A Little Bit Raw

 “It’ll feel a little bit raw out of doors today”, that’s how he put it, smiling his charm-school smile as the camera pulled away and he faded back into his labyrinth of technology, where futures are cast and euphemisms are coined.

 And so, duly warned, I opted to don both gloves and leggings and thereby become all but invulnerable to anything this treacherous late winter day might contrive as an ambush for my Saturday cycle.

 In an hour I was well on my way, toiling out over open country, under a thin cold sky, and the air felt clean and sharp and yes, maybe, just a little bit raw. Pumping steadily, I propelled myself, an intense mechanical entity, across the grey ribbon of roadway, between thinning hedges, still and sullen, under a wan distant sun.

 Time passed, wheels hummed, and gears sang in slick oily surface tension as momentum skimmed me, insect-like across the landscape, while ahead, out far in the west, the black-blue fingers of a storm began a distant probing, up along the curve of the sky’s dome.

 Unperturbed I pressed on, bending to my task, head down into a rising breeze, a chill flow, stinging the small sweat beads on my cheeks, slipping its cold stiletto in at the cuffs of my cycling vest. Closer now, the storm bank quickened its approach, rolling toward the zenith, curling and cascading its dark and boiling turmoil across the pale canopy overhead. A dark chilliness turned the wind into a steady painful stream and now I searched under these bleak air currents for some turning, some slip road that would let me branch away, would let me loop back, sheltered, in a shallow arc toward home.

 Nothing offered, and still I pressed on, grim now in the ever-darkening maw. Only when the thin dust-like threads of the rain took form and the clouds disintegrated earthwards did I deign at last to turn tail, only then did I swing and swivel and grit my teeth and race, headlong before the wind, driving my highest gear, in wild flight homeward.

 Too foolish and too late, for now the unimpeded vapour mountains came tumbling down the air, sweeping in bleak fury across the landscape, outpacing my earthbound dash. In a minute I was caught, overrun and smitten hard in the squall. The rain and the thick needles of almost-hail lashed themselves into wet stinging paroxysms around me, whipping their brittle pellets in bitter flails at my head and face. I was buffeted and mauled, pedalling desperately, gasping under the deluge, as the storm swept over me.

 And then it was over. This blitzkrieg of the elements, it passed, driving on toward the city, while the cold steady wind in its wake kept me freewheeling along, a mobile repository of streaming chilled droplets, panting and saturated, shivering and feeling now, as the man said, just a little bit raw…