Giro

I haven’t been watching the coverage this time around, despite the inherent excitement of this race. I’ve just had too much poor sleep lately to manage it this time around. I’m completely out of the loop and for once, I’m having a serious, deliberate twitter break.

So, waking up early this morning, with the hope of hearing some good news of David Millar, I was shocked to discover the news was entirely different and sobering. The fourth stage ended in poignant tribute to Leopard Trek’s Wouter Weylandt who died on Monday. I don’t know that I feel able to discuss death well, it’s not one of my areas of comfort and I think culturally we are quite closed on this topic. But right now I feel strangely sobered over the death of a person I did not know and surprised by the weight and power of the gestures being made to recognise the same. And, like most people recognising a death which is far away from them, I’m thinking instead of something closer and yet analogous: my friend Anthony’s dad, who died before he was born in a cycling accident, just heading up beach road for a casual ride.

Maybe tomorrow things will go on as they have gone on before, but maybe they don’t.