Cyclokairos

A Blue Bike ride. The Kenilworth Greenway was joined at the Balsall Common end, departed where it crosses the Coventry Road. A former rail line, the Greenway’s gradient is far from taxing.

.City limits soon reached – first the latest, then a former.

A slight climb up Gibbet’s Hill (no hangings today), the road so straight it’s Romanesque.

Across the A45, sticking to the cycle lane I’ve been on since Kenilworth, and into the War Memorial Park.

Some help from Google Maps as I tackle a network of roads, and destination reached: the London Road Cemetery. Wherein rest two people from when all things bicycle began: James Starley (inventor of the Penny Farthing and the differential gear – not to be confused with his nephew John, the inventor of the safety bicycle and co-founder of the Rover motor company) and George Singer (reputed inventor of curved forks, among other things).

The cemetery was designed by Joseph Paxton (he of Chatworth House and Crystal Palace fame). There’s a monument dedicated to him by the entrance, a couple of chapels, Anglican and non-conformist, sit among the many old trees (some showing the effects of recent storms, but god it feels good to be among them).

Heading back, I skirt by Philip Larkin’s old school. Beyond, opposite in direction to the one I’m cycling, lies the city centre. Pre-War World II it was a handsome city, but the Luftwaffe’s Operation Moonlight Sonata caused severe damage, and post-war reconstruction was unsympathetic to the past. Yet that’s the nature of cities, a mish-mash of eras, but with so much of Coventry’s razed and little attempt to replicate, it has more of the concrete and tyres of ‘Going, Going‘ than others.

Juxtaposition on the Kenilworth Greenway as I retrace my outward journey. Woodland, yet the government folly of HS2 ever present. But the path I ride was once a rail line that itself supplanted fields – I thought it would last my time forever thought.

Not that I don’t appreciate progress (although the way bikes are headed, a definite no) but at what cost? In Rupert Thomson’s ‘Dartmouth Park’, the Japanese idea of bunmeibyo, civilisation sickness, is mentioned. Where large-scale urbanisation has severed contact with the natural world, removing perspective and belonging. The Indigenous American belief that the environment is as much a relation as family, that it is part of community, is linked. Living in the UK, and western society in general I assume, it is so easy to lose that connection, to see humans and nature as separate, and that nature is solely there to be exploited.