Frost has bladed the grass but it will soon be gone. It has already begun to melt where the sun can reach, away from the shade of hedgerows and the winter bare trees. The sky is an intense cold blue. The air sharp and cold, shrivelling my lungs, biting at my face as I descend the long hill out of Truro, through a wood, larches and firs holding the winter close, lichen strewn, dripping, a sink of cold air.

It reminds me of days skiing long ago: catching the first lift of the morning with the snow crunchy and the early light still grey. Shivering, trying to ignore the cold nibbling at ears and nose and fingers. Stiff and sore, skiing badly until I could warm up, find the flexibility I needed to turn properly, skis bumping each other, rattling on the freshly combed and icy piste.

Like today. Legs stiff, knees creaking, with no rhythm yet, uncomfortable on the bike and fighting it, arms too straight, feet too loose on the pedals, not watching the traffic and startled when a van passes a few centimetres from my shoulder.

A hundred and three miles ahead of me. Or I could turn around and go home. Nobody is making me do this – except me. A constant dialogue between ambition and sloth.

It promises to warm later although the air will still be cold. If I can find a sunny lane out of the wind it will be pleasant. A thought to hold onto.

Spin the wheels, let the scenery past, try to stay in the moment. Body scanning: how tired are my legs already? Are they more tired than they were last time I came this way? Am I finding this hill harder? Am I slower than usual? Is this really a fun activity?

I know parts of this route so well, I know which cars will be in front of which houses. I have always had an autistic obsession with car makes and models and tick them off as I pass, knowing and noting which houses have recently changed cars. Knowing the route too well – and yet if I look properly instead of focusing on my complaining body, especially now in early spring when the hedges are thin and the trees scrawny, I can see new things. A patch of cultivated garden running alongside a country lane, with two bikes chained to a tree and broken shed. But no house nearby. A boggy mix of stunted oaks straggling along a braided stream, perhaps the work of the beavers who have moved into this area, whether by purpose or mistake is unclear.

Hills arrive. I have a complicated relationship with hills. I generally dislike them because they hurt me, make me struggle, make me breathe harder, my heart pump faster and that can generate anxiety which unsettles the ride, takes away any transient pleasure from riding through countryside. But I like the satisfaction at getting to the top, at doing it faster than last time, the views suddenly more extensive, legs slipping into a faster cadence, the bike pulling me on. I want to stay high forever, rolling on, lord of all I survey as the empty lanes summon me on to the horizon. Complicated.

If I can just let my mind wander, stop looking at the top getting nearer very slowly, thinking of the effort to come. If I can just watch the front wheel turn, roll over the alopecia surface of the lane, observe the verge for new growth, glance at the hedge to identify the bushes and trees, look for birds, if I can think of conversations gone and conversations I didn’t have but wish I had….then sometimes I can arrive at the top of a long hill with no memory of how I got there. Thats the best feeling.

I arrive at a place that I thought was a long way ahead and am surprised that it has come up so soon. The ragged houses of Roche, the left turn past the bakers with its alluring scent of pastry and steak, the Chinese takeaway in this most Cornish working town is the biggest retail unit, the industrial estate with its fascinating mixture of companies making a living by doing, selling or supplying things I don’t recognise or have never needed. Then it’s behind me, wheels turning, miles passing.

The day is passing too, getting warmer. Progress is being made. A steady beat of the heart, a relaxed circle of pedals, the hum of the tyres, wind in my eyes, streaming tears, the constant vibration through the saddle.

My favourite part of this ride is across Bodmin Moor. It can be bleak, black, wet, muddy, cold and windy. Today the exposed granite teeth have dried in the strong winds of the last week and turned grey. The moor grasses have begun to change colour from the beaten yellow of winter, fresh growth pushing through the newly purpled heather, sedges at the edge of small ponds, teeming with spawn. The lane rolls on to the horizon. To my right is the bulk of Brown Willy, Bronn Wennili in Cornish; the hill of the swallows. A triple humped whale of a hill that is visible from most of mid Cornwall.

Nearer are the crenellated, gothic spikes of Rough Tor, a more satisfying hill, closer to the Welsh hills I climbed in my youth, scrambling on the rocky spires and picking ways across slabs.

The turning point today is the shuttered remnants of Davidstow airfield, a wartime ruin where the runways and tattered buildings remain along with a small museum that never seems to be open. It is high on the moors at nearly 1000 feet above the distant Atlantic, which is now visible as a light blue smudge merging into the sky. A hard runway to find on a foggy day after a long sortie searching for German U boats. A difficult place to land when the Atlantic gales roar across the moor.

One day I want to continue from here. I keep dreaming of that. To ride on to Launceston and then into Devon. To not have to turn back for home. There is nothing stopping me from riding on and yet still I make the turn. The dis satisfaction with that choice curdles. I am expected at home but long to continue onwards..,.but perhaps that is just in my mind. Wanting something and doing something are not the same, the liminescence of unrequited love is no guide to future happiness.

On then and mainly downhill, bouncing on a poorly maintained road, my bottom beaten, legs aching, determined to go faster now it is easier, neck beginning to stiffen, shoulders moaning. The Atlantic visible, but not audible, to my right. Signposts pointing down to the sea, the coastal holiday villages: Tintagel, Boscastle, Port Isaac.

I am heading for Polzeath. My family holidayed there for years, my children spent weeks learning to surf, exploring the rock pools and low cliffs, walking along the soft tussock-grass headlands. One day we watched a sail training vessel go aground on rocks on a windy Whitsun day. Too far away to see the crew struggle into the water, not all survived, watching but almost not believing it was real, the ship looked small, the waves seemed insignificant. We couldn’t hear the roar, the suck and slide of green water, the sound of wood tearing on slimed rocks.

For days afterwards parts of the boat washed up on the shore, wooden spars, planks, ropes, ripped sails. They said we must hand it all in to the Receiver of Wrecks but whoever he was, he wasn’t visible and locals hauled the wreckage away to make sheds and garden features.

It was my mother’s favourite place and she liked to sit on a small headland above the beach watching us surf. When she died my father had a bench erected and when he died thirteen years later we buried both sets of ashes beside the bench.

I leaned the bike against their bench and read the memorial plaques to them both.

The tide was out and the beach glimmered in the lowering sun, silvered and dully reflecting the light. The waves rolled in whitely, broken, a few black suited surfers rising on the swells.

All those years my parents lived, different houses, doing ordinary things like shopping and sleeping, reading books and visiting places, holidays, wet days and sunny days, time rolling on day by day until they finished as ashes a foot below the grass swarth of this low cliff. A bench instead of a grave marker – a few lines from a poem by Rupert Brooke and two names.

I am not sure either of them liked Brooke very much but my brother, sister and I got to make the decision on what to write as neither left any instructions. My brother in law suggested the poem and we were too numb, too close to seeing our own deaths, to imagine anything better. And so we all shuffle closer to the grave ourselves and I wonder what to make of this day spent wheeling around the moors and lanes, what is it for and what am I doing with this brief span of time.

There are still another forty miles to go and I am cold and stiff after sitting on that bench too long, a cold wind off the sea with some north in it, clouds beginning to block what feeble warmth remained.

Now I want this ride to be over but that will never do. To spend the next three hours looking ahead, indignant at yet another steep, gravelly grovelling struggle upwards, cutting cross the grain of the land, parting puddles at the bottom of each hill, collecting more filth on the bike. That is a recipe for depression and unhappiness and I don’t need to be any more depressed that I already am, unable to settle after visiting my parents grave marker and all too aware of my own frailties and the free wheeling procession of time.

Stay in the moment. Observe the land around you. Enjoy this time. A former pupil of mine, aware of his own mortality as he was slowly eaten away by disease, spoke to me of imagining each second cut into two, and cut again…and again. In theory he said, you can cut a second into an infinite number of smaller units, time cannot be destroyed, there will always be another cut, two more pieces. So, he said, time is infinite. Life is infinite. Just keep cutting seconds. He had used 630 million seconds when he passed away, alone and by his own hand.

At this moment I am alive. I am surrounded by life, new life, sap rising in the trees pushing out budding leaves, the fresh green of spring, a cycle that will last for another 4000 million years, the sheer raw energy of life.

Let the wheels turn. Landmarks arrive and are noted, the turn left by the big oak, the crossing of the A30 already swelling with traffic heading home. Other peoples lives passing, each with their own thoughts, continuing on this carousel as it turns ever faster, not wanting to get off, paying the fee for another ride until the money runs out.

The sun is low in the sky in the last miles and I add another set of lights, flashing into the darkening spaces beneath trees, even though I am on empty lanes that lead nowhere, linking them up in a complex pattern I have learnt over the years. I have also learnt that tractors fill the full width of these lanes and they appear suddenly on bends, so I hold the brakes hard on twisting downhills, ever alert to the sound of a van or tractor who believe, like me, that no one else uses these back lanes.

My body is tired but not exhausted. I like these longer rides because they make me feel as if I have accomplished something.

But what? A snail trail of electrons on a Strava map, an electronic trace on a server in California, the kudos from friends and the mounting pile of kilometres ridden towards my target for the year? A scratching of an itch, a need to demonstrate that I have made use of this passing time to do something, a something which if not ‘worthwhile’ in any meaningful way, was at least worth my while.

Or is it the memories of sensations, of sounds, of emotions that I will treasure? Reliving the ride afterwards, even years later. The wide landscapes of Bodmin Moor, the luminescent beach at Polzeath, the nod of a dutiful son to his parent’s grave, the bite of a north wind on my face, the stiffness in my knees and hips and knowing I can eat deeply this evening, sleep well tonight. To have made something worthwhile of the day, to have weaved a different memory into this tapestry of passing days where, otherwise, one day will too closely resemble the last until I too become ashes beneath a bench.