Saturday marked a full year since friend, clubmate and all-round good guy, Gavin Husband (aka Benedict) collapsed and died on the return leg of one of our club runs. To mark this sombre anniversary, Biden Fecht arranged and publicised a memorial ride that would follow one of Gavin’s favourite routes, before delivering us to Kirkley. Here the café had reserved a section of the field for us to use and Gavin’s widow would be traveling out there to meet us. Biden Fecht had also set up a JustGiving page in Gavin’s memory with the monies being donated to the North East Air Ambulance, as worthy a cause as you can get.

I was a bit uncertain if I’d be able to make the ride, but toward the back end of the week my diary cleared, which is more than can be said for the weather. Saturday morning found me doing a long double take between the weather forecast on my phone, promising relatively pleasant bursts of sunshine interspersed with intermittent showers, and the sky outside, which looked grimly dark and threatening.

Remembering a similar forecast from a few week ago, when “intermittent showers” manifest as continuous, heavy rain, I found myself pulling on my rain jacket and strapping mudguards to the bike before setting off, hoping I was being unnecessarily cautious, but knowing better.

Just before crossing the river I even stopped to take off the jacket, thinking conditions weren’t all that bad and actually looked to be improving. Fat chance. A few miles further and the jacket was back as drizzle gave way to deluge. Then it eased again and I repeated the process of stopping and stowing the jacket, this time getting no more than a few hundred metres before it was called back into service. From that point on the rain would occasionally ease briefly, but never actually relent.

It took a while, but I eventually realised we were being subject to intermittent showers exactly as the forecast had predicted – where I was going wrong was expecting these would be interspersed with dry spells, while what we actually got was intermittent showers with prolonged torrential downpours either side of them.

Still, somehow the dark, miserable weather seemed an appropriate backdrop to such a subdued occasion as we collected together under the dank eaves of the multi-storey car park and watched the rain bouncing off the roads.

Despite the horrible weather we had a reasonable turnout of around 30 or so riders, including a few friends of Gavin I didn’t know and several that I did, but hadn’t seen for a long time. This including many of the rebels, strays and outcast, who found OGL’s leadership style, well … let’s say less than endearing and so had long ago made alternative riding arrangements.

G-Dawg outlined our plans for the ride and aftermath, then handed over to Biden Fecht to brief in the route. Without further preamble we split into 3 fairly sizeable groups and pushed out into the rain.

I found myself in the second group, riding with Arnold and catching up now he’s a refugee of the Ee-Em-Cee club and we no longer even work in the same place either. This catch-up naturally included reference to the time he’d punctured and suffered the indignity of having to beg the lend of a pump. His own had broken the week before, so he’d requested a replacement for his birthday. Unfortunately though, this birthday wasn’t until the following day and his wife was unwilling to bend the rules and let him have his present early.

Later on, I found myself riding and chatting with Cowboys while assessing the relative performance of everyone’s rain jackets as water started invading the arms of mine. Arnold’s seemed stout and effective, but I was especially impressed by a Rapha jacket on some guy on the front as the water was visibly beading and running off without soaking through.

We made it through to Dyke Neuk where we split, half the group following the planned route out to Rothley crossroads, while the rest of us were happy to chop of a corner and pass through Hartburn and Middleton Bank instead. We splintered on the slopes of Middleton Bank, but regrouped over the top and then enjoyed the super-smooth road surface on a fast run through to Belsay.

We passed a solo OGL emerging somewhat furtively from behind a hedge on the lane just outside Ogle.

“Aye, aye,” the Big Yin enquired, “So that’s what you get up to when you’re off on your own.” I chuckled. Others, well others may not have been quite so amused.

Through to the café at Kirkley, and there we were met by the Garrulous Kid, back from university sans velo, which he he’d been unable to cart on the train with all his other stuff. Without a bike to ride, he’d caught the Metro to Ponteland and then walked the rest of the way in an impressive show of dedication.

After wringing out my waterlogged mitts I somehow managed to wrestle my wet jacket off, somewhat surprised to find I was only a bit damp around the edges, but not wholly soaked through, although everything from the waist down was miserably sodden. In posts afterwards, Mini Miss revealed that even her expensive Rapha jacket had finally been breached by the rain, so perhaps staying dry remains just a cyclists pipedream? Aether later concluded our rain jackets were so called not because they were waterproof but simply because they were what we wore when it was raining.

In addition to his own rain jacket, Aether was also sporting a pair of Spatz, knee-length neoprene overshoes, which he said were excellent – or at least had been until he’d made the mistake of putting them through the washing machine. Now they were just good.

Luckily, the café had also reserved the barn for us in case of inclement weather, so we had some shelter from the driving rain that drummed impatient fingers on the roof. I suspect it wasn’t strictly necessary, as the rain seemed to have washed away all their normal Saturday custom, but it was a nice gesture nonetheless.

Gavin’s widow thanked the group for the thoughtfulness of the memorial ride, as well as the “honour guard” of cyclists that had formed outside her home during the funeral, when numbers allowed to attend the actual service had been restricted by COVID.

G-Dawg thanked her in turn for the visit, remarking how everyone seemed to have managed to share their favourite anecdotes about riding with Gavin and he promised we’d do it all again next year. “But,” he joked, “Next time we’ll do it in August, so we can expect better weather!”

People were starting to get chilly and the rain showed no sign of relenting, so we saddled up and skedaddled.

Just after leaving the café we passed our 3rd group, including Princess Fiona, Captain Black and Mini Miss, arriving late after a multiple-puncture outing and looking even more wet and miserable than the rest of us.

I caught up with TripleD-El on the way back. She was already plotting how she could coerce TripleD-Be, newly returned from working abroad, to step up to the mark and clean her bike for her. Personally I couldn’t think of a better welcome for a travel-weary worker.

Then, as we tipped down the other side of Berwick Hill I found myself alongside Cowboys again and nodded toward Aether. I was, I admit, slightly troubled by the glistening appearance of his “wet-look” lycra and latex collection of skin-tight shorts and knee high overshoes. This, I remarked, looked like some strange Bacchanalian fever dream from a sportswear fetish bar. Cowboys wondered if Aether was touting for business, but I just nodded to the dormant tail light under his saddle.

“If he is, he needs to put on the red light,” I suggested and, just like that, I had an earworm to accompany me all the way home, although I have to admit it was definitely more Reggie Hammond in 48-Hours than vintage Gordon Sumner.

So, all in all a good way of remembering and honouring our missing friend, despite less than ideal conditions and with special thanks to G-Dawg and Biden Fecht for making it happen. We even managed to raise close to £1,000 for a good cause, which I think far exceeded expectations.

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Riding Distance:	106km/68 miles with 1,039m of climbing
Riding Time:	4 hours 15 minutes
Average Speed:	24.8km/h
Group Size:	31, with 0 FNG’s
Temperature:	15℃
Weather in a word or two:	Appropriately miserable
Year to date:	3,027km/1,881 miles with 31,357m of climbing