It’s a funny thing to miss a stretch of tarmac.
Kit Nicholson and Alex Petter
It’s the morning of December 27, 2025. A golden morning, a frozen morning. The rising sun projects slanting amber windows onto the eaves of my bedroom wall, and whitening light dances through the stretched limbs of the old oak in the field beyond the garden fence. As I fold my pyjamas and stuff a last pair of new socks into my holdall, I’m acutely aware that this may be the last time I leave the family home of almost 26 years. It’s good riddance to some memories, but so much has happened here, and for every valley there’s a corresponding peak. And so many of the highest, I’ve come to realise, are cycling related.
I’ve lived in many homes in my almost 34 years. I specify ‘homes’ because for a couple of months as a toddler, my parents and I had no fixed address while we travelled New Zealand before setting up in Melbourne, so the caravan has always been counted when we’ve totted up the number of separate abodes I inhabited in the first decade of my life. It was 10, by the way, and now up to at least 13, depending whether or not you would count student digs.
And now my parents are preparing to leave the place in which they – we – have spent by far the longest, and make the move back to their roots (in one way or another) that they’ve both been dreaming of for at least a decade.
I don’t know what I expected of my inevitable reflections at the family home, where my 12th birthday included bathing my three-week-old youngest sister, where my other siblings and I embarked on fantasy adventures, learned many musical instruments, staged theatrical performances, played countless games of tennis, trained the family labradors, watched Swallows and Amazons (1974) on repeat, learned to make mum’s famous crumble, etc.
While ‘most’ might be overstating it, many of the freshest, happier memories that come to me are of riding my bike. Specifically, flashing before my eyes are images of familiar roads within a hundred-kilometre radius of the family home; I can only imagine this is an experience unique to cyclists, and perhaps drivers and runners, that a stretch of road should hold such importance.
Images like these have flickered to the front of my mind like slides in an old projector: first, the plateau behind the village; second, waiting for best friend/training partner Alex Petter at a regular rendezvous in Castle Camps.
I learned to ride a bike in the car park of Bishop’s Sutton village hall in Hampshire, but I became a cyclist here in East Anglia, the not-so-little bulge north of London that comprises Cambridgeshire, Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex. It’s low-lying and famously flat, though we Nicholsons find ourselves in one of the more hilly regions (no, really) about half an hour south of Cambridge.
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