My dad's most regularly told anecdote - even more so than the time he hospitalised himself spilling a vat of boiling soup into his welly or when he reversed a CND van with a cardboard warhead strapped onto it into a police car - is from 1973 when, at the age of 20, he cycled from Enfield to Venice.
With the flat fields of France beyond and having realised that the Saint Gotthard pass is quite tall, he grabbed onto the back of a passing truck and was pulled drag-lift style hundreds of metres up to the top of the mountain where he overtook the none-the-wiser lorry driver and glided on his way.
Over the next five decades this pilgrimage to Italy's answer to Birmingham had remained a formative moment in his life and, as his 70th birthday approached, one whose path he wanted to retread.
