Asking about my motorcycle: tracing a Covidian pathography through a child psychoanalytic psychotherapist’s recollection of his lockdown commutes

In this paper, I recollect the post-surgical loss of an important personal holding environment – my much-loved activity of running. In its aftermath the pandemic struck; and I describe my commute to and from my workplace, a public child mental health service in the UK, after finding a transitional object in a discarded bicycle, and later the purchase of my first motorcycle. I recount, from my perspective, my managers’ initial reactions to the challenging task of enabling a workforce to continue to care for child patients with mental illness. Then, seeking to understand the texture and depth of my experiences, I draw on several early personal recollections. I find that my mind posits a link to a childhood bicycle attachment that I forged in the wake of feelings of alienation from my mother; a situation that I am unsure I understood sufficiently during my training analysis. I then link a political dimension to my cycling with the initial response to the novel coronavirus by the UK’s government. As a result, I begin to construct a new holding environment for my experiences through autoethnography; as I trace a pathography that increasingly reveals the destructive impact on psychological services for children – and the frontline clinicians who staff them – of the austere, post-Brexit sociopolitical climate in which the pandemic occurred.