forgotten things
A long time ago - probably back in the Paleolithic age, or certainly before we had a car, which amounts to pretty much the same hill of Heinz - D bought a bike. I KNOW! Imagine! And Miss Saigon wasn’t even playing any more, so there was really no excuse.
Anyway, we had words about it.
ME: It’s dangerous. You’ll be hit by a car. The insurance won’t pay out because they’ll say you should have known better.
D: It’s good exercise.
ME: Exercise? It’s hazardous!
Exercise is a nice jog to the pub and back. A spot of high intensity aerobics to the “bangin’” “chaowns” of whichever ‘Rave’ ‘DJ’ happens to be supplying tapes to the Gym this week, interspersed with high energy cover versions of Indie Tracks about suicide and serious narcotic addiction (Abigails ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ being a fave, along with the Weather Girls rare Hi NRG Medly of ‘The needle and the Damage Done / Tears in Heaven’ or Geri’s ‘It’s raining Men’. Well, it’s high energy, and it makes me want to either acquire a serious narcotic addiction or contemplate suicide. But I digress…).
carry on reading… click
Exercise, if it must include pedals and such, is a Sunday morning “Spinning” Class (remember “Spinning”? The late ’90’s / early ’00’s version of the Swiss Ball: A way of making arse numbingly dull and back breakingly painful exertion seem trendy and technologically advanced. I mean, if I want arse numbing and painful exertion, I’ll get a job in a Bangkok Knocking Shop (where, coincidentally you’d not look out of place riding a bike to work in between coups d’etats).
And so it was that on Sunday I discovered, sitting in the garage under, as they might say in the Bible, “An hundredweight of accumulated dust and shit”, a barely used bike. No, I didn’t scare him off all those years ago. D rode the bike for several months before the winter kicked in, and the driving rains, bitter cold, freezing sleet, and, finally many millimeters of snow, made it feel a little too ‘frontiersman’. At that point, it became easier to take the bus to the train station in the mornings. By the time the spring came ’round, we were driving (a maroon/grape ford Sierra; manual transmission for those of you in the U.S.; no power steering. Kind of like a patio on wheels, and with the same maneuverability).
So the bike sat, undiscovered, gradually consigned to myth and history, like those cities of the plains. (Two points here: One, it was Sunday. I was reading the Old Testament. Hence the Biblical references. Two, that just came out as “Cuties of the plains,” which is something I’d like to see in the new KJ version), until it was unearthed by your own (your very own) Howard Carter of the Valley of the trolley Dollies, who promptly snickered, and sized it up for EBay.
Then, a thought crept on me. What would it be like to ride it? To clamber astride it, throw my legs over the dusty but still remarkably well-oiled machinery, and pump like mad?
to be continued. And stop sniggering at the back…