Days 44–82: The Only Two People It Had to Make Sense To

It has been a while since I’ve written one of these, and quite a lot has happened since Frome.

Some of it good. Some of it not so good.

The problems with the Luton hadn’t gone away and by Trowbridge we’d reached the point where something had to be done. We’d spent days trying to find someone who could look at it. Mechanics would say yes and then couldn’t fit us in, or we’d get passed somewhere else, and all the while we were trying to keep the journey moving with a van that really didn’t want to move anymore.

Eventually we found a mechanic in Bristol who agreed to take a look.

So the driver set off for Bristol with the Luton and I set off the way I usually do these days — on the Vok, with a piano behind me.

On the way I was flagged down by a man called Marcus who wanted to know what on earth I was doing. We got talking about the journey, the piano and where I was heading, and somehow it came up that he knew the mechanic in Bristol who had agreed to look at the van.

There have been quite a few coincidences like that on this journey. I’m beginning to think England might only have about twelve people in it.

By the time we all made it to Bristol, the news about the Luton wasn’t good.

It wasn’t going to be repaired.

I’d known for a while that we were probably getting close to that point, but knowing something might happen and actually being told it’s over are two very different things.

The Luton had been my home for nearly two years.

People who have followed this journey mostly know it as the support van, but LEJOG was only a small part of its life with me. Me and the dogs had lived in it long before Land’s End. Everything I owned was in there. We’d travelled in it, slept in it, broken down in it more times than I care to remember and, somewhere along the way, it had simply become home.

So having to scrap it was a much bigger blow than losing a vehicle.

For a while we looked at every option. Another Luton was the obvious answer, but what we needed was quite specific and finding one quickly wasn’t going to be easy.

Then Marcus did something I wasn’t expecting.

He offered to sell me his Sprinter.

He also let us use his construction yard while we worked out what came next.

So we spent the next few days emptying nearly two years of my life out of the Luton, moving everything we could into a much smaller Sprinter and trying to turn it into somewhere two people and four dogs could actually live.

Along with everything needed to keep a man cycling an upright piano to Scotland.

It was cosy.

Eventually the Luton went to the scrapyard and I had a home again.

Not quite the home I’d had before, and certainly not quite as much of it, but a home.

And once we’d sorted that out, there was still the small matter of a piano journey to finish.

So I rode back to where we’d left the route at Trowbridge.

I busked there and carried on to Chippenham.

For two days it felt as though we were finally moving again.

Then we weren’t.

The driver had a family emergency and needed to go home. I’ve always believed family comes first, so there wasn’t really a decision to make. We booked the ticket and I stayed in Chippenham expecting it to be a short pause.

It wasn’t.

Days passed without any certainty about when, or whether, he would be coming back.

So there I was.

A working van.

A piano.

Four dogs.

No driver.

Sometimes you have to laugh.

I wasn’t doing much laughing by then.

There were other things happening away from the journey as well. Yorkie was dealing with far more than anyone should have been dealing with while somehow keeping her own job and life moving thousands of miles away.

Neither of us had much left in the tank.

I’d been struggling with LEJOG for a while if I’m honest.

There had been constant battles over where I could play, endless logistics, things breaking, unnecessary conflicts, things changing and far too much noise surrounding something that had started out incredibly positive.

Somewhere amongst everything else, I’d stopped enjoying it.

I didn’t want to play.

So I didn’t.

We moved away from Chippenham for a while and stopped the journey completely.

I worried about her, she worried about me and we just pressed pause.

We knew what we wanted, but was what we currently had what we wanted?

Believe me, we have easier options available to us.

We talked about going all the way back to Land’s End and starting again.

We talked about not going back at all.

Mostly, I slept.

If we were going to restart, we wanted to know we actually had a team capable of staying on the road.

So we waited.

Eventually the new team came together and we travelled back to Chippenham.

Back to where I’d stopped. And I started again.

No big announcement.

No dramatic restart.

I just got back on the Vok and carried on.

Since then we’ve moved through town after town. The Sprinter has behaved itself. Mostly. I’ve played the piano. I’ve met some lovely people.

And I’ve enjoyed busking again.

That’s probably the most important bit.

I’ve also been almost completely absent from social media.

That hasn’t been an accident.

The strange thing about stepping away from all the noise is that eventually you can hear yourself think again.

And somewhere in all that thinking, Yorkie did what Yorkie does.

She went to the data.

We’ve kept the GPX file from every ride since we arrived in Penzance, before we started at Land’s End. Every mile is there. Every climb. Every wrong turn.

Even a river on a bridle path.

But that’s a story for just the two of us.

One of many.

So we added it all up.

On the actual LEJOG route, from Land’s End to my current location, I’ve now ridden 415.2 miles and climbed 22,923 feet.

That’s about four-fifths of the height of Everest.

Then there are all the other miles.

Getting into position. Getting back to the route after breakdowns. Riding backwards because the van was broken down somewhere else. All the miles that don’t move the little line on the LEJOG map north but still require me to pedal a Vok with an upright piano on it.

Since arriving in Penzance, I’ve actually ridden 665 miles.

And climbed 33,465 feet.

Everest is 29,032 feet.

So I’ve climbed more than 4,400 feet higher than Everest.

With a piano.

I had to look at that number for a while. I think I’m still looking at it.

Because if you’d asked me how this journey was going a few weeks ago, I’m not sure I’d have told you I was achieving very much at all.

I’d have told you about the van.

Or the driver.

Or the latest thing that had gone wrong.

I probably wouldn’t have told you that I’d cycled 665 miles with a piano.

Yorkie would.

She tells me all the time how proud she is of what I’ve done, what I’m doing, and who I am.

I’m not always very good at giving myself credit for it.

Maybe I should be.

Nobody has done this before.

There isn’t a handbook for cycling an upright piano from Land’s End to John o’ Groats. There isn’t really anything to compare it to.

There is just the next mile.

And then another one.

And apparently, eventually, they become 665.

Maybe that’s something worth being proud of. I’m working on that.

The time away gave Yorkie and me something else we hadn’t had much of for a while.

Time to talk.

So we talked about everything. We cried.

And we laughed too.

We talked about why we started this. What we wanted it to become. What mattered and, probably more importantly, what didn’t.

Somewhere amongst all the problems and all the noise, I think we’d forgotten for a while just how lucky we actually are.

This started as my dream a long time ago.

Then it became ours.

We’ve both carried it at different times. We’ve both had days when the other one believed enough for two.

And through all of it, our commitment to this dream has only ever been surpassed by our commitment to each other.

There is something quite extraordinary about finding even one person in this world who sees the same future you do.

Someone who doesn’t need the dream explained because they’re already standing inside it with you.

If you have that, you’re blessed.

We are.

Maybe sometimes we forget it.

And I think that’s what all the stopping, waiting and silence finally reminded us.

We don’t need everybody to understand what we’re doing.

We don’t need everybody to believe in it.

We don’t need to explain every decision or convince anyone that the future we’re trying to build is the right one.

It only has to be right for us.

Somewhere along the way this stopped being just a journey from Land’s End to John o’ Groats.

It’s our life.

And that life doesn’t have to make sense to anyone else.

It only has to make sense to the two of us.

So we’re going to finish what we started.

There won’t be constant updates from the road anymore. I won’t be living the journey through social media and I won’t be going live every day. From time to time, when there’s something worth saying, I’ll write it here.

For now, we’re just going to get on with it.

Living our life.

The street is still a stage.

The piano is still moving north.

And after everything, perhaps the biggest thing we’ve learned is that some things are worth continuing simply because they are ours.

So that’s what we’ll do.

One town, one mile and one dream at a time.

— James