Petor recalls a simpler, damper, mouldier time measured in meals and miles, not hours and minutes.

WORDS & PHOTOGRAPHY PETOR GEORGALLOU

Until my MA degree, I didn’t have an email address, because I didn’t really use the internet – Ididn’t really see its function. To me it seemed the ultimate luxury. I didn’t really have any money because I spent all my time in the studio painting, or tinkering, or reading magazines. Or looking at pictures, visiting galleries, listening to music and riding my bike. I got a summer job leading cycle tours for a weirdo ‘environmental’ charity. We’d cycle from town to town, performing a play to bemused school children about how switching off the lights, eating less meat and using reusable food and drinks containers would help save the planet. I’m 100% confident now that there’s no saving the planet, but as we slide off the precipice I feel better knowing I tried. My summers earning £50 per week as a stipend weren’t completely wasted because one year I managed to ride LEJOG (Land’s End to John O’Groats) three times.

Ah, the romance of the open road.

Roving dads

Land’s End in Cornwall is (more or less) the most southwesterly point in England and John O’Groats is pretty much the most north-easterly bit of Scotland, so it’s widely accepted as the longest one-way journey you can make in one continuous direction in the UK. It’s the sort of cycle touring that used to happen in the 1990s and 2000s before people started saying things like ‘bikepacking’ and ‘adventure cycling’. It landed in an odd period between the Rough-Stuff Fellowship’s numbers dwindling to nothing and Surly being imported to the UK in significant numbers. While aluminium was the mainstream, traditional steel tourers such as the Dawes Galaxy could still be purchased on a high street, although discerning tourists would covet a Thorn Raven. I was not a discerning tourist, and I definitely wasn’t going to squeeze a Thorn out of my student loan.