MY LEGS fizzed, every last fibre twitching away, drowning in lactic acid. The breathing, slow, steady, deep. Hands resting on the bars, not moving, corners come and go, I’ve no idea how.

Was it Alpe d’Huez, or the Crow Road? 

The front feels light, ready for take-off, but there’s no fight or flight in this union of flesh and steel. It knows where it’s going.

Eyes on the horizon, look for the climb through stinging eyes, and when the tar finally turns tail to run away, chase it undefeated.

The quiet of an ascent makes it — just a heartbeat on the eardrum.

On the best of days, you’re reminded that silence never really exists in this world while blood flows. 

“Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine …” Patti Smith insists, drowning out the roar as I climb through less familiar Alps.

Not all days can be the best of days. In recent times I’ve had to content myself with scaling pixels on a screen, on a bike tethered to flywheel, planted on the floor of my shed, its screams telling the neighbours I’ve given up the tinkering and taken up building jet engines.

Given the choice though, it’s probably preferable to the gasping of a middle-aged man who’s eaten too many biscuits for too long.

It has its benefits. There’s water on tap, and I don’t have to concern myself with lethal potholes, angry drivers or pedestrians sauntering into my path with their earphones in. No, now I get to wear the earphones, cocooned mind and body in a reasonably weatherproof shed.

In the ’90s when I first tried a turbo-trainer, they were even louder, certainly no simulations, and if you’d rigged up the telly to it, you were regarded as a bit of a show-off. It was very loud music and staring into space for the rest of us and, of course, tinnitus afterwards.

I hold no nostalgia for that though, it was hellish and even then seemed to run against why I got into bikes in the first place — to get out.

The scenery on a phone or tablet now though offers some relief, but as in so many other aspects of life, what is given with one hand is taken by another.

You’d be pushed to find any cyclist who goes any distance now without a phone, moments of joyous escape now punctuated by a buzz in the back pocket, or even worse, on the bars. It’s worse on a turbo — there’s nothing else to see.

There are no birds swaying their way through the intricately crafted fake alpine pass. Instead, little banners float across the digital horizon.

Too fast, Donald Trump announces denuclearisation, speed up, Rachel Reeves faked her CV, 20 minutes to go, WhatsApps about racist WhatsApps, don’t forget to drink, Israel stand ready to annex the West Bank, warm down.

I find myself responding to them as they appear whether they be automated training advice or news from beyond the shed, taking equal shares in distraction.

That’s quite the First World problem, as they say, but it’s also quite the trick. Bombarded day and night with stuff: 75 per cent nonsense, 30 per cent ads, 10 per cent bearing a remote resemblance to fact, and 87 per cent statistics made up on the spot.

I hear that Trump’s strategy is to flood all media channels with announcements, pronouncements, decrees and threats, to deliver a cacophony that leaves his enemies stunned like a Starmer in the headlights of his presidential motorcade. I can well imagine how it might work.

Earlier this week I committed the cardinal sin in the Labour Party of speaking at a Scottish Stop the War meeting focused not only on demanding justice for Gaza, but to defend the right to protest.

Naturally, Trump’s scheme to turn the beaches of Gaza into his own personal boardwalk empire got an airing from all who contributed. Even by his spectacular standards, it does seem a particularly egregious suggestion — literally the ethnic cleansing of a people already subjected to decades of daily indignities, blockades, murder, and torture we dare not imagine.

There are a number of strange things about his disgusting Gaza announcement, but I can’t help but think he said the quiet part out loud: money talks.

Tony Benn once said that if we should ever want to see how a government would treat the populace without the vote, simply look at how they treat those seeking asylum. For Trump and his ilk, this principle holds true on the world stage.

For decades Western foreign policy has relied on forcing amenable governments on peoples across the world, and making examples of the non-compliant, sometimes openly, sometimes not.

But why bother with covert operations to expand your exploitative horizons when those on the receiving end have already been robbed of statehood, the UN agencies fighting their corner robbed of legitimacy and resources, and their supporters around the world demonised as terrorist sympathisers?

Whether his war-criminal fantasy comes true, will remain to be seen, but he did it again on Thursday. 

“Denuclearisation is a beautiful word,” he said as he talked of halving US defence expenditure and hinted at nuclear arms reduction talks with Russia and China.

“The day we need to use nuclear weapons would be a sad day,” he said.

I can’t really argue with that, but I suspect his nation’s military-industrial complex might.

While he was at it, he claimed the peacemaker mantle in Ukraine, another huge issue he tossed into conversation in recent days, sending the liberals of the world into a tailspin, as exemplified by SNP’s Westminster leader Stephen Flynn. 

Bidding for his erstwhile colleague Stewart McDonald’s vacant “honourable member for Nato” crown, the man who once embraced the “Bairns not Bombs” slogan called for a boost to war spending, proclaiming on Elon Musk’s X: “Europe must find its voice, unite, and invest in our collective security.”

The British government meanwhile stands devastated, abandoned by a partner who always told them they were special. Looking for comfort, they picked on six people fleeing a genocide in Gaza who dared come here under a law designed to welcome 200,000 Ukrainian refugees.

The noisiest dog-whistle that ever there was.

The common theme, of course, is that they are all being played. 

Trump’s goal (or at least that of his backers) is to see defence spending across Europe rise, but not for the purposes of staving off war. Instead, it is to minimise their outlay and, crucially, force cuts to what is left of the social wage across the continent, creating new, rapacious markets in its stead.

While the useful idiots play along, the racket directed at those in opposition reaches ever new heights, curtailing hard-won rights to protest, and to dissent. The old “for us or against us” approach has seen striking RMT comrades smeared as pro-Putin at the outbreak of war in Ukraine, those standing in solidarity with the people of Gaza smeared as terrorists and anti-semites, and climate activists receiving patently ludicrous prison sentences. 

Why?

Because strikes work, protest works, success breeds success, and they’ve bet the ranch on their cacophony bringing our silence.

The child queuing at a foodbank in Glasgow stands there for the very same reasons a child stands in the rubble of Gaza, for the very same reasons people are forced to risk life and limb to find safe refuge, the very same reasons workers around the world still, among unimaginable wealth, toil for next to nothing. Their struggles are ours.

Getting that singular message through the tyrannical cacophony of the screen-age might sound an impossibility, but it must be done.

Break out into the material world.

Keep your eyes on the horizon, and steel yourself for the road ahead — nothing in this world can be silent while blood flows.