Bakewell & The Art of Flâneurie

Bakewell, that small town in the Derbyshire Dales famous for its tarts which are in fact puddings, is approximately 24 miles from Macclesfield. Take the back roads via Flash and Longnor and you can add a further six or seven miles to the journey. It should take around three hours to get to Bakewell by bike. I say should, because I have never completed the journey, this despite several attempts. These repeated and ‘unsuccessful’  trips have not left me feeling anxious, mildly depressed or to chiding myself with one of those phrases, an all too common part of my youthful vocabulary: “can do better”, “should try harder”, “not good enough”, and the one word that lurked behind them all, failure. As a young man I had hoped that these words, applied like a whip, would drive me on to greater success. They did not. My ‘failure’, a word that now strikes me as anachronistic, to reach Bakewell has not lead to a loss of self-esteem.  May I long not get to Bakewell.

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