Album

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Composer:   Ed Hooke
Date of Composition:  May-September 2018
Date of Recording/Copyright:    September 2018

Commentary
On our two mountain bicycles, by chance we found ourselves exploring Hainault Forest Country Park.

We were not disappointed.

To my mind, there’s one possibly incongruous-seeming line in this song: “Fly bullets & flamingos from a gun”.  It was inspired in part by a scene in the film “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel” which showed a white bird (a snow crane, I believe) in the mid-distance, slowly & gracefully launching itself into flight before gradually soaring further & further away until it disappears, symbolising the death - or spiritual departure - of one of the film’s characters.  In this song, the sudden, majestic, departing flight of a flock of flamingos, startled by the sound of a gunshot, represents an unwitting, incidental loss triggered somehow by the same gunshot that launches the flying ‘bullets’, the bullets being, in fact, the fast & fleet bicycle riders.

Through the gate strange shadows loom
‘neath leafed canopy gloom
but we climb up the incline & we climb & we climb.

Broken bracken, twigs twisted lay
while wild wound woodlands weave our way.
Sunshine’s shards thread through and splay
- splinters of a day.

Down we dash.
Clothes flap.  Nostrils flare.  Eyes flash.
We bounce & we bound
down o’er bobbled ground.
Sparkling spokes spin round
- serendipitous freefall found.

Fly bullets & flamingos from a gun.
We knew not that that day would be the only one.
There would be no repetition

of our exhilaration daze.

Fast & fleet.
We’ve got winged wheels round our feet.
Ride wild with the wind
where the woods have thinned
like the ground has grinned at us
- traced by tracks twice twinned.

Two-wheeled is each metal steed.
Tough tyres turn at snail speed

as we climb up the incline & we climb & we climb.

Handlebars clasped, pedals pressed.
Pushed slow spun sprockets, path progressed.
Reach hill’s crest.  Complete the test
yet here we will not rest.

Freewheel, freed by chains.
Full tilt down tilted terrains.

Erratic repeat

of a backside beat
on a stone-like seat
every time ground & wheels meet.

Each bike swoops & sways,
careers & conveys us
down dirt highways
in exhilaration daze.

With the Sun still ablaze
my eyes meet your gaze
& that memory stays
of exhilaration daze.

But we spotted not the sinking Sun
stooping to kiss the horizon,
arcing away from our attention,
with its red ever reducing rays.