Feedback on the bike ride? I’ve a number of thoughts…

So the bike ride to London has been. How was it? Well here are the numbers:

119 (not 100)

Just under 12

4.30

Over 500

1

3

6.

Clear? Partially maybe. The sorts of questions that get asked after a challenge like riding between Bristol and London in a day are fairly predictable. How far is that? 119 miles (which is not, as I believed until I’d been riding for over 4 hours, a nice round 100 miles). Blimey. So how long did that take you. Just under 12 hours with various breaks. That’s a long day. You’re telling me. Alarm went off at 4:30am. How many people were doing it? Over 500. You get the picture. Or do you? You know facts about length, time, scale, but do you actually get a sense of what it was like?

You can probably imagine what it is like to ride that far, for that long. Imagine, that is, what it would be like for you to do that. But this was my challenge, my experience and I’d suggest that the numbers mean nothing in answering how it was for me.

I’ve become strangely animated over this point as I’ve handled the response to my ride. It was a tough day, threw up a range of physical and psychological challenges, gave me an insight into myself, my companion on the day, the sport of cycling, a narrow line of sight through several southern counties,. I’ve lots of thoughts on whether I’d do it again; tips I’d give anyone thinking of doing it; comparisons with other challenges I’ve done. Yet the questions I get asked are – how far, how long, how many… Numbers. People feel a need it seems to quantify the experience in order to assess it.

The reason I’ve become exercised by this is recognising how this obsession with quantitative analysis pervades so many other elements of life, and in my particular sphere, the evaluation of services. Working for a charity which receives income from both grant funding and earned income, the measurement of our work is forever couched in numbers. How many children will benefit? How many families will tick the box on the questionnaire that says the project made a difference? How many professionals will attend the course? What percentage will say that it increased their knowledge?

Recording qualitative experience so often seems to be regarded as the softer measure, the method of illustrating what the numbers say. I’ve never been satisfied with that and am feeling ever more convinced that attempts to quantify human experiences are flawed.

Whilst I freely admit to being more of a words person, I am by no means anti-numeric. Indeed I’ve a fascination with mathematics that comes from appreciating how powerful pure maths can be whilst accepting that I don’t speak the necessary language to harness that power. My passion for poker is stoked by trying to unpick the statistics and probability that, if mastered, counteract the element of luck on which the game hinges.

Therefore, numbers can tell you so much, but that requires a strong grasp of mathematical theory. I’d wager a fair amount that the vast majority of people who ask for impact reports, funding proposals, or even who design and circulate questionnaires have no such mathematical understanding. Consequently, it follows that judgements and big decisions based on quantitative measures are actually being made on evidence that is essentially meaningless. 500 disabled children benefitting sounds like a great return, but when the method of setting that target, or evidencing attainment is carried out without a genuine and transparent understanding of the statistics, the numbers just become a manipulated and artificial record of what is hoped for and delivered.

Qualitative measures carry similar dangers, of course. One brilliant case study does not factually prove anything other than what happened in that case. But it does illuminate what can happen more than the numbers. It can tell you the difference that one disabled boy and his parents got as articulated by them, by involved professionals, by factual measures. As long as the pressure to claim perfect success for every person is avoided, giving a smaller number of meaningful descriptions and analyses of impact is surely more satisfactory a measure for everyone than a series of spuriously arrived at percentages and figures to 2 decimal places.

But we live in a world keen on the expediency of headline numbers. So, the rest of the bike ride.

1 puncture

3 deer carcasses seen on the verges of the A4

6 single gloves spotted on the roadside along the route.

Gloves? Just discarded by the roadside? What sorts of gloves? Were they all in the same place? How do so many people lose one glove? Why were you counting gloves?? Ahh, well I think those are more interesting questions, but I have no numerical answer…

Stuck in traffic? It’s a tragedy.

I try to avoid having to drive south from work on Fridays. The Friday before a Bank Holiday weekend, well, that's a definite no go. I work in Bristol and live in a coastal town that has a junction with the M5. It's a pretty reliable motorway, but look on a map and you can see that it points at the south west - at Devon and Cornwall. It's pretty hard to get away to those holiday spots without using the M5 south of Bristol. Setting out on the commute amongst the holiday traffic is a fatal error.

Four days ago, the Friday before the August Bank Holiday, the reports came in throughout the afternoon of traffic building up, junctions closed, police on the scene 20 mile tail backs. I was listening on the radio whilst working from home thinking 'thank heavens that's not me'.

There were two things that tolled loudly in the reports, though - firstly it was the northbound carriageway that was broken; secondly the cause given was an 'on-going police incident'. Not an accident, an incident. In our 21st century psyche that subtle change pricks the conscience a little more - terrorism is not an accident.

The congestion on the M5 was not an act of fanaticism, though.

A man had been found on the Avonmouth bridge around lunchtime and there were concerns for his safety. Police closed the roads whilst they dealt with it. Seven hours later the man died after falling from the bridge.

The reports of the incident are sketchy. I know there were people trapped for hours in their cars. I know there was concern about people, especially the elderly and pregnant, not having access to loos or water. I know there were fears for pets stuck in cars and horse boxes. I heard the usual indignation about the lack of investment in our roads and disgruntled souls who felt that at least one lane should have been opened to prevent gridlock.

I didn't hear anything about the man who died beyond: man in his fifties from the Bristol area.

Of course I don't want to rubberneck at the human tragedy, but surely there is something awry here. Yes, for the thousands in their cars the impact was one concerning traffic; but for the one person at the centre, this was life and death.

Such events - or the reaction to them - are prone to bring out the worst in me, I know. When I worked in the corporate world in London the regular delays on the Northern Line caused by the clinically ambiguous "person on the tracks" always unsettled me. Tuts, groans, angrily rustled newspapers all seemed to whisper an unspoken: so inconsiderate to choose a rush hour train for suicide.

In my darkest moments I see in these responses the victory of individualism over community; the extent to which capitalism can brain-wash humans to ignore their fellow man. This preference for sweeping out of sight the distress and needs of 'weaker' beings is, I believe, all too familiar to those who work with the marginalised in society.

Rather than see any collective responsibility for the safety, behaviour or needs of others, it is distasteful in the extreme to me that all too often people are equated with burden and inconvenience. Either that, or people are thinking 'thank heavens that's not me'.