travel

“Bicycle Race” – a BBC Pause for Thought

/ Trey Hall / Leave a comment

Here’s the text for the 22 September 2025 “Pause for Thought” I offered on the Breakfast Show with Scott Mills on BBC Radio 2. Listen here.

Earlier this month in London, there was a near-total Tube strike for an entire week. One of the results of that was that everybody who owns a bike in greater London decided – understandably – to cycle to work, even if they hadn’t ridden their bike in years and had to dig it out from behind the stacks of boxes in the very-back-corner of the garage.

Picture it: It’s 7:15 in the morning, and the generously-sized bike lanes into central London are already rammed with commuters.

We are a heaving movement of humans, metal, and lycra that feels wild to be part of – and also slightly precarious. People who’ve never commuted on their bikes, people who look like they’ve never been on a bike: there they all are, God bless them, huffing-and-puffing and trying to get to work with nearly-flat tyres, rattling-rusty-chains. People pedaling in stiletto heels, three-piece-suits. It’s a Great Migration, radically diverse.

But there’s one thing that all these folks have in common. They’ve all discovered or remembered their bike-bells. They haven’t ridden a bike in ten-or-twenty years, but oh their thumbs are still strong. And they know how to use those bells. They ring at every pedestrian who steps within a meter of the cycle path, jangle at falling leaves or slight curves in the road, clang at any infraction they perceive in their fellow cyclists. Don’t you love a new convert?

To me, it feels like a few herds of buffalo have joined the antelopes, alongside a parade of elephants, giraffes, and the occasional flamingo — and we’ve all been crushed together onto the goat path. For several miles. It’s cumbersome, hilarious, and even joyous: and as I surrender to this unwieldy commuting congregation, I realise I’m being converted, too.

One Christian author says: the spiritual journey is “always personal but never private”. It’s more “us” than me. I feel that so keenly in this pack – we’re held together as we amble along the narrow path, and then there’s the turn onto London Bridge and for a blessèd 300 meters, we race and expand into width and length, height and depth: love surpassing understanding, before we come back together in freedom with all the people on the other side of the river.

And all of it is the journey. Not so much towards God, because, whether buffalo or flamingo, I believe we’re already in God: in whom we live and move and have our being.

Take me to the river – a BBC Pause for Thought

/ Trey Hall / Leave a comment

Here’s the text for the 23 June 2025 “Pause for Thought” I offered on the Breakfast Show with Scott Mills on BBC Radio 2. Listen here.

When I visit a place that’s new to me, I like to explore it by walking ­– or running ­– along its water: the lochs of the Scottish Highlands, the reservoirs of the Elan Valley, Birmingham’s canals, the dykes of the Fens.

There’s something about the flow of water that tells the story of the land – what’s come before, what’s on the horizon. And it helps me get my bearings.

Maybe that’s why rivers show up in so many songs – Springsteen’s “The River”; Joni Mitchell’s, too; Tina Turner “rolling on the river”; Al Green asking to be taken to it. Water moves us – literally and spiritually.

I remember walking along the Thames in London once, near Blackfriars Bridge. A friend pointed out some bubbles rising in the currents near a metal grate. “That,” he said, “is the end of the River Fleet.”

The Fleet? I’d never heard of it. But it turns out that the Thames isn’t the only river in town. London is laced with hidden rivers – the Tyburn, the Walbrook, the Effra – all flowing underground, culverted into tunnels and pipes as the city has grown. You can’t see them, but they’re still there, moving quietly beneath the surface.

My spiritual searching as a Christian has helped me discover the hidden rivers in my own life. Buried beneath the noise of my anxiety, the concrete of my to-do list, the performance of my social-media feeds, there is a deeper stream. Something truer that I’ve forgotten, or concealed, or been told to hide. But still there, still flowing.

The nature writer Robert Macfarlane says a river is alive – “a gathering that seeks the sea”.

And the Gospel of Jesus says: “Out of human hearts will flow rivers of living water.” Real, spiritual rivers that, I believe, run through every single human being. Elemental currents that are in us – sometimes obvious, sometimes hidden – but never contained by us. We don’t own them so much as we partake of them. They flow through us. Their source and their destination is Something-More-Than-Us, Whom I call “God”.

So when I feel stuck or dry, lifeless or anxious, I meditate. I pray. I take a walk or a run. Or better yet, a swim. And I try to trace the river’s path through me, to feel its flow of freedom beneath my surface. And to trust, even when I can’t feel it or see it, that God is still moving. Alive, flowing, sacred in me and in everything.