What better way to escape the madness of our politics than a naked tandem ride to John O’Groats?

SOMEWHERE on the back roads of our glorious isle, a man in his 50s with unkempt hair wends his way south with his much younger partner.

Their mode of transport is an eyecatching tandem laden with supplies for their journey from John O’Groats to Land’s End.

Their dress code is more eyecatching still.

But for their trainers and the odd baseball cap, they are naked.

At the time of writing, I cannot tell you whether Colin Unsworth, 52, and Sadie Tann, 31, are aware that Prime Minister Boris Johnson has confirmed he is to quit.

What I can say with a degree of confidence is, either way, it is the least of their concerns.

There are hard miles to put in today, midges to dodge and saddle sores to soothe.

‘Our bums are killing us,’ admits Mr Unsworth – and, it seems, the other day a passing driver had the same idea, deliberately running them off the road for reasons he did not stop to elucidate.

Other motorists have yelled abuse. How dare this couple of jokers cycle through the countryside in the buff in service to the causes dear to their hearts? What is the world coming to? Who do they think they are?

Well, Mr Unsworth, from Adlington, Lancashire, is a joiner and mushroom forager, while his partner is a student from Sheffield. They are nature lovers, supporters of the mental health charity MIND and, through their nakedness, they wish to promote body positivity.

Eccentrics

More importantly, perhaps, they are exponents of that institution of Great British eccentrics which, reassuringly, comes into its own most magnificently in moments when the wheels come off the orthodoxy and convention in which most lives are mired.

This is just such a moment. The ‘orthodoxy’ of this week has found many of us living minute to minute by news alerts on our phones, slaves to events, dear boy.

My mobile will not shut up. Ding! The Chancellor’s gone. Ding! A new one is in place. Ding! Oh, wait, he says the PM should resign too. Ding! The new Education Secretary, appointed only a few dings ago, has now quit.

The mind races. Where will we be by lunchtime? Who will be Prime Minister tonight? There is, we may have to admit, a certain pragmatism in burying our phones at the bottom of a panier and knuckling down to a day’s naked cycling as events in Westminster take care of themselves.

We are, after all, no more able to control the psychodrama by following every twist and turn than the nude tandem riders are by focusing on the twists and turns on their road ahead.

Indeed, in concentrating on the stuff they can control, rather than obsessing over much on the mayhem they cannot, they emerge as stoic heroes, doing their own thing as politics does its worst to the rest of us.

Somewhere in our souls I suspect many of us long to be them. For it is not just politics which has slipped its moorings in ordinary lives lived on the square. It is practically everything.

The war in Ukraine is not just a humanitarian crisis but a dire threat to global stability. It is the main contributor to the most severe cost of living crisis in many decades.

The petrol we put in our cars is becoming unaffordable. The low interest rates on the basis of which many of us bought our houses are rising monthly, piling on the pain for mortgage holders.

Household staples – butter, ketchup, baked beans – are spiralling in price along with the administrative apparatus of conventional lives such as car and home insurance, heating bills and internet connectivity.

It is yet early in the 2022 summer of discontent yet, almost daily, thousands of family holidays are thrown into disarray through cancelled flights. For months our trains have been running on an emergency timetable due to industrial action. Good luck to those planning rail journeys to the Open in St Andrews next week.

Conventional avenues of pleasure, some of them only recently available again after the pandemic put them in mothballs, are increasingly blocked or rendered impractical.

For some of us, eating out is a distant memory – too expensive, too risky, too hard to find a taxi – and Friday nights in the pub have been knocked on the head for the same reasons.

We thought Covid was disappearing in the rear-view mirror yet here it is, up ahead again, spreading twitchiness about our return to normal. In truth, we have not known normal for years and the older 2022 gets the further over the horizon normal recedes.

In the circumstances, a naked cycle on a tandem, up hill and down dale, from one end of this land to the other, may be one of the sanest responses out there.

Hoping

I find myself wondering where the two of them are now, imagining the silence they may be enjoying as the gear-grinding of political machinations assaults our ears from morning to night – and hoping the great British public has the sense to see them on their way with a smile and a wave.

I would not swap places with them, of course – well, not yet anyway.

I am a product of orthodoxy, a man of routine with all the usual habits such as looking at my phone every five minutes and getting dressed every day.

I have a cost of living crisis to navigate, interest rates to monitor and September flights to the sun to fret over.

It is the lot of the modern news junkie to need regular fixes on what is happening and to suffer mild panic when the dings go quiet.

For now, I am willing to accept my lot, but not that it is conducive to a fuller life. No, from where I stand, the British eccentrics corner that market and, rather than sneering, we should be celebrating them.

The pursuit of peaceful lives outside the norms when the current norms stultify and depress should not offend society but inspire it. It is an expression of freedom, an affirmation of choice.

Perhaps when I am a little older and less bothered about the opinions of others I will join their number.

At this rate, theirs may be among the last Great British institutions going.

Happily, progress is steady in caring less and less what others think about what I do with my life. It is perhaps the greatest compensation in getting older and one which I am forever recommending that my daughter embraces earlier in life than I dared.

But while my own membership of the eccentrics’ club is likely a few years away, I can think of another couple – a fifty-something chap with unkempt hair and his much younger wife – who could sign up on the spot.

It is the future I now wish for that natural nonconformist Boris Johnson and his wife Carrie, neither of whom, I believe, found much of real value for their souls in Downing Street.

Memorably, Mrs Thatcher left the place in floods of tears. Gordon Brown did it hand in hand with his family, a world of cares suddenly off his shoulders.

Boris and Carrie? For my money, they should do it on a tandem, clothing optional. There’s a better life out there.