Tim Moore - Vuelta Skelter: Riding the Remarkable 1941 Tour of Spain

Tim Moores writing has appeared in the Daily Telegraph, the Observer, the Sunday Times and Esquire. He is the author of Gironimo!, French Revolutions, Do Not Pass Go, Spanish Steps, Nul Points, I Believe In Yesterday and You Are Awful (But I Like You). He lives in London.

ALSO BY TIM MOORE

The Cyclist Who Went Out in the Cold

French Revolutions

Do Not Pass Go

Spanish Steps

Nul Points

I Believe in Yesterday

You Are Awful (But I Like You)

Gironimo!

Another Fine Mess

To Jos Luis Navares Gonzlez

We will live in your journey. You do this for all of us. We are in your heart and in your mind.

It was 4 July 2020, and there we were outside Biketown, a shop in Madrids northern suburbs. Three fortysomething Spaniards and me, all in shorts and facemasks, sunglasses steaming up in the monstrous midday heat. And a fortysomething road bicycle, thin and silver, leaning against the sun-scorched wall behind us.

Two months had passed since Id chanced upon a photo of this graceful old machine, in a blog post composed by Gerardo, the stubbled one. I had made contact, asking if it might be for sale. Gerardo gently replied that it wasnt, on account of a deep sentimental attachment: he had inherited the bike from an elderly cycling companion who had passed away the previous year. He said he would confer with Javier, the tall one, Biketowns manager and the silver bikes co-owner. Gerardos next email, composed like all of our correspondence via Google Translate, had pricked my eyes with tears of emotion and gratitude. Our friend Jos Luis was a great lover of cycling and would have much love for your project. I have spoken to Javier and we are happy to lend you Jos Luis bike free of charge.

Antonio, the one who spoke English, flicked a finger towards Gerardo, who had taken off his sunglasses and was drawing a bare forearm across his eyes. See? Now he cries. He has thoughts of envy for you. Throwing Covid caution to the winds, Gerardo strode over and gave me a great big unprotected hug, along with several slaps on my hot, woolly back. It was probably now that I first regretted my choice of facemask: a florid Liberty-print affair that made an awkward contrast with Gerardos dourly masculine black number.

I pulled down the peak of my little white cap, then went over and straddled the bike. This wasnt a graceful procedure with a big saddlebag in the way. Looking from face to covered face, I tried hard to convey appropriate emotions with the small visible parts of my own visage. No thoughts of envy for myself, its fair to say, but a welter of sadness, pride and affection for the late and mystical Jos Luis, for these three masked benefactors, above all for the extraordinary cyclist whose name was plastered all over the bike beneath me. Then I hoisted a string-backed glove, yanked off my poncy mask and freewheeled waywardly down the empty, sloping street, bullying feet into toe clips and doing ugly, crunching battle with the gear levers on my down tube.

Before I hold down the rewind button and spool way back into monochrome history, lets just give it a brief prod, returning to those balmy, barmy dog days of that first Covid lockdown, when the sun burned bright in a cloudless sky and time went all wrong. Afternoons that seemed to stretch out for a whole week; whole weeks that shot by in a flash. Its not exactly a hard sell, but this would be an adventure born of stir-crazy, weapons-grade boredom.

My first task under house arrest was to settle down and watch a career in travel journalism die before my eyes. That took care of half an hour. Then I drank cider in the garden. Three days in, my wife came down with a fairly apparent dose of what my daughters called rona headache, leaden fatigue and a total loss of smell. It dragged on and on, but got no worse than that. I took my sons bedroom window out of its frame, carried it out on to the patio and somehow spent five whole days doing stuff to it with brushes and spatulas. I drank more cider; I drank stronger cider. I eradicated every last rhizome of every last buttercup from my flower beds. Just after my wife started feeling better, I started feeling worse. But I was lucky, too: a couple of days in bed, another week mired in a kind of jetlagged hangover, all the while with that same unsettling vacancy in my nostrils. Still, what a towering relief it was when I recovered, and could at last re-string our rotary washing line, pickle seven kilograms of carrots, and devote an entire fortnight to restoring the old traffic lights Id left in my parents garage thirty years before.

Towards the end of April, I had scraped the bottom of my barrel of projects and pastimes. Then it came to me. With juggling, topiary or transvestism just hours away, I braved the horrid, spidery depths of my shed and effortfully extracted the bike I had ridden round France two decades previously. What a terrible state it was in, poor old ZR3000. Cracked and airless tyres, great coils of detached handlebar tape that spooled down to the floor. The front derailleur had broken off and everything was covered with rust, dust or both.

Resurrecting this forlorn machine to its proud, factory-fresh glory was more than a project it was a duty of care, a moral obligation I had been postponing for at least fifteen shameful years. Make that sixteen and counting. I flicked off the biggest insects, pumped up the tyres, slashed away all the bar tape and gaffer-taped the redundant front derailleur cable round the seat tube. Then I went for a ride.

The sky was blue and the roads of London were weirdly, wonderfully empty. I went into town and had Oxford Street and its shuttered shops all to myself, in broad, bright daylight. I went out of town, south-west to Chertsey, up the Thames Path to Staines, back home down the Great West Road. A 30-mile circuit right under the Heathrow flight path, yet the loudest noise was birdsong. Well, that and ZRs unlubricated shrieking. But I could live with that. The greatest legacy of my previous two cycling endeavours, in which I covered more than 15,000 kilometres on bikes with 140 years and three gears between them, is that everything Ive ridden since seems like the finest, fastest, human-powered two-wheeler ever conceived. Its just such a shame that I havent ridden anything since, not really. Those 30 miles were a good 27 more than I had cycled on any single day over the previous five years. But sometimes it doesnt take much to rekindle the flame. Turns out, all I needed was the gentle nudge of living through a global pandemic with my front door welded shut.