“I‘m sorry, you don’t have a reservation, you can’t take your bikes on the train.” The train guard was bustling about readying the train for departure from London. “What are we meant to just leave our bikes on the platform, we spent 100 quid on tickets!?” The guard paused, eyes softened. “I guess we can take the risk, but there are only 5 spaces for bikes and if anyone with reservations is at any of our stops you’ll have to get off.” We thanked him, no dedicated bike carriage like in Sn Fran, here just a small room built for three bikes and retrofitted for 5. We were off, every station we held our breaths watching for cyclists, counting down how many miles and days from Edinburgh we’d be by bike. but, there were no other cyclists and as we left the penultimate station we could finally enjoy the Scottish coast wizzing by.

Earlier that day London had been transformed by blue sky, closer to my memories, it was even warm enough for gelati, London’s latest obsession. We walked past the palace just as the guard changed and were treated to the show, brown bear hats dyed black bobbing whilst a tam of gardener’s ripped out spring’s flowerbeds leaving a dark void. Teenage girls climbed the wall for the view, a blonde, red head and brunette all sporting contrasting roots.

“By the time we arrived in Edinburgh the sky was darkening and the clouds hung steel grey over the stone walls. The sound of bagpipes filtered through the gloom. As we rode it began to rain, but we had a warm house to look forward to, Dylan’s family friend Andrew was taking us under his wing. Inside the family was riding on tumultuous waves rising to the brink of exhaustion, but always just pulling back in time without crashing to the floor. They were moving house, renovating another and had twins on the way. We had plonked ourselves down in the midst of it and yet they never blinked an eye at our burden. We met Andrew’s heavily pregnant wife, Fiona, at a delicious dinner in a ‘Melbournesque’ restaurant called the Timberyard. On the way home the tale of Andrew’s family unfolded, he was a grand storyteller, “there my mother was, alone in a foreign city, wrapping her shame in a winter’s coat, she was brave”.

Andrew was a twin himself with an older brother Ian, but on his mother’s death there was a phone call that shocked them all. It was their full blood brother, they had never known existed. Adopted as a baby, the product of reckless teenage love. Their mother had been sent away to school to have the child in a time where the shame could destroy you, then she secretly sent their baby son to live with relatives in the country claiming they had adopted him out. His mother and father secretly visited him throughout his first year, planned on keeping him, but then tragedy stuck. During the war his mother’s house was bombed and she was the sole survivor, discovered horribly injured in a bath tub flung into the garden, this last trauma proved too much, and the baby was adopted. Years later he found her, and they carried on a secret relationship for years, a house without photographs, she hid all signs of her other family from him, still so filled with antiquated shame she made him promise not to contact her other boys until her death. The beauty of the story, was that it had humanised his Andrew’s image of him mother, explained her bouts of bitterness, her favouritism; she was a courageous and compassionate woman. How many people have we sketched with a pencil and never really known the true glorious technicolor of their life?