..And
another.
The only alternative is to put the bike in the car and drive somewhere flatter,
which seems to defeat the purpose of the bike, so rapid fitness is being forced
upon me as well as expected, and unexpected, aches and pains. As the bike has
the down-curved handlebars I get a sore neck holding my head up – this is the
recommended technique for avoiding running into solid and unyielding objects.
As my head is, by popular consent, of unusual size and squareness not dissimilar
to a Besser block, it takes lot of effort to hold up.
The second source of pain is in the lower back as you are in a leaning forward
in a position, which would be highly aerodynamic if I was going any faster than
a jog.
The third source of pain is the saddle. You may have noticed that on road bikes
they are very narrow and look like they could be totally subsumed into the capacious
buttocks of the typical older person. Apparently this is a much better idea
than something wider and more padded – like an armchair for example –
but me and my dangly bits are yet to be convinced. Wiser and more experienced
heads than I have said that you only know if your saddle is comfortable after
you have been on it for several hours. I know mine is vaguely uncomfortable
after twenty metres and almost agonising after only one hour, so this is going
to take urgent remedial – or even medical- action.
The other matter of concern is cars. The outskirts of Melbourne are not exactly
bike friendly. Where there is a bike lane it conceals a rough surface where
considerate hoons have thrown beer stubbies whose broken shards can easily puncture
the alarmingly narrow bike tyres on which I teeter. And, to add spice to life,
it is an inevitable rule that whatever bike reservation there is will vanish
as soon as you come to a blind corner.
But in general cars have been damned considerate as I toddle along – which is
good as the speed limit is generally not sixty, but rather eighty or one hundred.
Having a cement lorry pass close by at vast rate of knots is enough to turn
the bowels to jelly.
The unexpected hazard I discovered today on my madcap way to Panton Hill (more
aptly Panting Hill) is kangaroos, which have a habit of bounding in fright along
the road into one’s unstable path. In a car they are a worry, but on a
bike they are actually terrifyingly large and rapid. They also had a slightly
crazed look no doubt occasioned by my yellow jacket, flashing lights and thin
hairy legs protruding like white pipe cleaners from my rather old ‘nicks’.
But the bicycle is a Giant of white carbon-fibre beauty. I fortunately have
a friend who is a master of the arcane world of cycling technology and so he
looked after the mechanical bits and left me to worry more about the aesthetics.
There’s no point falling off a bike that doesn’t look like it might
have bucked you off at vast expense.
My brother and I learnt to ride in the conventional way the all stepfathers
teach their unwanted stepchildren to ride. He bought something cheap and fourth-hand,
painted it Dulux duck-egg blue with an old paintbrush and didn’t tell
us about the brakes. Our training commenced in the backyard, which in our case
was a hill with a 1:1 slope, and we were aimed at the wooden fence at the bottom
of the lawn. Actually we could have been aimed at the hydrangeas, but that might
have been a little cruel as they masked a metre drop before the solid and unmoveable
back of the house. Well, a fence will stop you no matter how fast you are going
and we were going pretty fast when we hit it – once we had mastered the knack
of remaining vertical for the ten seconds it took for us to get from one end
of the backyard to the other. Having amused himself for a while watching us
ricochet off the grass or the fence he did inform us about the backpedal brake,
which meant that we could hit the fence sideways as we skidded on the wet grass.
We were fine bouncing boys back then.
In our adolescence we graduated onto real bikes – mine was a red Humber
Swift with Sturmey-Archer three speed gears whose colour matched my acne –
and we rode down the Dyers Pass Road to school every day with our trousers flapping
like Tibetan Prayer Flags in a Nepalese storm. In winter the road had one thing
in common with Nepal which was black ice which featured at the hairpin bend
at the bottom and led a frisson of fear to every winter morning’s journey
-a fear made more present by the constant schoolboy challenge of getting all
the way down the hill without using your brakes.
I never fell of there – though I did fall off everywhere else – but I
was stopped for speeding one day as I rocketed off the bottom of the hill past
one of Christchurch’s large and odorous diesel buses. I can’t see
that happening at any time in the immediate future, but if you do see an Old
Man in Lycra give him a wide berth. It may be me, and my stability and sense
of direction are highly suspect.