I received the news from his son Richard early today, the last day of October 2023, that my friend Mike had been given the last rites and was fading away quickly. Then I learned six hours later that he had passed away. He had planned to come and stay for a few days this very month, and enjoy the sunshine, but had to cancel that idea as his illness overcame him. So, I have spent the day reflecting on the half century of friendship with Mike and I want to share some thoughts here.
I met Mike at Ruskin College in September 1974 as we began a two year course in English Literature and immersed ourselves in Joseph Conrad, William Shakespeare, George Elliot and Alexander Pope in that first glorious autumn term among the falling leaves at Headington Hall. He gloried in his working class background as an anarchist gas fitter from Leeds and I traded on arriving from my job on the communist Morning Star newspaper in London, but we both put all the politics behind us quite quickly and became gripped by the nuances of kingship and chivalry in Henry IV Part 1.
In those years at Ruskin College I came to know Mike as a very sensitive soul who was also very passionate about justice and fairness and working class dignity, but also clearly sceptical about human social institutions or political parties that might address those very issues. In a real sense he was very pessimistic: not in a depressing way, but as a kind of realistic philosophical position. For example, he was gripped by the bleakness of Thomas Hardy’s novels, particularly by Jude the Obscure, and he identified with the stonemason Jude who was condemned to build the walls of Oxford colleges but never able to enjoy the education they offered, because that was a kind of social mystery, a law of nature. Mike tried his hand at writing his own fiction and he often voiced this inner struggle against a social system that always seemed to him a suffocating presence, yet he could rarely put his finger on the source of the injustice he battled against.
So it was much easier, talking with Mike, to shift the conversation to cycling. It was his life’s sporting passion and right up to the end, he was commenting enthusiastically about the Giro d’Italia, the Tour de France and the Vuelta a España in the last months and weeks of his life, as we shared our Whatsapp messages reflecting on the day’s tour stage or the latest racing gossip.
Mike was the secretary of Canterbury Cycle Club which he and a few friends helped to revive, and he enjoyed his Sunday rides, always forcing the pace to a steady twenty miles an hour as we cycled out from Canterbury to the Channel coastal towns or inland through the Kent orchards and hills, then back for Sunday lunch. Mike would often become very lyrical about the ‘simple bicycle’ which he regarded as the best invention of the entire history of civilisation.
Due to my own ever-changing life, I went for a few years without seeing Mike, then caught up with him again for a while, then lost touch for a longer time and finally managed to track him down – through Wendy – and get his address in Leeds, so I could keep in regular touch with him during his hardest trial, against his final illness. In these last months I was struck by his positive view of the world: this “beautiful world” as he referred to it, which seemed to strike a different note to the younger Mike I remembered railing against injustice and bleakness. In the pain he experienced in the last months, he also found some peace, I believe, and this came across often in his Whatsapp messages to me, where we talked about many things but mostly cycling. And he laughed when we recalled a moment we had met up again in France in 2005…
I was cycling through France to Compostela and dropped in to stay the night in Albi before continuing on my way. Mike said he’d cycle with me for some of the next day’s ride, so we set off at a furious pace – Mike on his racing bike and me on a heavy mountain bike laden with luggage – and he shouted back to me, “If you’d just stay on my wheel you’ll get the aerodynamic benefit! I bet you’ll never get to Compostela on that bike!” He was right. In the end, I gave the bike away a hundred kilometres from my destination and continued on foot to Compostela, without the need for aerodynamic benefits… But that’s the snapshot of Mike that I will remember: always out in front, forcing an impossible pace, but you were somehow compelled to try and keep up.
Even as he struggled against illness, he wanted to travel to the Mediterranean one last time, at my invitation, to come and spend a few days in the sunshine in Spain, where I had a spare bike waiting for him. He was always a free spirit and held onto the dream of one last journey. Sadly he never managed to recover his strength; but at least it was good for him to smile at the thought of doing it.
Requiescat in pace. Rest in peace, Mike. I’m staying on your wheel, fella.
