It’s not often I get my bike out of the shed. It has been slowly seizing up since we moved here. But so have I been (‘seizing up’, that is, not ‘in the shed’). So it was high time I got us both back on the road. Twenty years ago I was a keen and eager cyclist, tackling the hills and valleys of Norfolk with great enthusiasm every Sunday morning. Well, starting mid-morning and finishing at a pub at midday really, but you get the idea. I could cycle 30 kilometres without recourse to medical equipment, despite my high consumption of alcohol and cigarettes.
So last Sunday the bright and sunny weather had me oiling my chain and inflating my tyres and getting back out there. You never forget how to ride a bike, they say. Well that’s true perhaps, but that didn’t make it any easier.
Luckily the road runs downhill from our house, and is very quiet, so the first 250 metres were very easy. Rolling along down the middle of the road, the sun on my face and the noises of the countryside all around it was perfect. The feeling of freedom, and of being a child again, was almost overpowering. I was ready to keep going all day.
Then a tractor appeared around the corner. It wasn’t driving too fast, or in a dangerous manner, but it startled me enough that I pulled into the edge of the road a bit enthusiastically. The edge of the road was slippery with grit, gravel and water and I zoomed rather dramatically into the ditch at the side of the road. Happily the French like to keep their roadside ditches well trimmed, and to be fair it was a bit like falling on a duvet. But when you reach my age even falling on a duvet at twenty miles an hour is a bit of a shock. I pulled myself out of the ditch in time to hear the tractor driver shouting at me that I should be more careful (he didn’t stop or even slow down), and remembered that I had forgotten the first rule of cycling in the 21st century:
ALWAYS WEAR A CRASH HELMET
I hadn’t, in all honesty, hurt my head or anything else, but after a certain age you become aware of the harm you could do to yourself, even if it doesn’t happen. So I pieced myself back together and returned quietly home, telling myself how lucky I was not to have received a nasty blow on the head that sent me into a vegetative state and required my family to wait on me constantly for the next 40 years.
The small hill I had been rolling down just moments earlier was now too steep for me to cycle back up, so I walked instead, pushing the bike beside me. Mrs Boris was waiting on the terrace, drink in hand, to console me by explaining that both she and our two children had seen the whole thing from the house, asking if I was alright, and so on. Some comfort, I suppose, but I can’t help wondering why they didn’t come running down the road to se if I was alright, rather than sitting on the terrace with a glass of wine in hand.
Perhaps they were also concerned about the possibility of needing to look after me for the next 40 years?
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