Relegated by a return to my fast light commute bike to shopping hauling status, I have given in to practicality and gone on a trawl round the bike shops in Fremantle to buy a kickstand for the Big Dummy.  I’m amused to see that kickstand quality isn’t much higher here than it was in Central America. There I went through a succession of them before admitting defeat and learning to pack the bike balanced against whatever stability I could find.

The second shop has one that will probably do – shopping and errands won’t stress it as much as the abuse I meted out on tour so it may last a while at least. I ask to borrow a spanner, and am directed towards their workshop out back.  As I enter, one of the shop assistants is half-heartedly trying tricks on his skateboard – there’s not much going on today.  He doesn’t look inclined to fuss about tool use so I get on with it.

“Do you just use that round town, or are you going to do a tour on it?”  He has sidled over to inspect.  My bike doesn’t fit in amongst the stock-in-trade carbon and aluminium bling.  The skateboard is now discarded.

I am still unsure as to how to answer this innocuous question, even after a few weeks practice in this place so removed from our recent life. The time when my uncontested identity was that of a cycle tourist is already fading enough that I find myself fighting the urge to come out with all of it – the months, the countries, the distance – trying to communicate the absolute reality that we’ve lived.  Touching the vividness of these memories jolts them to the fore.

Returning to the hospital where I used to work has produced an odd time-shifting effect.  It is as if I have stepped side-ways and backwards into a life that is both alien and comfortingly familiar.  The people I work with have a remembered ‘me’ in their minds that I almost was, but now am not.  Time and an enormous experience have moved me further from their conception.  To avoid fleeing in the face of such discomfort, I am letting myself settle into a reconciliation between the different versions of ‘me’.  I hope that I won’t lose the now-me in the process.

Daily cycling continues with the commute into Perth and back each day.  Much like work, I am growing used to the degree that I have remembered the minutiae.  I anticipate known bumps and cracks; and the seconds-saving short-cuts make me smile at the challenge I make of iterating improvement in such an oft-repeated journey.  It is a very different take on movement and progression to that that was just a short time ago.