I've just seen I can try Google Gemini artificial intelligence, so , providing I can remember my password, this may well be the last ride report I ever actually pen myself. You may therefore expect better quality ramblings from now on! Or perhaps you're already looking at a a deep fake....?
Anyway, I digress. It was a typical Remembrance Sunday morning - cold, overcast and miserable. It wasn't actually foggy but it made me recall a Remembrance Sunday morning in my childhood when there was very thick fog. On the valve radio, Wynford Vaughan-Thomas was commenting from the Cenotaph and the guard's band were lingering over the Nimrod variation. The service once over, I went out with my dad, on foot since we had no car, likely to get some fags (for him, that is, not for me). I came back with a packet of Callard and Bowser's butterscotch, then one of my favourites. Mais où sont les bonbons d'antan, as the man almost wrote!
To return to the subject, it was 'implacable November weather' (as another bloke wrote) but that did not deter Dave V, Diane, Steph, Terry, Andy, Brian, Keith, Jennie, Clive, Graham and, surprisingly, me from gathering for a convivial elevenses at a very cosy Vineries Garden Centre! It was hard to drag ourselves away but we were ready to leave promptly at 11.00, pausing for two minute's silence before actually setting off.
We left Dave V and Graham at the Vineries and set off into the gloom, taking an improbable route through the implacable weather - we reached Horsley station via some pointless back-doubles, then took the railway path to West Horsley and headed for the Ryde Farm track. I had promised no unsurfaced tracks, and, strictly speaking, kept my word, although in truth the broken up concrete of the first part of the farm track resembled an earthquake zone! Miraculously there were no casualties! Brian disappeared into the gloom after this, off to quality control the new Wisley Lane bridge works!
We fended off some implacable drizzle and at length we reached Guildford where Steph left us. Wetherspoons wasn't too busy for a Sunday lunchtime and service was quick. Unfortunately, wifi and the internet were both too slow to use the app and we had to suffer the ignominy of going to the bar to order! I envisaged countless university students all around us lazing in bed in their garrets while artificial inelligence was busy writing their essays and assignments for them, just in time for the start of the new week, and draining the internet of power. Walk to the bar, what a humiliation!
After lunch Terry left us. It continued implacable and the rest of our dwindling group headed off in the direction of Jacobs Well, crossing the Brutalist concrete footbridge which is inexplicably juxtaposed with a pub proclaiming itself to be 'the Wooden Bridge'!
The ride continued and we were fortunately spared any 'events'. Clive and Keith wisely left us on the outskirts of Woking. The rest of us plodded on to tea at Walton bridge. We didn't pass a single sweetshop en route, just as well since C & B's butterscotch has long since disappeared! The implacable in pursuit of the unobtainable, as someone else might have said!
Thanks to all for your company and to Steph for back-marking.
