UK ADVENTURE

For some riders, night riding is a necessary winter evil, for others though, it distils everything that’s great about mountain biking.

WORDS BARNEY MARSH PHOTOGRAPHY JAMES VINCENT

I remember being eight years old – November 5th, bonfire night, in a field in the middle of Lancashire, in the very early eighties. I remember an astonishingly vast bonfire we’d been sternly warned by our parents not to approach – but even a safe distance away (this is a less proscriptive age, so ‘safe’ is a relative term) it was possible to feel the searing heat on my cheek facing the fire, and a bitter cold on the other.

I recall I’d been reading about space, and my mind was full of spacesuits and what life must be like as an astronaut. I remember running races with my friends, pretending to be in a rocket and, most vividly, the strange distortion that running into the night can give you – the extraordinary feeling of speed as parallax and perspective are punched into the background by darkness, and the feeling of running at one hundred miles an hour. I remember how running towards the stationary point of that bonfire created a doubly strange illusion – I felt as if I was travelling so very, very fast, but approaching the bonfire so very slowly. I remember finding this a completely magical sensation.

Subsequent evening escapades – some with bonfires, of course, but many more in the garden or up and down the street – involved bikes, and as many torches as I could find. I’d crudely tape these on the handlebars and power into the garden, over the flowerbeds and back in an effort to reach light speed like Han Solo in Star Wars, before bedtime. Sometimes I’d venture out with my mates and riding local housing estates we’d revel in what we thought was car drivers’ amazement at how bright our lights were. In reality, they were just annoyed by a few 12-year-old herberts astride Grifters with one properly functioning light and eight suicidally wonky ones between them.

Do you remember your first time?