t yet found a seat must do the walk of searching – it’s slow and peering, often circular, slightly abashed. It’s a vulnerable thing to be unseated among the seated. Today when I was done with my seat for the day, I stood up and found a woman standing right behind me, poised and ready to seize my position. Also, I’ve noticed that with some library seating arrangements – like sofas, and sets of desks – people often spread out in such a way, letting their personal space balloon outwards, that even though there is technically enough space for another person to sit nearby, you cannot take it. Or you could, but it would require even more cringing and apologising than usual. So, those are my complaints for today.

I’ve managed to wrench myself away from editing and reworking and get to writing some new passages. I keep a number of feelings on rotation when striking out: dismay and paralysis, a sort of creeping optimism, a kind of warming, a jag of fear. All the hits. I move back and forth amid these. Sometimes a new, unprogrammed one pops up, like relief, hopelessness, or a sort of pleasure.

I also watch the second workshop recording with Emily Perkins and Charlotte Wood, this one titled Permission. Again – a revelation! I recommend this course to all. The danger with reading The Luminous Solution is that now I want to quote it at everybody, but I will just say one more thing about it – somewhere along the line I had forgotten that the writer doesn’t always have to struggle in a self-inflicted, guarded, lonely darkness, as if that’s somehow truer or more genuine; they can allow their work to be more porous, open to conversations with friends, to talks and courses, and so on. ‘I seek out instruction because the danger is not that my well-oiled way of working might be disrupted; it’s that it might never be disrupted again. Interference with my process, in other words, is exactly what I need. . . . Sometimes I wonder whether I could write at all without the transformative jolts these conversations have given me.’

On Instagram a reel comes up with a young woman explaining how ‘Oversharing is a trauma response’. It seems to me that many things are being reframed as trauma responses. Accidentally blowing off in the supermarket? Trauma response. Getting your shoe stuck in an escalator? Trauma response. Anyway, it made me worry a little about what I’m doing here, and about how I do tend to blurt things out inappropriately when in company. However, depending on the blurter, I always love to be on the receiving end of a blurt. So now I am not sure what I think.

Friday

I’ve been reading along with the rest of the world the novel Transcription by Ben Lerner. Something is not quite gelling with me here – what is it? It’s like there’s some odd pitch in the writing, almost like a faint electrical noise of drilling (though this might literally be the construction workers outside), as if I can feel what he’s getting at all the time. At the same time, I think I like it.

Unsure if the morning pages are still helpful. I tear through them at a stupid pace and with no regard for what I’m doing, like Old Filth. Today I struggle to progress much beyond these,pages, so I resort to lists and plans, and then I put on some music to try to help things along. The music I write to is extremely repetitive – usually it’s a soundtrack (Max Richter). But every so often I’ll need something voicy and fast and even screechy. Disasteradio or Built to Spill are perennials. I don’t know how Doug Martsch’s nasal keening can work for me, but I’m very grateful to it.

In primary school, our Standard 3 teacher, Miss Lawrence, had us do a writing session while she played the Jurassic Park soundtrack. An incredible choice, from this distance, but the soundtrack was very big back then. I think I remember the portable stereo she played it on, which had a roundish, baskety look. This would’ve been around 1993. Mainly, I remember how much I enjoyed writing my story to that happy, soaring orchestra. (I’ve since read on Wikipedia that the soundtrack’s composer, John Williams, set out to try to ‘match the rhythmic gyrations of the dinosaurs’. Incredible! He also described the work as ‘a rugged, noisy effort – a massive job of symphonic cartooning’. As well as filling his soundtrack with harps and horns and woodwinds, Williams also turned to synthesisers, like for ‘Dennis Steals the Embryos’.)

The story I wrote in class while listening to all this was about a girl getting stuck in an avalanche and then rescued by a polar bear which had somehow abandoned all its murderous instincts. A bit of plagiarism there – I’d been reading ‘heroic dog’ stories and there was one about a Saint Bernard that rescued a young girl trapped in the snow of the Swiss Alps; I remember the way the dog’s great, soft warmth was described and how it brought the child back to life – but the music unlocked something for me and there was much feeling in the writing of the story. During that session I am sure I also made an excited list of ideas for future stories, none of which I remember except for this line: ‘A sad sort of story in which two people part.’ (This sort of thing is why I cannot write fiction.)

In the afternoon I go for a walk and can’t handle the sound of my own thoughts so I have to stuff earbuds in and listen to a podcast with two guys shouting at each other. I do not want to go back to my work and see what horrors lie there. But then, once back, I put on some music, light an actual candle (which takes numerous attempts to light, in an annoyingly heavy-handed metaphor for a creative work), and settle in, with Jerry wedged again down one side of the armchair. Through this, I manage to mash out a few hundred words. All bad, but something.

I have been thinking about this because an incredible thing has happened, which is that I am now on leave from my fulltime job for a whole six months. I will spend some of this time writing. I am a very slow and clunking writer, but so far each day feels like a small commute through weather, and maybe this could be traced in some way and made to count.

Writing Week will be even more sporadic than Cycling Week. There will be some weeks when there is no writing to speak of, or weeks when I am not keen or am too cowardly to write about the writing. So it will happen when it feels like it, and perhaps then it will metamorphose into something else again, or go to seed again.

Monday

There’s a folder on my laptop labelled ‘Dark forest’. Inside are several Word documents. They are half-written essays and a book outline. I’ve called the folder ‘Dark forest’ because this validates my fear about going into the folder and opening one of the documents. The ‘dark forest’ isn’t particular to any real or imagined place – it’s just the felt sense of the words, which match the dread I feel about going into my writing. Once I have entered this place and taken a few steps, a few things happen: I remember that it’s a horror in here. I take a few more steps. There are small patches of sky through the trees. I’m still down in the mud, and alone. But I can sort of handle it! I keep sort of shuffling along.

Over the last couple of years I have had a lot of fear around writing. These started out as garden-variety fears, like ‘you have less than nothing to say’ and ‘you will squander all opportunities’. It’s difficult and embarrassing to talk about this. But suffice to say I let these fears run riot. It felt like an emergency. Most things I’ve started, I’ve let go cold. I will finish a commissioned piece only when I detect true desperation in the editor’s email.

Last week I finished writing a short piece I was commissioned to write about the poet Jenny Bornholdt. This should have been a joy to write (and it was! in the last few minutes, when the end was in sight). But because of my fear, it took me three months to start writing it, and I blasted through all new deadlines kindly extended to me. Though, is there anything sweeter than confessing all this to someone, and them telling you that they know someone else who still hasn’t written their piece, for the same project? The heart has no choice but to soar.

All of this to say, part of my project over the next few months is to write through these fears.

I have another folder labelled ‘Bad News’. This folder is full of stuff – poems, short prose pieces, outbursts. I like surveying all the stuff in there, and find it’s easier to write new things, and be alert to old things that might become new things. Anything that rises up alive out of this wreckage seems like a miracle.

Today’s word count: 0. (What counts as a word? Do the words in emails, journal entries, to-do lists etc. count? Does what I’m writing now count? I regret bringing up this subject. Why must we always play into the hands of Big Word Count? But in terms of material progress on what I intend to write, the word count is 0.)

Tuesday

Today I’m writing at home. I’m hemmed in by bikes and my cat Jerry is sausaged into one side of my armchair. It is useful to be a bit trapped.

I have a lot of material that could go in many directions, and I don’t know how to organise any of it. I’m trying to focus on just one scene, but other scenes keep muscling in. The piece is about learning to drive, which has been a largely shameful experience. The specific scene is about trying to reverse up around a steep hairpin corner, with Jerry in the car (we’d been coming home from the vet, only to find the driveway blocked by scaffolding trucks) and then scraping the car – my partner’s car – all along a fence.

Today’s word count: Around 450.

Wednesday

An experiment: Morning pages. You’ve heard of these. The idea is, you write three pages of any stuff, then stop. It has to be in the morning, when your defences are low, before you look at your phone or do anything else. I feared this whole exercise, because what if there was nothing . . . in there? But then I found myself warming to the exercise. I felt a bit more hopeful.

And I had a thought: why am I describing scraping the car along a fence?! I need to go back to the beginning. Back to when we were content to imagine ourselves driving logs around – not even hobby horses, just rotten, faceless logs. To be clear, this direction might also be a dead end.

I’ve been reading the 2023 edition of Best American Essays. I haven’t read one of these in a while. There’s a great essay in there by a writer called Merrill Joan Gerber, called ‘Revelation at the Food Bank’. She writes about being torpedoed by her own rage about everything, rage about the mistakes made every day ‘by careless, indifferent idiots’, and rage about her husband, who she wishes would remember to take out the garbage and who tells her she just needs to relax. The essay is set during the pandemic, and on the urging of her cleaning lady Gerber starts going to the food bank instead of shopping for food, and she is buoyed by the riches available and the kindness of the people distributing the goods. She has cooked so many, many meals over her lifetime and surely now it is her time to be provided for. ‘I so desired a free turkey for once in my life.’ I enjoyed Gerber’s cranky self-possession, despite the unflinching bleakness of this piece – it carries us through the escalating irritations and horrors of old age, how even dying seems a chore; but in her writing there’s fierce love for her husband and for the world, too – and so I got Gerber’s most recent book of essays and started reading it. After a fascinating piece about her friendship-in-letters with Cynthia Ozick, there is an essay called ‘At the DMV’, in which she describes the torment of going to the DMV so that her husband can take his yearly driving test – a condition of his staying on the road. Reading her account, I started to get an uneasy feeling. The rage has got Gerber in its grasp now. She’s no longer in charge of it. Anyone who stumbles into her tale has their ethnicity and appearance noted. Gerber is afraid and desperate and seems to assume bad intent from all sides. It is sort of understandable: this DMV sounds like hell! At one point she rings her doctor and says: ‘Help me. We are lost at sea.’ The DMV people control her and her husband’s fates – losing your driver’s licence in California ‘is like being removed from your basic freedom to breathe’. But then, when the couple are eating lunch in a Chinese restaurant after surviving a whole other saga at the doctor’s office, Gerber shares her feeling that Chinese people are taking over America, and that ‘I am becoming a lonely outsider’. The racism erupts so suddenly, but looking back through the essay there are sure signs of its creep – and I think we are supposed to understand that Gerber’s feelings of isolation and helplessness have caused this sepsis. We have to understand! Maybe we’re supposed to think of the other old people in our lives. Maybe we’re supposed to blame ourselves for the prejudices that may have taken hold of them too. But what is incredible is that the writer lets the thought sail past, unexamined, leaving our hearts to sink, leaving us to make the effort to understand her. It feels like a failure of nerve. Or maybe it’s just an exhausted, fearful turning away, which is also a turning away from her reader. Also, she was in a Chinese restaurant for crying out loud.

I abandoned the Gerber and returned to the anthology and read a young man’s account of being in the prison system after carrying out an art heist with two friends. It’s called ‘Bidders of the Din’ by Eric Borsuk. It’s an incredible piece of writing, about the work of recreating one’s life in a hopeless environment and rebuilding when even that is destroyed, and the tiny gifts and inventions that people can wring from these places. For a person to go through such a thing, then here are these few, vivid pages in a prestigious literary anthology for us to enjoy – I feel something about this, and I tell myself I will never forget what I have read just now; I put down the book and I don’t rush onto the next thing.

But then inevitably it goes into the churn of other things read and grappled with. I started reading Michael Pollan’s new book about consciousness. (Do plants have it? etc.) I am nowhere near smart enough for this book and must reread many of the passages.

Today’s words: around 460, but I see deletion in their future.

Thursday

The first thing I heard on waking was a builder, on the building site nearby, saying: ‘There’s a lot of meat in the head as well.’ A LOT OF MEAT IN THE HEAD. AS WELL.

I spent some time writing in Te Matapihi, the new central library. All the students were leaned over their work in the same way as before, and the security guy was doing that same slow walk along the tables. The same libraryish light was coming in from Civic Square. In Clark’s I ate a filo pastry that had the same spirit of the filo pastries I used to eat in the old Clark’s, around 2005. It feels as if the whole library world was suspended somewhere else for a while before slotting right back into place.

I was trying to write a lecture that I am giving to an undergraduate English class next week – why did I agree to this! As part of this process, I am looking back over a similar lecture I gave a few years ago. It is terrible to read your notes for an old lecture and to see how certain you once were about things.

In the morning a pīwakawaka flew through the open door and into the room. I let it out a window. Then I went outside, and it flew back around and fluttered around me on the doorstep, chirping. This was ominous – what message do you bring?! Tell me! – but it was so friendly and it seemed to look directly into my eyes.

Word count: I’m not sure how to count this today, because the words were scattered among projects. Let’s say around 400 of actual wordage.

Friday

Fear is running high today. It’s like an eczema flare; it comes on suddenly and with no obvious triggers. I also got trapped in the bathroom for a full five minutes. The latch got stuck. I was alarmed at how quickly I gave up – ah well, I thought, I won’t be able to do any writing today, I will have to live in here. Then my self-preservation instinct kicked in and I remembered the window and managed to squeeze through in my dressing gown and drop down onto the recycling bins and clamber to the ground from there. The writing life.

That pīwakawaka came inside again. It was the same one, no question. I let it out the window again. Again – ominous, but I hope it comes in every day bearing whatever messages of doom it likes.

Word count: A negative number. I didn’t write anything substantially new, but edited and noodled with existing things. This can be a trap, and I am susceptible to it because I edit other people’s writing for a living. The habits of editing are like muscle memory. It is easier and more enjoyable to rewrite and cut and reshape and tease out, and often this phase is where I land on things I feel OK about. It’s risky, though, because you can spend forever in this phrase, turning and turning in circles like a cat that never sits down – and needless to say you might be making the situation worse and not better.

Pedal on, everyone! Or – shuffle. Shuffling is work.

Monday

For the Christmas ride, I cycled over to Brooklyn in the morning. I wanted to cruise along Highbury Fling, but on Sunday it was heaving with rain, and I didn’t want to slip into the mud and roll down a bank, which is something that definitely would happen to me on Christmas Day. One time on Christmas Day I went out running and fell over and fractured my arm. So this morning I went down Aro St then up Brooklyn Rd (again, I thought up going up Ohiro instead, which is a bit shorter, but I was feeling more like a long, less steep ride than a short steep one).

With the separated lane, Brooklyn Rd is so much better for cyclists than it used to be. It’s almost peaceful to ride up there now. The roads were quiet-ish of course, and the temperature was exactly right, if on the muggy side. I saw one other cyclist, plodding up Happy Valley Rd, and we gave each other The Nod (Christmas Day edition).

I was going to have coffee at my friend Morgan’s. The problem with cycling to someone’s for a visit, especially if it’s uphill, is that for quite a while after you arrive, you’re going to be sweating. And you just have to accept that; fighting it will make it worse. I’m a profuse sweater, especially on the face (and the shins – why the shins?) and the polite thing to do is to discreetly blot with a hand towel you’ve bought for the purpose or, at a pinch, with your t-shirt. And you have to be patient: it’s not just the first wave of sweat to deal with, but the subsequent ones. I usually get two waves; three if it’s really hot. After that, there’s the need for sunscreen re-application. There is no point in attempting make-up. And ideally you’ll get through this whole performance without making a scene. It’s all a faff but it can be done, as long as you make your peace with looking bedraggled. There are two things I want in the future world: the ability to teleport, and the ability to switch off sweat (somehow with no detrimental effects to the body). If I could have other impossible things, I would also like a Surly Midnight Special and for Jerry to never die.

Anyway, after that I rode home, zooming along Tanera then Mortimer then down Durham, then back up Raroa and Mt Pleasant. In the past I’ve liked to do a big ride on Christmas Day, but today it was necessary to lie around and read. I’ve been on a huge Willy Vlautin bender for the last few days. I’m trying to think if there are any bicycles in any of his books, and actually I don’t think there are, so this is irrelevant. A lot of great cars and trucks, though, and a horse.

Tuesday

A no-ride day. But I went for a little run around the trails in the morning, and I must have been the first person around because I ran through approx. 125 spider webs. Apart from this destruction, it was quiet – I saw no other runners or walkers or bikers at all – and a total delight to be out running, with the birds blipping around. Then I lay around and read another Willy Vlautin.

Wednesday

I went on an errands ride into town. This was very satisfying – there was no particular urgency or time limit on any of it and I took both panniers and just cruised along. I saw a girl on a really cool racing bike. Although I often talk about how much I love the look of the new e-bikes flying around, especially the cargo ones, it’s the pedal-powered bikes, especially the racing ones, and especially the racing ones ridden by women, that truly have my heart. Nothing will ever look cooler, and that is just a fact.

After riding back up the hill – and attempting to ride on the road for a little bit up Raroa, but then giving up and going onto the footpath out of sheer terror of close-passing maniacs, festive edition – I lay around and read another Willy Vlautin.

Thursday

I lay around and read another Willy Vlautin.

Friday

First thing in the morning I went for a little ride up the hill. On the way back, pannier full of bread and milk, I did a couple of loops around Highbury. The air was soft and cotton-woolly and there were just a few runners out. When I got home I did a bit of bike maintenance (by which I mean I pumped up my tyres and de-greased and re-greased the chain, and nothing else).

I may have overdosed on Willy Vlautin. Everyone I know is getting tired of me going on about him. So I’ve moved on to Sigrid Nunez’s latest for a change of gear.

This is going to be my last Cycling Week, at least for a while, and this blog will go back to being more occasional. I’m not sure what the heck it will be about now, but rest assured, it will be ‘something else’. Secretly, of course, Cycling Week will continue on, at its usual glacial speed, because every week is a Cycling Week for me, but I just won’t be writing it down.

I’ve been thinking a lot about writing, recently, and how bad I’ve been feeling for not writing the book I have been wanting to write, due to a total loss of confidence and a surfeit of highly effective avoidance strategies, and that this year I would like to try to make a bit more headway, rather than letting work take over my brain and heart quite so much. This is the eternal struggle of life for anyone who is trying to be a writer (although, I say that about many things: email, mornings, parties, eczema, etc.. – all are the eternal struggle of life). But if I can write even a sentence each day (or each week!), I will be going further than I’m going now. And some of it might go on this blog – we’ll see.

Thank you so much for reading. Pedal on!

Monday

Rode to work in gusty grey winds. Legs feeble, brain like pile of leaves (alternately whirling in the air and lying in a dingy heap). Was wearing a skirt that wasn’t ideal to ride in but that was somehow enjoyable too – on the downhills I liked the feeling of it billowing around like an exhaust fume, and on the uphills it was easy enough to keep under control.

After work I rode into town for necessary beers. On the ride home, twilight-ish, zooming past a bus stop, I saw that my bus was on the way and – emboldened by 2.5 beers – decided to catch it.

I’ve used the bike racks on buses a couple of times before, to and from Paraparaumu when I was house-sitting and the train was cancelled. But I’d pretty much forgotten how to do it and I’ve always feared holding other people up, due to my ineptness at anything involving levers, springs, ‘arms’ or brackets. But this time I realised: what’s the worst that can happen, other than somehow getting my entire body caught in the mechanism and requiring a team of firefighters to free me?

Some back story. A couple of weeks ago, on a Sunday, I was waiting for a bus (sans bike) on Aro St and the broadcaster Bryan Crump came along, preparing to load his bike onto the rack. Many years ago Bryan Crump interviewed me, on Nights with Bryan Crump. But I decided not to say anything and just pretend we’d never met before, which somehow seemed more polite. He’d been prepared for rain, he said, so he had planned to use the bike rack on the way home, but as it turned out the rain hadn’t come, which meant he could bike up the hill after all – but he wasn’t psychologically prepared. So he was still going to use the rack. The bus came along, and it was incredible to see him flow through the encounter: a hearty wave and a bold showing of the bike so the driver could see what was coming, and then a seamless loading of the bike onto the mechanism. A masterclass.

So, I was inspired to try the rack the next time I had the opportunity.

Back to Monday night: The bus surged towards the stop. I experienced a thrill of fear and excitement. I rolled up with my bike, making towards the rack as if I knew what I was doing. But the driver – he could smell my confusion – was already on his way out to help. Then off we went, up the hill with my bike on the front while I relaxed like a happy hog. Even better, there were only two other people on the bus to witness my incompetence. At the top I managed to get the bike off and then I sailed un-sweatily along the top of the hill towards home.

Tuesday

It felt like a lot of riding today, always running late, always riding as fast as I could go.

Rode to work in glinty sunshine. Then down the Terrace to meet a writer for coffee. Zoomed back to work at top speed – after the coffee this was a really enjoyable ride, somehow, the air still cool-ish and the road quiet-ish, lungs feeling good. Some days the best way to get up the Terrace is to meet it on its level and really attack it. The misery comes when you allow the unforgiving churn of that road to get into your bloodstream.

After that, I weaved through traffic over to Mt Vic for a Christmas lunch, and then, sweating and full of cherries and regret, up the hill back to work. This time, the Terrace really did defeat me; roly-polying up it would have been more efficient. Then, finally, biked home, with overstuffed panniers and tired legs. Lay on the floor.

This was one of those days when an e-bike would come into its own. And one of those days where resistance feels increasingly futile. ‘The e-bike thing has been building, Ashleigh,’ said my friend James recently, and he’s right.

Recently, on a week when I didn’t write this blog, I tried out an e-bike for the first time, going up and down a steep hill. What struck me most about the experience was the ridiculous delight of moving at such speed with so little effort. I found myself screeching with joy – a wholesome, uncontrollable screech. I felt a bit like Klara in Heidi, returned to health after weeks of fresh mountain air and goats’ milk, when she surges up out of her chair and miraculously walks.

Wednesday

Rode to Thorndon at lunchtime for a brain appointment. This was a bad ride, not helped by running late again; the wind was blasting from all directions and there was a feeling of craziness in the air, of things building and curdling and spilling over. Ahead of me Mainfreight truck trundled along with one of its shouty motivational quotes – I don’t remember the quote exactly, but it was something like ‘You are an idiot’.

It hasn’t been a great year for the brain. But I’m grateful for my bike for continuing to get me places, even though so much of the time I am complaining about the getting there.

I saw a beautiful cargo e-bike on this trip through town, one of those ones with a long wooden box that look kind of like a sideboard full of secret fancy plates.

Afterwards, I slogged south up the Terrace back to work. Technically, the university is now closed and work is over, but I’m not finished. Afterwards I rode home very slowly, panniers once again overstuffed and left leg starting to gripe. Flax and a few little branches are tendrilling out on Glasgow so you have to duck to avoid them now. I let out a gargled groan at a close-passing ute.

Thursday

Rode to the National Library. Then rode a bit further into Thorndon and got an extremely painful but excellent massage mostly on my bad leg.

The roads had reached a new level of insanity, with rampant red light runners and drivers crossing lanes chaotically and without indicating. I tried to keep my head down and just get through, hopefully without being too obnoxious in my occasional weaving through long lines of stopped traffic. At one point I was in the cyclists’ stop box on Victoria, preparing to go straight. The light went green. A tall white van behind me tried to accelerate past and cut in front to go left. I heard a guy yelling – a weird, high tromboney noise, like Telly Savalas on The Extraordinary, but angrily – out the window of the van. I honestly can’t work out if I was in the wrong there or not. I think I wasn’t. But he sounded so annoyed that I wonder if really I was.

Further up Victoria St, at the point where it turns towards Aro, a van sped past me too close and I heard the guy inside say, ‘Fuck off!’ and then he cut in front of another cyclist – an older lady – to turn left; a second later and he would’ve knocked her off. This is some bananas behaviour.

Rode to a cafe and jabbed at my work laptop. Drank two coffees, became less productive but more frantic.

Rode home up the hill in weirdly steamy fog and rain-flecked air. The hills like sheepish blobs. Stopped to say hello to a grey cat on Mt Pleasant.

Friday

Rode up to the golf ball on Hawkins Hill this morning. Rather than a reset ride, this was a depression ride, which is a bit different – a depression ride is about just keeping on going, pressing through the moment, keeping your eye on your front wheel, and, ideally, exhausting yourself. I feel depression in my body as well as my head – I think this is pretty common for garden-variety depressives – so it can be helpful to get really tired.

Moving at approximately the pace of a slug, I went from Aro Valley up to Brooklyn – as always, the sharply steep bits of Durham and Mortimer, then Apuka and Mitchell were killers – and then began the climb towards the turbine.

I’d hoped that this ride would improve as I went on and my energy would return, but the ride was actually kind of miserable, and I probably should’ve turned back at the turbine rather than making for the radome. Partly it was the fog. The world was the colour of a lint filter. The higher I climbed, the thicker the fog became and the colder it got and the more my head ached and the more depressed I felt. The metaphor was embarrassing. At one point, I was churning along up a particularly steep and gritty bit, and I started sobbing like Homer Simpson over spilt milk. The sobbing was not bad enough to stop riding – in fact maybe it gave me a bit more forward propulsion. Luckily I am now able to zoom out on this moment and find it quite funny.

And maybe the ride did improve, a little bit? I noticed things: a pair of little quails jogged nervously over the road, headgear wobbling. Another cyclist – only one, today – came zooming down. Pink foxgloves trembled at the side of the road. An occasional truck or car, always speeding. By the time I got to the top I had made several major life decisions three times over, all of which became ridiculous as I zoomed back down the other way and my senses returned. All up the ride took me 1 hour and 45 minutes, which is outrageously slower than usual for that ride, but I’m pleased I managed to get out and do it.

Thank you very much to anyone who has stopped by this silly blog this year. I am very grateful to anyone who has read my complaints and unfocused thoughts as I’ve ridden around – mostly over the same roads, having the same thoughts – and left me nice comments or emailed me. I don’t quite know why I am recording my very ordinary bike rides in this way, but somehow it’s fun, and it keeps me going, and maybe helps me be a little bit saner too.

Having just written that paragraph I have just realised that there is still one more week of 2023, so I take it all back. I will ride around a bit more, and then will be back next week. Meri Kirihimete!

Monday

The morning ride. A blustery sunny morning with blackbirds swooping low over the road. Sudden horror: rode over a huge dead rat. It was on a blind corner when I was going uphill, and it was too late to swerve, so I had no choice. The rat was flat but fresh, and in the split second of riding over it my experience of the morning ride broke into two distinct parts: before rat, after rat. Before rat: hopeful, energetic, a little nervous about the week ahead but determined. After rat: fearful, weary, newly alert to pain in the world. To be clear, the rat was big.

On the ride home – greyish, warmish afternoon – I passed a boy on a bike with a loud squeaky chain. A squeaky chain is a sad noise. It’s one of the few things on a bike that is very easy to remedy – even I can do it – and that provides instant gratification for you and the bike.

This felt like a hard ride. I was feeling deeply frazzled and this always makes riding feel harder, or increases my rate of perceived exertion, as the kids say. I had to hop off and take two trips – first bike, then pannier – to squeeze past a truck that was parked on a narrow bit of road.

Tuesday

The morning ride. Grey and rain-spattered. I confess I did the fingers to a close-passing car on Raroa Rd. Was immediately disappointed with myself. I’d thought I’d been getting better in the last few days about keeping a handle on my rage, but sometimes the handle just flies right off and your arm goes with it.

Going fast downhill on Glasgow, a little car sped past to overtake and then pulled left without indicating. Grumpiness increasing.

In the afternoon I rode into town – scary red light runners on Karo Drive, like clowns cartwheeling across a stage – and then rode up the eternal hill to get home and get back to the second eternal hill: my manuscript reading. My chain leaped off its sprocket on Mt Pleasant and it was nice to have a rest for a moment while putting it back on.

Wednesday

I’ll just come out and say it: I woke up from a dream in which I was riding my bike in my undies. I was going uphill, and trying to ride along confidently to trick people into thinking I was wearing some kind of sporty get-up instead of undies. But I knew, and everyone else knew, that these were straightforwardly undies. What interests me about this dream is: why wasn’t I just completely nude? Why did my mind say: ‘She needs to be made anxious by this dream, but not TOO anxious – let’s put her in undies, at least.’

Today was a four-ride fully-clothed day. It was a work at home day, but I rode into town to work in a cafe for a while and rode back at lunchtime, and then at the end of the day I rode to the university for a book event. The ride home, at first a minor slog, suddenly opened out into a good ride. A good ride! The roads felt quieter and the air was soft. On Highbury Rd I heard a saddleback doing its loud chattery beeping noise from a tree and I stopped to see if I could see it, but I couldn’t. I nearly always find it hard to spot a tīeke, even though their call is so insistent. I think they must do this on purpose.

Thursday

Non-bike-related: Started the day with an early-morning run/plod around Clinical, no one else out, sun plinking through the trees. I’ve been trying, very slowly, to get back into the running, with a max of two runs a week – I miss running more than that, and in terms of head-clearing power, nothing comes close – but my cranky leg always starts up when I push it, and after much trial and error, many physiotherapists and acupuncturists and massage therapists, and endless rolling and stretching and mobility work, I’ve learned that I simply cannot reason with this leg. This leg is my dark matter. Where did it come from? Where is it going? How do we study it? Does it even exist? Is the bad leg the secret to solidifying the standard model of particle physics? Will understanding the bad leg fundamentally alter how we view and understand the world around us?

Rode to work. Had to hop off at speed and scramble onto the footpath to let a bus coming up the other way go past. Did the wave and nod, and but no wave and nod were forthcoming in return. But fair enough. Driving a bus in Highbury must be stressful enough without factoring in waves and nods.

Rode home at lunchtime to continue my work. This was one of those teeth-gritted rides, but I did see a good dog – a large black Lab – waddling along behind its owner.

Friday

Pumped up my tyres. Have been making an effort to do this weekly, and it really does make a difference to comfort levels on the road.

Jerry came for a walk to the top of the hill this morning –

– then I set off for a fast morning ride, pannier heaving.

Rode home in the afternoon to continue my work. I’ve been experimenting with a new mindset for going up hills, and all it is, is telling myself when at the mid point of a long hill: ‘You’re practically home!’ Sometimes this helps, and sometimes I get into an argument with myself. ‘You idiot. There’s still miles to go,’ etc.. Both of me has a point on this.

Haven’t managed a big ride in ages. Resolved to get out and do one this coming week – probably just a golf ball ride, because quiet roads are needed, and the golf ball ride is a manageable length of ride to fit into a day if you start work early and finish later. Speaking of the golf ball: on Friday night, talking to some cyclist poets, I heard tell that a windsock recently appeared up there near the radome. This was very exciting news and I was sad that I hadn’t had a chance to see it, because apparently the windsock has now disappeared, and all that remains is the pole from which it once flapped. What happened to the windsock? Why did it appear, and who took it away – and why did they take it away? And how? Or was it simply that the windsock wasn’t properly attached to the pole, and a strong wind took it?

No choice but to pedal on into the unknown.

The morning ride. A blackbird sat on the road for ages, watching me approach. I asked it what it was doing and it flew off, thankfully.

Raroa was surging with impatience so I put my head down and tried to focus on my front wheel and little patch of road whirring away.

Rode home after work in the rain, in a T-shirt and without gloves or headband – one of those rides where you set off on auto-pilot, slack-jawed. I watched the rain running across my bare arms and thought, ‘I could stop and do something about this,’ but the effort of stopping felt greater than the effort of carrying on.

Tuesday

Rode to work. It was grey and cold again. A driver tried to let me in at an intersection, but it was one of those strange courtesies, where to take the driver up on the offer would mean holding up a long line of traffic as I went uphill and presumably enraging a whole bunch of drivers, so I waved them on. Then felt guilty for refusing the kindness.

After work I rode down into town to an event, then rode home just before it got properly dark. The red light runners were out, playing their games of nearly causing fatal accidents. My spare rear light came into its own when the main one died. After the ruckus of the event it was good to be slogging along in the twilight, thinking about dinner.

Hills. The worst thing about a hill is that once you start climbing it, you have to carry on climbing it. That is a very basic hill observation. But still, I grapple with it over and over again – this business of having to keep going when everything in your body is saying, ‘This is just really unpleasant.’ But the hill has you in a headlock. Some days I choose to suffer; some days I choose to encourage myself through it like a motivational speaker in a badly fitting suit saying words that mean nothing but that sound like something; some days I choose to cry, as if I’m in the last stage of the Tour de France rather than just getting up a minor ascent to get home; some days I like the hill and feel grateful that there’s no other way to get to the end.

Wednesday

Bright sunshine all of a sudden. Two rides, both difficult, all of my fitness vanished and my focus simply on getting through.

Should you carry on riding your bike when you’ve got a cold, or you’re recovering from one, or you’re just generally feeling like a dried-out sponge with eyes? It depends. Usually the decision I arrive at, for better or worse, is: pedal on, you big baby. But walking or getting the bus would’ve been the sensible thing for today.

Small triumph: Pumped up my tyres and cleaned and re-greased my chain after two weeks of putting it off.

Small failure: Went into the bike shop to get electrolyte tablets but they didn’t have any. The man tried to persuade me to buy a different sort, but I couldn’t face change.

Thursday

The morning ride. Summery. Getting up the hill was a struggle. Felt like riding through raw dough. Made mental note to get blood test. Yelled ‘Shithead’ at a car that passed too closely, and immediately regretted it and promised myself that was the last time I would yell that. A large truck passed closely and I very nearly yelled it again but managed to yell something else terrible.

At lunchtime I trudged home, and even though it was a beautiful day and the road was relatively quiet I could not wait for this ride to be over.

I’ve now entered the danger zone of the year, where I spend more time at home reading manuscripts, which tends to mean fewer bike rides, or bike rides at irregular times, or some days ignoring the bike altogether. Time becomes a bit amorphous without the bookending of the bike ride. My hope is that during this time I’ll be able to do a few ‘reset’ rides – rides that are slow, and mainly about getting air into your lungs and sun on your face, and also about looking at birds and trees and about making plenty of stops to drink from your water bottle. A reset ride just means any ride where you do whatever you want along the way.

Friday

Cycling Week ground to a halt to conserve energy, so there were no rides today at all, and I didn’t feel too guilty about it.

I wish I had a good sentence to sum up this week of very average and less than average rides. But no! Sometimes you just need to get to the end of the ride so that you can make a sandwich and then do something else.

What happened was this: I didn’t ride a bike for two weeks. My reason is: I just didn’t didn’t do it. And listen – I’m embarrassed. But nothing can be done now and we will have to accept it and move on. But first let me try to explain myself and tell you my excuses. I was in Frankfurt for the Book Fair, and then in London, and unless you count a hotel exercycle – but that’s not really any kind of experience, let alone anything like a real bike ride; hotel exercycle time should be experienced at a far remove from yourself, like having blood taken – there was no cycling. I sort of tried to cycle by osmosis, by watching cyclists zipping past, and admiring beautiful cycling infrastructure with smooth, plump separated lanes, and envying people on magnificent cargo bikes towing their shopping, children and dogs. Meanwhile, I was walking, or taking the subway like an animal.

I realised I was too scared to ride a bike. That’s at the heart of it. When I’m in an unfamiliar place, my proprioception – sense of my body in space – gets mangled. I have to move slowly through the world, eyes peeled, feelers out, or I think something bad will happen. It was only after having been in the city for a week that parts of the city felt solid and permanent to me rather than an endlessly revolving carousel. At a dinner one night in Frankfurt, I mentioned to somebody that I was feeling guilty about not having been out for a ride, at least for the good of the blog, and that maybe I would try the next day but I was worried I would get on a bike and just immediately crash, and the person pointed out that the crash would be good content. They were exactly right; the one thing this blog is missing is a good crash. But, I reasoned, I had a couple of meetings in London over the next couple of days, and I couldn’t be going around with a broken collarbone. So on my last morning in Frankfurt I just went for a cowardly run along the riverbank.

Back home, jetlagged, I tried to get back on the bike.

Monday

I had been up since 3am, and by 7 I felt possessed so I went for a ride to the supermarket. I wobbled through the air like a migraine aura. I could feel my legs moving, flapping around like wet flannels, but my head was still rolling around somewhere in the northern hemisphere. As I tried to lock my bike I forgot the code to the lock, panicked, remembered it, forgot it again, remembered it. The next moment my pannier was heaving with grocery items so I must have gone in and shopped and come back out, and I had a recollection of the check-out operator looking at me weirdly. Rode back home slowly, breathing in slow-motion explosions. Raroa Rd swelled and steepened before me like a giant damp serpent. Got home and lay down.

Tuesday

A no ride day. Jetlag and the inevitable plane cold kept me down.

Wednesday

Crawled to work early in the morning. The sunlight was bitey on the eyes. I wasn’t all there yet. A massive truck with a skip on the back roared past breathtakingly closely, engulfing me in its stink. The road itself felt bumpier than I remembered, or my wheels more sensitive. At the same time it felt nice to be inside the familiar rhythm of the bike, as if my brain had been unspooled everywhere and the motion of cycling was gently respooling (?) me.

My ride home was slow, I think the slowest I have ever ridden up that series of hills, every pedal stroke requiring a great conscious effort. Lungs still feeling like two rusty saws. Saw a G-string lying on the road. Had a nice moment of communion with a dog hanging its head out a window. I was starting to feel my legs remembering leg business, and my head returning to the correct hemisphere.

Thursday

The morning ride to work featured a gigantic very flat dead rat. It was right around a blind corner and I was too late to swerve and had to go right over top. I rate this experience a 0/10.

I rode into town mid-morning and got stuck behind a cyclist of chaos. It’s usually pretty easy to know a cyclist of chaos when you see one. This one was on a Flamingo bike, helmet in the front basket, seat too low, pedalling cartoonishly fast but going relatively slowly, handlebars blipping side to side, running every red light he could as pedestrians dodged him. At one point he weaved over to the wrong side of the road into the path of a bus, lurching back over to the other side at the last moment. He cycled with both a high level of intensity – energy spraying in all directions like a Catherine wheel – and a powerful obliviousness to other people on the road. I wondered about this guy; maybe I’d read him all wrong and he wasn’t a chaos cyclist after all, just a guy in a hurry, his big square backpack full of important goods. Maybe the urgency of the moment had made him momentarily chaotic and that wasn’t who he really was. Whoever he was, he owned the road.

Today also featured a night ride home, in quiet, cool, springy night air, and this was a pretty good ride.

Friday

The morning ride. For the first time this week, into a bright grey morning, jetlag fading and cold lifting, I was enjoying some proper alertness, and, along with it, some of the old rage as I churned up Raroa, passed by maniacs.

Early afternoon I rode into town, and on my way back to work a Vector van honked before passing me closely on Salamanca Rd. I did the outstretched arm of incredulity. Why this honking? Was I too far over to the right? But no – I’d been jammed up right against the bank. What is one meant to do on a narrow fast road, where there’s nowhere to pull over? Is the honking just meant to say, ‘I am annoyed!’ But then what? The honking made me crazy. Did they want me to clamber up the grassy bank and off the road so that they could pass? Did they just want an apology? What good was this honking? I wanted to strangle the Vector van’s horn.

I’ve been thinking lately about what to do when you feel embarrassed or plain anxious about holding drivers up. This is something I struggle with, especially as the rider of a push bike, and especially as a slow coach. I find myself pushing as hard as I can to get out of people’s way more quickly. But I think maybe there isn’t an easy solution. Unless you want to pull over – which isn’t always possible, and although you’ll stop holding one driver up you’ll soon be holding up another one – it’s probably best to accept the discomfort, and strive for some dignity and grace in your holding-someone-up-for-a-few-seconds.

Rode home in a semi-window in the rain, happy to have made it to the weekend.

It feels like a real failure to be a bad traveller. Like, a deep incompetence, somehow. If I could have a superpower, apart from stopping eating when I’m full, it would be the ability to move through the world seamlessly, immediately understanding etiquette and signage and public transport systems and crowd behaviour, and to go eagerly and hungrily out into it, rather than cringing, mapping my way at every turn, shoulders like steel pylons. When I think of a good traveller I think of an old friend, James Purtill – I remember meeting up with him in London years ago and he said that earlier that day he’d been walking along when some guys playing football in a park yelled out to ask if he could play, they were short of a player, and he ran out immediately into the game.

Anyway, although they’re now a world away, here are some things about last week’s routine bike rides.

Monday

An earlyish ride to work on a spring-ish day. Leg was aching after running (I use the term loosely) along Transient on Sunday.

As I flew down Glasgow I passed a man and woman talking, both of them wearing the big backpacks of the early walker. ‘I just wanna say, what were you thinking, Grant?’ the man was saying, as the woman guffawed.

After work I zoomed down the hill for necessary beers then rode home afterwards up the hill. The red light runners were out on Karo Drive, sprinting desperately through like streakers on a rugby field. Every time I see them, it’s like seeing some strange species that probably should have died out centuries ago. At the bottom of Raroa the footpath was blocked by the cycle lane construction, and I know that technically I shouldn’t ride on the footpath anyway – so I went on the road instead, and it was freaky how unsafe it felt, to be inching upwards with my little lights on as cars tore by so close. I used to ride this way all the time – there was a time when I was a road purist and always refused the footpath – but it’s bananas how bad that road has been.

Tuesday

On the ride to work a fleet of school boys on scooters went tearing down Raroa, pumping their fists and yelling out of their helmets. In Kelburn I got stuck behind a bus with a big ad for underwear on its back. The picture was of a beautiful woman, a rugby sevens player, in undies, standing in a paddock. I couldn’t get past the bus, and I felt awkward waiting right behind it, trying to avoid the gaze of the woman, as if some sudden intimacy was being required of me, and I resented how the ad seemed to be asking me to appraise the woman’s body, to have opinions about it as I was on my bike going to work, and I just didn’t want to have any opinions but they were beginning to form, rise up out of the sludge, against my will. I started imagining how the ad was conceived – how the team behind it would’ve talked to the rugby sevens player about the look and feel of the campaign and how they all agreed it would be a nice respectful wholesome photo featuring her standing in her undies in a paddock, which would then be carted around town through rush-hour traffic.

After work I zoomed down the hill for writing group. Outside the pub, an elderly man was having an altercation with someone who was sitting in their car. ‘I’m a pedestrian,’ he was crying. ‘This isn’t a road. When were you gonna give way to me? When were you gonna give way to me?’ He was pleading, not letting the driver go.

A slow ride home. Blossoms glowy, moon out. Thought about stopping to take a photo for this blog, because I never have enough pictures, but I didn’t. Exhaustion. Red light runners again. But Raroa Rd was feeling better: there was a new shiny smooth bit that takes you off the road and onto the path – a shared path, now. There is something so hospitable, so kind, about a smooth bit between a road and path to allow an un-bumpy entry; in that shiny seam, you know the makers of the cycle lane were thinking about the over-sensitive tyres of the cyclist seeking a smooth passage uphill.

In the Cycle Wellington Facebook group there have been reports of tacks scattered over the Newtown cycleway. I want to know who it is putting the tacks out, and can almost imagine it being anyone at all – a nice elderly lady, an IT worker, a poet, just some guy at a loose end one night, etc.. But I really want to know, even though knowing would do no good.

Wednesday

On the morning ride my pannier bounced off as I went through a pothole, and my keys went flying out of a pocket and into some weeds, never to be found again.

On the rest of the ride to work, impatience seemed to be pulsating in the air. Once you feel the impatience, it’s hard to tune it out. It comes through in cars following too closely, nudging out to pass at all costs, even on pedestrian crossings – a sense that you must go as fast as possible or be swallowed.

Rode into town again after work for errands. A miserable freezing wind on the downhill. And then home afterwards, riding in a tired blur. My leg has been hurting again this week, so I’ve stepped up the foam rolling again – but the problem with the foam rolling is it requires a bit of energy and knuckling-through, and in case I haven’t complained about this enough, I’m knackered. What would be ideal, I think, is some kind of foam-rolling machine, like the roller inside a pasta-maker, into which you could feed your legs and then process them via a simple hand-crank.

Thursday

The morning ride to work. I was tired and grumpy from too many nights trying to catch up on work and feeling that I was simply getting further behind, so I barely took anything in on this ride, except for when someone close-passed me at speed on Raroa. A bitter rage came surging up and I screamed ‘Shithead!’ Yes, bad behaviour, and a bad choice of expletive, and the rest of the ride was a bitter tug-of-war between my enraged, indignant self and my ashamed, slightly more reasonable self.

At lunchtime I rode into town to run more errands and then did a slow, tiring trudge up the hill, panniers dangerously overstuffed again, to finish the day out at home.

Friday

I’d had hopes of doing a golf-ball ride in the morning before my flight in the afternoon, since it was probably the last decent ride I would get in for the next couple of weeks, but I realised, for once, that I just needed to conserve energy. So, sadly but sensibly, this last day was a no-ride day.

Monday

Rode to work through a blustery grey morning. Nearly got hit by a car at the top of Raroa; the driver blasted through the roundabout as I was going through with right of way. I jammed on my brakes and did the Larry David outstretched arms of incredulity. The driver looked directly at me but didn’t seem to see me, then they cruised off. I felt like a tiny fuming ghost as I pressed onwards.

Rode into town at lunchtime. And this was a bad ride. I’d known it would be, but not quite this bad. The air was all big rainy gusts, side-swiping and galumphing. Car-wash weather. At one point I got stuck behind a deranged-looking bubble car that had ‘GET 1 MILLION SOCIAL FOLLOWERS’ emblazoned on it. Hmm. What if . . . I mean, no. No! Unless . . .

Close-passing cars all through town. As I slogged back up the hill the weather got worse. Pants sopping, nerves jangling.

The sun came out for the ride home. A watery but bright post-rain sun, which is the best sun to ride in. I always notice that after an intense work day my legs are tired. Do other people find this? You hear a lot about the gut–brain axis, but maybe there’s also something to be said for the leg–brain axis. Admittedly the brain in my legs is still in its primordial soup phase. But I can feel it! Pulsating, plotting, forming terrible opinions.

At various points I was passed by e-bikes and then, embarrassingly, by a runner. Stopped at the dairy to get necessary beer (which was then shaken up hazardously in pannier).

Tuesday

Confession: A no-ride day. My goal this week is simply to get through, and if a ride is on offer or there is a bus approaching, I am going to take it.

Wednesday

On the ride to work my head was somewhere else, either down in the weeds or up in the clouds, in an acid rain of to-do lists, but then I shared a nice nod with a guy riding an incredible-looking cargo bike with a long wooden box on the front. I’m really liking seeing new cargo bikes around. They look more like fancy furniture, or big dancing clogs, than bikes. This one was big-nosed, elegant, a sort of Adrien Brody cargo bike, or a psychotherapist’s-chaise-lounge cargo bike.

Once at work I realised I’d forgotten my lock. Disaster. I’d wondered why my pannier was so light. The forgotten lock was a problem. I needed the lock because I had a book launch after work. Could I bike home at lunchtime on a busy day and grab it, so that I could bike down to the launch then bike home afterwards? It was all too hard. So I left my bike at work. This turned out to be for the best: After the launch, I had to carry a long cardboard box thing with me, and it would’ve been awkward or impossible on a bike. A cargo bike would’ve had no problem with it of course. Being a weakling, I got an Uber.

Another day of truncated riding goes by.

Thursday

A good lunchtime ride today. The purpose of this ride was to carry a whole bunch of crap home – gym gear, shoes, lunchbox containers, etc. – that had been festering in the office. I think of this sort of ride as a ‘bike commute maintenance’ ride. This is obviously where the car, as an idea, comes into its own: you can carry everything in one go, eliminating the need for a maintenance ride. But I often get into a situation where I simply have too much stuff, too much for one bike trip. So I have to do a secondary trip. The best way to do this is to make the maintenance ride an event: don’t fight it, don’t grouch about it, don’t half-ass it; whole-ass it. As it turns out, this bike ride was excellent, out in the sun; I felt returned to myself as I went up and down hills. There was also something satisfying about moving stuff from one place to another, as if I was off-loading psychic baggage as well as actual baggage.

I remember when I was moving flats once, in my twenties, I cycled back and forth between Lyall Bay and Newtown six times in one day, determinedly, with two heaving panniers. I’d booked a mover, but I thought I didn’t want to inconvenience them with all of the little things. There is definitely some element of pride and ego (or vanity) involved in these sorts of rides.

A strange thing happened on this ride where I soared between excitement and exhilaration and then stress and dread. Then back again. This emotional trampolining is a thing that sometimes happens on a ride and I’m trying to learn not to worry about it.

At the end of the day: a good, fast ride home. Kākā circling and screaming; a tiny boy holding his palm out defiantly to stop a bus; some boy mountainbikers careening down the hill without lights.

Friday

A grey, spitty morning ride up Raroa in a dream. Stress. Too many things. The hours squashed. Too tired even to yell at a little car that passed so close I would’ve touched it if I’d shrugged a little to the right.

Saw a freshly dead blackbird on road, which made me intensely sad for a moment.

A fast ride home at the end of the day, legs griping, grumpy as hell, but relieved to be back on my bike and on my way to the fix-it stand of the weekend.

A brisk grey day with aching legs. Daylight saving has begun, and what a terrible idea that was. Rode to work, sleepy, running late, with my usual groaning pannier. A kid was dressed as a tree while waiting for the bus, his mother bending down to fuss with his leaves. A man was walking towards the vet holding a cage with a ginger cat in it. He reminded me of my dad – something about the stiff-legged carrying, the bend in the arm, the grasp of the hand on the handle of the cage.

I rode into town at lunchtime – I’d had a pants sizing mishap and needed to exchange the pants. While I was waiting at a red light, a man wheeling his bike over the road turned to look at me. ‘Hey,’ he shouted. My blood jumped. Then he said: ‘You look really fit! Really fit. You have a good day, young lady.’ Now, this guy was crazy, and maybe he was only joking, but what cyclist doesn’t want to be told that they look fit? My ego ballooned briefly but grotesquely. I told him to have a good day too.

I’m lucky as a cyclist that generally I haven’t had a lot of people yelling stuff at me, so I don’t often feel fearful that it will happen – but it was interesting how quickly I was on the alert for trouble. I did have people saying stuff when I was younger, and a lot of the comments, hilariously, took issue with my ass. The most memorable one was a woman leaning out of her window to shout ‘Fat-assed bitch’ as she passed. In a post around that time I wrote:

‘You are particularly vulnerable to ass-related verbal abuse when on a bike, not only because your ass is taking up space on the road, but because the ass is at the root of the cycling problem, the original sin – it drives everything; it’s the engine of your forward momentum, it’s always at the heart of the journey. Without it, you wouldn't be on a bike, you wouldn’t be on the road, and this would be preferable to the people who shout things from their car windows. The fewer asses visible on roads, the more room for cars, inside which people’s asses are discreetly tucked away, almost as if they weren’t there, almost as if a person in a car exists in a fugue-like, assless state, taking up no room at all. The ideal ass, the most ergonomic and conveniently formed ass, is the unseen ass.’

The unseen ass! I find I still agree with all this. (But in that same post I also voice a bizarre theory that the reason people get annoyed with recumbent bikes is that they can’t see the ass of the rider, so they get confused about where to direct their rage. I’m not so sure about that now. I think this was a time of my life when I felt the need to have theories about things.)

Slogged back up the Terrace into strong headwind. A BMW the size and colour of a whale shark shot past inches away.

Rode home in drenching rain. Feet wet, legs wet, ass wet.

Tuesday

Rode to work in drenching rain. Cyclists are in ‘take a whole change of clothes with you’ territory this week. Had to stop for milk, and dreaded the fruitless tunnelling in my gigantic pannier for my wallet, but miraculously found it on the first swipe through. I realise I should probably be taking two panniers rather than one, to make all of my baggage easier to manage, but I don’t know. Two panniers? It’s all too much to think about. It would be like having two heads.

Rode into town early afternoon to get my mullet trimmed, then took the long way back – a surprisingly enjoyable slog up the Terrace going south from Parliament. I managed to time this well, in a weather window. The fresh air felt good and wholesome in my lungs and the ride gave me a surge of energy for the rest of the afternoon.

Rode home in cold feathery rain – dampening rather than soaking – and again this was a pretty good ride. Stopped for armfuls of cat food. Pannier heaving once again. Kept up a fast clip all the way home.

Wednesday

Rain. Tiredness. Raroa Road. Daylight savings is still a source of suffering to me.

Saw some good dogs on this ride, including some with matching puffer jackets on, and a woman picking up a little dog to put it in the back seat of her car. I’ve always been really struck by the image of a person gently picking up an animal to put it in a car or on a couch or bed. My mother would pick up our dog – a minature dachshund – to put her on the bed when she got too old to jump, and we would pick her up to transport her up and down stairs.

After work I couldn’t face another rainy ride, so left my bike at work. This is always interesting: the line between ‘yes I will ride’ and ‘I can’t do it’. I often find that this line is endlessly negotiable and whim-driven – even when you think the decision is final, there’s nearly always room to turn things around and take the other route. If only I could take this wisdom over into other parts of my life, like writing. ‘Yes I will do it today’ versus ‘I can’t, I can’t, I will die if I do it.’

Thursday

No notes on this day’s rides, really, because my head was so full of work on both of them: I rode into town at lunchtime then rode home at the end of the day, making lists and writing emails and having important conversations in my head in which I articulated myself perfectly.

Sometimes everything becomes clear on the bike – almost like it does when you’re on a long flight, in a blissfully unreachable bubble – and then once your feet are back on the ground the world rushes in and sucks you back out, and you realise that the clarity was a fantasy.

Friday

Managed tiny, limpy run in the morning. Then today was a three-ride day. The morning ride in a watery sun, a lunchtime errands ride, then the post-Friday-beer ride, which was a delight – quiet and cool, cherry blossom glowing, and it was still lightish (daylight saving suddenly a good idea).

Lately I’ve been neglecting my foam-rolling and ‘Claw’-ing (as detailed in the Thursday entry of the below post:)

So I’ve renewed my efforts to use the foam-roller and the Claw every day in an effort to speed up my Bad Leg’s long and tedious recovery. It is such a time-consuming business to writhe around on the floor in various degrees of discomfort, and I don’t even know for sure if it’s truly helping, but my leg feels much better after I do it. In the end, with legs, all you have to go by is feeling.

Hopefully next week’s post will be more interesting.

Monday

The wind was blasting again but the sun was out and I sped to work, pannier dangerously overstuffed, head also full of the usual Monday baggage.

Passed a slow e-bike, which I always worry is somehow rude on my part.

Passed a pick-up truck filled with dirt and a sign on its back: ‘Our business is in the shit’.

After work I rode up to the gym then rode home afterwards, leaving my headphones in. I know this sort of behaviour is frowned upon but it’s too enjoyable not to do it every so often outside of rush hour. (Listened to ‘Oh Joy’ by Todd Terje – cartoonish, satisfying, probably good to play if being chased – and ‘Track 10’ by Christine and the Queens, and I forget what else.) Got a second wind and tried to sprint up Highbury Rd. I can hold a decent uphill effort for as long as my heart and lungs don’t figure out what’s going on. Managed to get away with it for about 30 seconds, zipping upwards and keeping my breath steady as if everything was fine, then the jig was up and I had to revert to a slow, gaspy trudge.

It was getting dark, but in that still lightish September way, and the road was quiet.

Tuesday

Pushed my bike to the top of the hill. Three massive kererū, like bowling balls, were sitting in the magnolia at the top, burbling.

The morning ride. I passed a woman who was waving a stick wordlessly at someone across the road. Her eyes looked unhappy. Beside her, the small drama of people getting on the bus and other people getting off.

A very old-looking dog was being walked, a few steps at a time.

On the ride home I saw an altercation between a courier driver and bus on Highbury Rd, the bus honking in panic while the courier driver tried to get far enough onto the footpath to let the bus through. The bus driver was waving one arm. Finally the courier sorted himself out and the bus roared down in full happy flight at last, like a huge goose that had been freed.

A milky pink and blue sky.

My legs were sore today. I’ve been doing lots more yoga recently, in an effort to get more strength and balance back into the Bad Leg, or more specifically the foot. When I stand on the foot by itself it still wobbles around frantically, like it’s feeling around trying to figure out where the hell it is, but I feel like it’s figuring things out.

Wednesday

Jerry came for a walk up the hill and watched as I pedalled away. After that, the morning ride was stressful. The wind was doing the spinning wheel of death – endless buffering. A dead bird was on the road – a tūī. I was thinking about a talk I had to give later that day, to a 300-level class. I was so nervous about it that my face felt tingly.

Got a fright from a cyclist zipping past close on my inside, and yelped.

The ride home was also stressful. Wind like riding through pillows. Close passes on Glasgow. Shrieked a couple of times. A lot of shrieking today all up.

There are some days where you realise, all of a sudden, that many of the cars have got properly gigantic. They are so huge they have their own weather. I don’t often indulge in giant-vehicle fear and loathing, because if I let myself go there it’s a long way out. But on my ride home today, the road full of massive roaring, I gave in to it completely, and the loathing coursed sweetly through my veins.

Thursday

A work-from-home day, but I rode into town at lunchtime. ‘The only thing that limits me is me’, said a passing Mainfreight truck.

A pedestrian scowled as a beeping e-scooter zoomed past him at close range.

A preacher was raving on Willis St, with a woman standing quietly beside him.

The designer Todd Atticus went past on a bus.

‘A big problem is a small problem that was never handled,’ said another Mainfreight truck. (I have to confess, I kind of like these trucks. There’s a poignancy to their motivational quotes – each one a truck’s plaintive cry as it begins to tell its story of woe.)

On Customhouse Quay, keeping up a fair clip in the wind, and running late for an appointment, I looked over my shoulder and saw that a guy had ‘tucked in’ behind me. He was draughting! Profiting off my effort into the head wind! This is pretty rare for me. Usually I’m nowhere near fast enough to be draught-worthy. I felt strange about it, and a little indignant. So I sped up and shook him off.

On my ride home I noticed new cycle-lane paint on Aro and at the bottom of Raroa, and workers carving in a new lane. Naturally, these are exciting developments. I want to believe.

Further up the hill, various defaced election hoardings – chunks hacked out, faces with black eyes sprayed in, some lying face-down on the grass.

Friday

Eyes streaming in the wind on my ride to the gym in the morning. I was running late, after a book launch the previous night, but this was a good, bracing ride – except for a breathtakingly close pass on Raroa that sent a bolt of fright through me – and I had more energy than I had a right to have.

Saw an interesting vehicle – a toddler on a little bike that an adult was guiding from the back via a big lever thing. It looked comfortable and efficient.

I’ve been thinking about pants again. The impossible dream of pants that can be cycled in comfortably and that don’t have an aura of trackpant or legging once you’ve reached the destination. At the book launch last night James Brown apologised for turning up in his cycling gear. (‘I thought it was a peloton meet!’) But the joy of going to an event and then being able to get onto your bike immediately afterwards, without having to get changed in a toilet, cannot be underestimated. It goes without saying that I got the bus to the launch.

Buffeting grey wind again on the ride home, and the ride went on and on, on and on.

The morning ride. Rounding the corner onto Plunkett, I accidentally made eye contact with the electric unicycle guy. I thought of that essay by Annie Dillard, where she makes eye contact with a weasel: ‘It was also a bright blow to the brain, or a sudden beating of brains, with all the charge and intimate grate of rubbed balloons. . . . I tell you I’ve been in that weasel’s brain for sixty seconds, and he was in mine.’ It wasn’t like that, is what I’m saying. We stayed firmly in our own brains.

Jammed on brakes when a Spark car reversed directly into my path from a driveway.

Enjoyed the sight of the always-magnificent crane near the university rearing up into a gloomy sky.

I was feeling cranky as I rode along, because I was mourning the weekend – I’d spent a lot of it not out riding my bike or loafing around with a book, as I would’ve liked, but working. Working! I feel very grateful for my work and what it gives me, but at times it eats me alive. For some reason when I am on my bike, in between places, my disgruntlement comes ballooning up, and I imagine riding past work and just keeping on going and riding down the train station then getting on a train and fleeing the city. But what would I do after that? I’d have to get a train back then ride back to work and apologise.

Rode home after work in rain. Legs unenthusiastic. I engaged snail mode and inched up the hill in my lowest gear.

Tuesday

Rode up Raroa to meet my friend Harry at the cable car cafe. A sunny morning. White blossoms. I felt a surge of appreciation for the bike racks outside the cafe. I love a sturdy, well-positioned set of bike racks. It’s like coming home. Another set of bike racks I’ve recently enjoyed are the ones on Brandon St that are planter boxes but also bike racks.

After work, at around 6, I rode into town to go to a reading. Afterwards, dreading the uphill slog, cycled home. A strong wind and a chaotic feeling in the air. Some wiry young runners sprinted frantically through the night with head lamps on. Some young guys on e-scooters blasted back and forth through Aro Park. Thought about stopping to get ice cream at the dairy but didn’t. The thing with stopping is that it’s a faff – there’s the business with the lock, the helmet, the gloves and head scarf – but then you get home and you don’t have ice cream and you regret everything.

Rear light died on Mt Pleasant. Then – good grief – front light. So I hopped off and pushed the last bit.

This was a hard ride – it only took about half an hour, but seemed to take more like an hour – but all the stars were out.

Wednesday

Rode into sunny windy morning, running very late, legs still waking up. A van on Raroa Rd passed too close and fast, as if incredulous that I was there. To be fair, I was in snail mode again.

After work I rode into town to go to yet another reading. At an intersection on Victoria I waited behind a police motorbike. As soon as the light turned green the cop honked impatiently at the driver in front, though the driver was waiting for a pedestrian to cross on the green man. A police motorbike’s honk has a metallic, aggravating sound – like the buzzer that starts a swimming race. Anyway, it was kind of odd, and I did the usual ‘outstretched hand of disbelief’ at the motorbike.

After the reading I had another night ride home, with both lights in good health this time. The sky was very dark and eerily windless. Stars out. Cherry blossoms glowing in the streetlight on lower Raroa. From Mt Pleasant, the houses always look tiny inside the huge hilly darkness.

Thursday

A work-at-home day, so there was no morning ride, but I rode into town at lunchtime, for sandwich reasons. Very windy, the sort of wind you can feel going through your eyeballs and into your brain. The ride home was a struggle against the wind but I ploughed on.

Saw a massive dead rat on the road. Whenever I see a dead rat on the road, I remember when I was very young and a strident animal rights’ activist. My best friend and I asked each other whether we would squash an ant for a million dollars. Neither of us would, we promised. We asked my friend’s mum – also a vegetarian – if she, too, would save the ant, or if she would squash it for a million dollars. ‘I’m sorry, but I would squash an ant for a million dollars,’ she said.

On twitter I saw a clip of the UK broadcaster and cycling activist Jeremy Vine having a run-in with a van. In response someone remarked that Vine is ‘the Larry David of cycling’: ‘increasingly convinced jeremy vine is willing to die in defence of the highway code. it’s not even that he’s wrong, it’s that he refuses to yield his right of way on principle, at enormous personal risk to himself. the larry david of cycling’. Acknowledging how brutal it would feel to be described as the Larry David of anything, I’ve been trying to figure out where I land on this. Jeremy Vine posts clips of good interactions too, as well as even sometimes clips of his own mistakes, and it seems to me he uses his platform largely for good. But yes. Posting a heated incident on social media amplifies the furore, and I wonder what’s helpful about that, in the end, especially when the driver has acknowledged he made a mistake and apologised.

On the other hand, if I were Vine in that situation, I would have adrenaline and disbelief and rage coursing through my body, and I too would probably punch the van. I don’t wear a camera around, but there are times when I have been so enraged at bad driving, so determined to have it be known that I am right, that self-preservation goes out the window, and – like Larry – I will become obsessed with the incident and ruminate on it at length and fantasise about vengeance.

Recently I saw a car with a cock and balls scratched into the boot – it was magnificent – and I liked to imagine that a disgruntled cyclist had done it.

Friday

A sunny and incident-free morning ride. Occasional stabbing sensation in my knee, which I am choosing to ignore.

Rode into town – wind, spitty rain – after work for dinner. Got stuck behind a slow e-bike whose rider wasn’t pedalling at all – just cruising along. If I had an e-bike I would be going at top speed at all times.

Riding home up Victoria St afterwards at night, I made sudden unexpected eye contact with my friend who was waiting at the bus stop. We both shrieked as I flew past. I don’t know why very brief, unexpected eye contact when zipping past is funny to me, but I continued laughing all the way up the road.

My third night ride of the week, and it was a good one – starting out freezing cold then rapidly warming up – with a full belly, and a dark sky and moon-coloured clouds moving slowly through it.

The morning ride. I rode into town to take my bike for a service and get the clicky pedal seen to. It’s been ages since I’ve cycled into the CBD during the morning rush hour, and the traffic was bananas. Saw a roadworker nearly get hit on Karo Drive. Saw a pigeon nearly get run over by a bus. It’s every man for himself out here.

In the last week or so, when I ride I’ve been wearing these little earplug things that are meant to turn down the volume slightly on traffic noise. I can’t tell whether the earplugs are doing nothing or something, or whether they are doing a tiny bit of something and mostly nothing. I’ll keep wearing them.

A confession: I was tired at the end of the day and the temptation to leave my bike at the shop and pick it up tomorrow was simply too great.

Tuesday

After work I collected my bike from Capital Cycles. It has new pedals on it now. ‘They have a sort of nice scalloped shape, see?’ the bike shop guy said. It was true – and the scalloped shape felt good under the feet. The pedals are a bit bigger than the old ones too, so I feel like I can access more power from the legs. I have been cycling for many years but I feel like today was the first time I really thought about the importance of pedals. (To be honest, it’ll probably also be the last time I think about them.)

Rode home through a brief window in the rain. A guy on an e-bike whipped past on my inside in the Victoria St cycle lane, and I shrieked loudly. Lately I’ve been keeping a good handle on my shrieking, so this was a disappointing regression.

After a day or so off the bike, it felt good to be on it again – and a freshly serviced bike always feels pretty good; it has a new power and precision to it. Even so, the ride home up into the hills was a struggle – my leg was sore and some garden-variety crankiness was setting in, so I was glad to get this ride over with.

Wednesday

Running late. A gap in the rain: I zoomed out onto wet roads. This was a very enjoyable ride – that feeling of rushing through just-rained-in air. It was one of those silver/gold mornings. Saw a guy gliding along on an electric unicycle. I’m working on my acceptance of those things.

At lunchtime I rode from work into town. Again this was a good ride – a very good ride. I can’t figure out what it was about the ride that made it good. Again, was it the freshly serviced bike, the bigness and scallopedness of the pedals? Was it the escape from the office? Or was it the errand itself – going to get food with which I was going to make a sandwich – that gave the ride an aura of excitement and anticipation? Maybe the wind had something to do with it, too – uncharacteristically it kept blowing in the right direction.

Even the ride back up the Terrace was not a grind. Spitty rain, but the spits were soft.

As if that wasn’t enough, on my ride home I saw the artist Karl Maughan blasting up a hill on an e-scooter. A good sight to see.

My friend Nick Ascroft has said that someone should set up a bike blog that’s the polar opposite of this one – it would be all about consistently great, heartening daily bike rides. ‘Yet another fabulous ride today. An SUV gave me the widest, most considerate pass I have ever seen. My legs were full of energy, my blood sugar was steady, my front light kept blazing when I needed it most, everyone checked carefully before opening their car door. It rained, and I felt alive.’ Maybe it would be called Eyelashclowning. Anyway, today the imagined celebratory bike blog became this bike blog. It rained, and I felt alive.

Thursday

Worked at home today, so it was a no-ride day. As much as I like to ride, I really like to not ride also, and I recommend it to everyone.

I read this piece about the Paris–Brest–Paris, a 1200-km amateur ride that riders have to finish within 90 hours. I really like reading about multi-day endurance events. I would like to know what it feels like to be at one’s absolute physical limit. Then again . . . would I actually? If only we could be guaranteed some great spiritual revelation, and not just suffering and chafing and hallucinations of elephants – though those are all great experiences too, in their way.

Friday

I’ve been avoiding Raroa Rd in the last few days, but this morning, since it was sunny, I rode up it to get a bit of extra exercise in. A mistake – it was a bad time. There are fewer sounds scarier to me than the sound of a car accelerating towards you from behind when you know there’s not enough room for them to pass safely. I went into hedgehog mode and shrivelled up.

Saw an old dog being walked; saw a woman carrying an armful of something that looked like Jerry until I saw it was a canvas shopping bag.

After work I rode into town to pick up my new glasses from the optometrist and have a beer, and then had a good night ride home – clouds of weed abundant, kākā gargling (they sound a lot like turkeys sometimes).

Gripe of the week: why is it always the cyclist who always has to give way to the driver on Mt Pleasant, as the road is too narrow to fit the both of us? I know it’s the logical thing: the cyclist can squeeze themselves up, the cyclist can cling to the fence like a snail so that the car can sail pass. And yet. I will hang on to this small, unreasonable gripe forever.

(Also this week, as you can see, I’ve moved Eyelashroaming over to Substack! I hope that’s OK with my four readers. It’s much easier to use than my old nemesis Wordpress, and is free. My page here is still looking pretty rustic, but I’ll try to get it looking better soon.)

For this ride I was wearing the padded pants gifted from Freya, and once again I nearly panicked when I put them on. The padding, as I’ve mentioned before, is intense. But once I was on the bike, I felt like a king on his throne.

In my backpack were a couple of water bottles with lemon slices floating in them, a bottle of chocolate protein oatmilk, and – as an experiment – a can of cold Supreme oatmilk coffee. Last week, on my golf ball ride, the mushroom Cup-a-Soup was a wild success, and I haven’t stopped thinking about it since, but I’d run out of packets and was also thinking I’d need some caffeine on this ride. FYI, some other liquids I’ve tried on a big ride – apart from the usual electrolytes – are:

• Nippy’s banana milk (delicious, but banana is a hard-to-find Nippy’s variety, overtaken by the ubiquitous coffee and chocolate flavours, and besides, I can’t really do cow milk anymore.)

• Little Island banana milk (incredibly good, but tends to slosh heavily in the stomach. Also, this is yet another hard-to-find banana variety.)

• pineapple juice and soymilk shaken up together (refreshing and energising!)

• kombucha (Too fizzy; no good for the desperate gulping that a big ride involves.)

I pumped up my tyres, degreased then regreased my chain, then set off at 8am, feeling smug to be hurtling through the morning. From Aro St I inched up Durham and Mortimer and Ohiro to Brooklyn, then began the long glide down Happy Valley Rd in the shade. Happy Valley Rd is an OK road. It could be a great road, and maybe it once was, but it isn’t now. There are a lot of surprise potholes and uneven patches and bulging trucks on their way to the tip, and it’s scary to be passed at speed when you too are going at speed. And on the uphill, you usually have an annoying headwind, and the speeding trucks again, and other cyclists going faster than you.

Tried to go fast around Owhiro Bay, through Island Bay and on towards Lyall. I had just one close pass, by a big orange SUV, at which I shook my head sadly, like a dad witnessing bad reffing. The head shake is a low-impact response to bad driving, and I doubt many drivers even register it as they surge impatiently towards the next person who will get in their way. But the head shake feels nice to do, and obviously it’s lower-risk than the fingers.

There were a lot of other cyclists out, most of them serious-looking, and some in pelotons, rippling along in their bright colours, shouting ‘What?’ at each other. Still, Sunday morning is really owned by one specimen, and one specimen only, and that’s dogs. Dogs speeding past with their heads out of car windows, dogs being run and walked, dogs stopping to greet other dogs . . . Cyclists only borrow Sunday mornings. It’s the dogs who run the operation.

Stopped for chocolate milk in Lyall Bay then pushed on ahead to Moa Point. Sped up to get past the straight road that runs alongside the airport, as it’s narrow and feels exposed and risky somehow. I emerged from the dark Moa Point Rd tunnel and was glad to be heading back towards the water.

Leg check: Feeling strong.

Brain check: I was thinking about some public speaking I have to do tomorrow. I tried to focus on the ride at hand, but kept being distracted by everything that could possibly go wrong at this event. The most vivid scenario I was imagining was that I somehow grasp onto the lectern so hard that it falls forward, taking me with it, so I kind of sled down from the stage onto the floor. Anyway – we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.

In Breaker Bay, climbing the hill towards Seatoun, a man on the footpath turned and started clapping. ‘Ah, here she comes! Tour de France! Hooray!’

I said, ‘Thank you!’

In the cycling subreddits I sometimes read, occasionally you’ll get people posting that a pedestrian yelled encouragement at them while they were riding along, and they don’t know how to feel about it. But I’ll tell you how you should feel: Good. Especially when someone just yells: ‘Tour de France!’ That’s a very wholesome thing to yell.

At the start of Marine Pde, about an hour into the ride, I stopped and poured the can of coffee into my maw. It was terrible, like cold dregs tipped out of various cups and mixed together in a can, but I know lots of people really like cold coffee, so this was definitely a me problem, and I forced it down.

Continued on through the gentle undulations of Karaka Bay, Scorching Bay, Mahanga Bay and Kau Bay, then rolled onward to Shelly Bay.

Because I’m a moron and hadn’t looked at the news recently or even googled, I hadn’t known that the exclusion zone on Shelly Bay Rd, after the fire in June, means everyone is excluded from passing through, including cyclists and pedestrians. I reached the zone, and a sleepy-looking security guard was sitting in a car beside the No Entry fence and I immediately realised my mistake so I took this photo to make it look like I knew exactly what I was doing.

Turned around – feeling grateful now for the disgusting coffee, which had given me a surge of energy – and attacked the ride afresh. I went all the way back to Marine Pde, then turned onto Awa Rd and made my way up the steep hill into Miramar. This was actually an enjoyable hill to climb, with views of the sea floating up at every turn. Went through Miramar, considered stopping for a coffee and scone but felt too self-conscious about my increasing smelliness, then found my way onto Cobham Drive.

After Cobham Drive it was a matter of getting from Evans Bay to Oriental Bay. I wasn’t looking forward to this portion. The northbound cycle lane feels like it was designed by a hedgehog. Like, ‘Oh, here would be a good place to cross the road.’ And if you don’t get killed there, you can have a few more goes up ahead. By my count, you have to cross the road, through fast traffic, three times. And then, once you’re on Oriental Pde, alongside all the trikes and pushchairs and babies riding e-scooters, there’s no obvious place to get back onto the road. You have to push your bike across the pedestrian crossing like an animal.

By now grinding my teeth, I thought I’d try out the new cycle lane along Cambridge Terrace. Opposite the fire station, I went over some sudden judder bars on the cycle path and my water bottle leapt out of its cage and rolled onto the road. Embarrassing, but OK. Retrieved the bottle and carried on, immediately riding over another set of the exact same judder bars so that my bottle leapt from its cage once again. Embarrassing, but OK.

Further up, the cycle path was smooth, and had its own lights, which felt like a special sort of pampering. The path carried me all the way up to the Basin, then it suddenly dropped me from its arms as if I had turned from a prince back into a toad. The Basin was closed, so I had to crawl along the footpath and then cross over a busy three-laned road to get to the War Memorial and on the road towards Aro.

By this point I was well over two hours in, and looking forward to a shower.

As I was about to begin the Raroa climb, I saw two other cyclists making their way up the hill. They were on pushbikes, and they had full panniers. They had the slow, patient look of cyclists who regularly lug their groceries up hills and who know that they must settle in. It feels rare to see pannier-carrying pushbike up in the hills these days. It was like seeing a pair of saddlebacks.

Made it up the always obscenely steep Mt Pleasant, which almost finishes me off every time, but yet again somehow I made it to the top.

This was mostly a good ride and I am glad I did it.

Monday

A cold and blustery morning ride that I was glad to get over with.

At lunchtime I had to ride down the hill and into town for a poetry reading at Te Papa. Poetry! There was no way to avoid it, so I got on the bike and rode through a knifing cold southerly, spattered with rain. After the poetry, the weather was worse. I rode back up the hill to work through blasting rain and wind, and felt glad to get back off the bike – glad, in a way, that I had suffered for poetry.

The ride home: traffic was bad-tempered, wind was throwing itself around like the Hulk. But at the same time, a pretty sky – shiny blue, bits of silver – with a ghost of sun coming through.

Tuesday
On the morning ride I crossed paths with another cyclist who was riding along with a radio playing. And not playing music, but playing the news. I tried to figure out why this bothered me. It's harmless, isn't it? I want to think it's great, same as I want to think cyclists who play jazz from a stereo on their handlebars are great and I want to think the Uber driver with the 'party car' is great. But I can't. It has unicyclist energy. Everyone else becomes a minor character who must endure the main character's great scene.

Today was a four-ride day. All of these rides featured a cold head despite swaddling it in two headbands.

If any companies that make headbands/earwarmers/buffs (? is 'buff' right? Is that what those things are called?) want to reach out and give me free headbands, to test, let's talk.

On Highbury Rd, a little feather drifted down and fell on my shoulder, Forrest-Gump-like. Almost embarrassing. Glad no one saw.

Wednesday

I spent the day at home today, so there was no morning ride, but after work I rode into town, bundled up, then back home up the hill later. It was a chilly, vape-filled evening – sweet plumes of smoke at bus stops and at one point billowing out of a car window and into my face. Secretly, I don't mind the smell of vape smoke. The moon tonight was in its lying-down banana phase. A driver on Aro St seemed to have lost their mind, revving then blasting past then having to stop at the pedestrian crossing a few metres up. The ride up to Highbury was as usual endless – every time, every single time, I'll think, I'm not going to make it, and then somehow I have made it.

Thursday

This was another home day. I rode into town at lunchtime, eyes streaming in cold wind. A guy veered in front of me to park on Thorndon Quay. On my way back I noted that Featherston St was smelling like red onions – then again, has it always had a kind of oniony aspect? The air tastes like officey sandwich. I was glad to hoon through a stream of green lights at top speed. Blustery wind again on Victoria St. On my way back up the hill, legs burning, the sun started breaking through.

A new development: I've got these little earbud things that are meant to 'lower your trigger response to annoying sounds' by slightly changing the way that noise goes into your ear. They don't block sound, just .... redirect it? They are meant to be good at diluting the annoyance level of many sounds – beeping and blooping, eating and clicking and tapping, and, crucially for me, traffic. So I figure I'll give them a try in the hopes of going less crazy less often.

Friday

Pushed bike to the top of the hill with Jerry coming for a walk this morning. Forgot the earbud things. A stressful morning ride. Cars impatient, buses heaving along, an e-cyclist who whipped past too close on the inside, making me shriek. Front wheel (or pedal?) making a suspicious clicky noise.

I have been ridiculously tired this week, and often spaced out on my rides, sort of tumble-weeding along, day-dreaming of pyjamas. But – the hell with it – rolled into town after work for a beer anyway. The ride home afterwards was incredibly cold. One of the coldest rides in recent memory. My bike felt like cold monkeybars. It wasn't till I was halfway up Raroa that I started to feel my blood moving again. Gentle clouds of weed on the air.

It was a very dark, quiet night except for the repeating click, click of my front wheel (or pedal?). Will take bike in for a service next week.

Monday
Three rides today, all of them – *gasp* – quite good.

A nice morning ride. Conditions: ideal.

Rode into town at lunchtime to buy some new front lights and some Nuuns – the best hydration tablets. But the man at My Ride told me that Nuun was no longer supplying their store. I was confused and thought he meant that Nuun had gone into liquidation and cried out: 'Nooo! But they're the best ones!' Bought GU ones instead – which, I'm ashamed to say, actually turned out to be better than the Nuuns. I may never buy Nuuns again.

The bike shop guy also said he often sees me slogging up Raroa in the mornings as he zooms down the other way. This was nice. Sometimes it's good to be witnessed climbing a hill by a fellow bike rider – to have your suffering seen. Seen by someone who understands.

Rode through a derangingly good croissant smell on Victoria St.

Got startled when a pedestrian bumbled out in front of me at an intersection. 'You almost ran me over,' they shouted. Which was true, but – not wanting to be bike-centric here – I'd had a green light and they had gone out on a red man.

Tuesday
Chilly ride to work. This ride felt long. The week felt long. It was Tuesday.

Rode into town after work – cold zooming downhill – for a book launch, then home later in freezing recent-rain air. Had to sit on a wet seat. I was dreading this ride home, and I was right to, because it was madness on the streets – close passers, red-light runners, hurtling SUVs. Every time I see a car run a red light (which happens a lot on Karo Drive), I feel like I am in the presence of death itself. Obviously we are always in some way in the presence of death. But red light runners have a particularly Grim Reaperish shadow about them.

Wednesday
I found a little window in the rain for my morning ride, and it was excellent – cool morning air, wet trees, slick roads. Smell of hot dryer in Highbury.

Trudged home after work in darkish spitty rain. It's possible, in some sorts of weather, to still feel like you have a sort of warm nest inside your jacket. The weather blasts all around but you are cosy.

Thursday
Morning: a brisk ride in flimsy sunshine, but sunshine nonetheless.

Rode home at lunchtime to finish the day. Leg protesting. Discovered I had spilled blue pea sprouts all through my pannier. A few days later and I'm still discovering peas everywhere. Spillage is a constant risk for cyclists who transport food. Soup or hummus is the worst of course, but anything that rolls around is a nuisance. Dried chickpeas are a menace, and I can't even mention rice. What I find usually works is to put the risky food right at the bottom of the pannier and then put a heavy bike lock on top of it, pinning it in place.

Friday
I took today off work, intending to go for a big ride with my brother Neil, who is over from London. Neil has contributed a few London-based cycling weeks here in the past. But the logistics proved too difficult in the end and the ride was thwarted. So – not wanting to waste the riding opportunity – I just set off for old friend the golf ball around lunchtime. Conditions: overcast, sun bumping through, breezy.

The first leg, from Aro up to Brooklyn via Durham St, was a bad time at first. There is nothing like the shock of a sudden steep hill: the heart and lungs react with panic and disbelief as they hear the news that the body is no longer lying on a couch. Gradually they come to terms with the situation; the pain subsides. The road was closed on Apuka and part of Karepa due to slips, so I wheeled my bike sneakily through then carried on. The leg from Ashton Fitchett Dr up to the turbine was excellent – strenuous as hell but the whole world sparkly, and I was struck by the beauty of even the gorse with its funny little flowers. Gorse flowers always look like they are trying so hard. 'Love me!' they cry.

At the turbine I stopped to look back at the sea, and as always I noted my distance from the golf ball.

My quads were shrieking, so I stood up to climb a fair bit. Another cyclist came hurtling downhill in hi-vis and we exchanged nods.

It got colder and windier as I climbed, so I was glad I'd brought another jacket.

Also as I climbed, I was thinking about the mushroom soup in my thermos in my bag. In an inspired move I'd brought plain old packet Cup-a-Soup, mushroom flavour, the best sort – as well as my usual litres of hydration-tablet-infused water. So, although I was trying to pay attention to my surroundings, really the whole time I was thinking about the soup.

At last, my head getting cold, I reached the top and sat in the sun and had my mushroom soup, overlooking snow-capped mountains. Although there is undoubtedly something sinister about this place, with the radome pulsating nearby, it was the best mushroom soup of my life.

The wind took a colder turn on the ride back. The hilly bits of the way back are always a shock, too – often much steeper and sharper than expected. Animal check: Sparrows, wax eyes, thrushes. Saw a pug being walked by two people in huge puffer jackets. Heard a chicken screeching.

I was still thinking about the soup – I had about a cup of it left in the thermos – so once back in Brooklyn, I gave in and pulled over to finish the rest. It was even better now. As I write this (it's Saturday), I am still thinking quite a lot about the soup.

The climb home, from Aro climbing back up to Highbury, was hard work. After all of that open space, the proximity of hurtling vehicles felt freshly unsettling. But I settled into the climb. All in all, this wasn't the ride I had imagined for today, but it was a pretty good one.

Monday

Worked at home today, so there was no morning ride today; however there was a rushed lunchtime ride through town into a hard grey wind, eyes streaming, then back home up the hills.

At the moment up in Highbury there are a lot of blackbirds running around importantly, waiting till the last possible moment to take flight as you wheel towards them. What’s going on in the blackbird community?

This lunchtime ride felt more difficult than usual, and although it was partly because of the wind, and maybe because of my sagging fitness, it was also because of my tyres. I’ve been putting off pumping them up. It’ll only take a couple of minutes, but those are long minutes. Pumping up your tyres is like peeling garlic – it’s necessary, and there’s an element of satisfaction to it – everything will be improved if you do it – but it’s also fiddly and grimy. Let the tyres squish for one more day.

Tuesday

A no-ride day. Over the last week or so, I’ve softened (... like a tyre) and can’t handle cycling in rain.

Wednesday

Back on the horse. Slogged through the morning circus of Raroa, SUVs and little trucks blasting past. In terms of cold grey morning rides, this Wednesday ride raised the bar yet again – the coldest and greyest yet, like being slapped in the face by fishes the whole way.

Rode home at lunchtime to finish up my day, and this was a good ride, much quieter on the roads, blue sky bursting through now, and more reckless blackbirds on Mt Pleasant. Also saw a bunch of goldfinches.

Thursday

Back off the horse!

I've been hemming and hawing about whether to write about last week, because it’s not cycling-related. In fact, I was walking when it happened – so, there’s another mark against walking as a mode of transport. But maybe I'll say something about it, because in some way it was about travelling (?) – just in a more flailing style than usual – and because it's the reason for all this stopping and starting.

None of last week's rides were good rides, and when I look at my notes about them it's clear that something wasn't right with my brain. 'Moon looks like horrible eyeball following me', 'Every driver seems to hate my guts', this sort of thing. I had been feeling too strange to enjoy my bike rides, and I wasn’t sleeping very well. I had an unhinged, paranoid feeling that was building into little ripples of panic. Thursday was a bad night – a sudden meltdown where I began punching myself in the face, which took me by surprise. I’d thought people punching themselves in the face was a sort of stock-image idea of a crazy person, not really a thing that happened, but there I was doing it. So on Friday I walked instead of cycled. As I walked, I started to feel that I wasn’t quite in control of myself. At one point I realised I was muttering ‘I can’t, I can’t,’ so I sat down on some steps. I knew I had to get a handle on the muttering – I couldn’t wander around in public like that. But then another part of my brain said, ‘...Or could I?’

I wasn’t able to get myself to care enough to stop the muttering, and I couldn’t just keep sitting on the steps, so I gathered myself up and kept walking and kept muttering. As I was walking down the hill next to the university there was a sharp, bright, decisive moment when I stopped muttering – it was as if my brain said, ‘The muttering is no longer enough’ – and started screaming. The phrase ‘screaming your head off’ is exactly right, because I felt like I no longer really had a head – I was all floating in bits. I saw my arm shooting out and throwing my phone hard onto the path, then my sunglasses followed, then both of the bags I was carrying. I seemed to be whirling around, and then I was clutching onto a sign or some other object, then I was leaning over a rail. I registered that there was a bus idling alongside, as if thinking about what to do, then it huffed and slid away. Another wave of panic came walloping through and I was bellowing again, like Ludo being set upon by goblins in Labyrinth. My vision seemed to have gone underwater – later I found that I’d either wiped my contact lenses out of my eyes or they had popped out on their own, like cartoon eyeballs on stalks – and then I was sitting somewhere trying to pull clumps of my hair out. I could blurrily see the feet of people standing around me and heard them asking if I was OK and they were returning all my things to me, including my broken phone. It was a blessing to have lost my lenses, because it would’ve felt even more mortifying to be able to see anyone’s face clearly.

For a few days I was too nervy and raw-brained to walk anywhere by myself, in case it happened again, and I still haven’t been able to wear the shirt I was wearing when it happened. The pants are also a problem. I now think of them as ‘the crazy pants’. But they are very useful pants for cycling, and I need to be able to wear them, so hopefully soon they'll lose their crazy charge.

The whole thing was scary and deeply embarrassing – to have a meltdown in public, like a massive baby, has always been one of my worst fears, even though I know that people have been melting down in public since the beginning of time, since before there was even a public to melt down in. I also worried knowing that I would have alarmed and even frightened many people who were just trying to go about their business. But what I found was that people were actually really kind about me going crazy. So it wasn't as terrible as it could've been.

In retrospect – after a psych appointment and an appointment with a GP who insisted that I practise smiling and that I might be somehow taking in the 'pheromones' of all the depressed people at the university – I confess that I also find it a bit funny.

Friday

The morning ride. Chilly air again, but a gold-blue sky. The Leg has been much less gripy this week and as I rode along I realised with a flood of relief that I was feeling pretty normal, bordering on cheery. 'Normal' really is one of the great experiences.

After work I zoomed into town for a poetry reading. I locked my bike to a fence and then after the poetry reading I couldn't find my bike lock key in my bag or any of my pockets. It was gone, lost to the night. I blame poetry. Nothing to do but leave my bike where it was, amateurishly leaving it with all its lights still clipped on, so of course when I came back in the morning some fucker had stripped it naked of the lights. I hadn't been able to find a spare bike lock key anywhere at home – I have about fifty other bike lock keys, none of them right, and why I've kept them I don’t know. So I went sheepishly into Bicycle Junction to ask for advice, and a nice man said he could help liberate my bike for me. After that, I bought a new lock. A new era of locking begins.

A silly ending to the week, but an ending.