To the lighthouse!

Once a week when I am home I usually take a morning ride to this lighthouse. I have to drop down about 1000 feet off the ridge on which we live, then across the coastal plain to the little resort of Torre Canne. This only takes about half an hour, but it then takes me over an hour to grind my way back up again.

During the ride I travel through three different worlds. The limestone plateau called the Murghe, which is a patchwork quilt of little stone houses and small holdings, the plain below, a good five centigrade warmer most of the year and dominated by large estates of majestic olive trees, then the coastal strip, full of camper vans and holiday makers in the Summer season.

The climb back is a good antidote to life's petty frustrations such as "will the part I have ordered from the UK to get my motorbike back on the road ever arrive?" I seem to spend a lot of my life waiting for things at the moment, but out on the bike there is just the one hill to climb. From the plain the Murgh looks very like the North Downs, the intercostal muscle that separates London from its lungs - the counties of Kent and Surrey. As I look at the band of green stretching in front of me I often think of my Mum, who when my Dad or I would point out the Downs while out on a Sunday drive would cry anxiously, "where, what are you looking at?" She would stare blankly at the line of hills and simply not see them as a separate entity.

I only bought the bike about a year ago, the first new one I have ever owned and the steepest part of the climb is a measure of my increasing fitness, as over the months I have tackled it in successively higher gears. I get back home after a couple of hours, hot, sweaty and ready for breakfast and the day ahead.