Never lend your husband’s clothing to another man. I did that last month. Leant a pair of gloves to the village postman whose fingers were perishing. It was the least I could do for a man who is my main connection with non-edible consumer goods of every kind. I confess, I am a catalogue queen. Whenever I feel guilty about this I remind myself how much money I am saving in petrol and parking (not to mention how vastly I am shrinking my carbon footprint – practically the size of a geisha’s). Garden supplies, children’s toys, soft furnishings, clothing, gadgets, everything, it seems, that we do not immediately consume (and even a fair bit that we do – Inverawe smoked trout and salmon— fight over the last morsel) can come to me at the click of a mouse.
When the phone rings I suffer from a sudden attack of familial deafness. When the postman or DHL man knocks, I thrill. A parcel. For me? How perfectly lovely. I like signing the little bits of paper they produce. It almost makes me feel as if I have a secretary. Print here sign there. Madam. Vanish flour dusted apron and cords, and yanked back hair; enter alternative me in a neat suit and bob. For that one moment I hold the pen.
And then there is the delicious menu of choices the catalogues afford. The Garden menu – David Austin’s Shropshire Lass or The Countryman on the terrace trellis? Those deep dark tulips from Parkers this year? Or the crimson? Followed by the clothing menu – Boden again – reliable with a light seasoning of playful -- or the slightly more exclusive if less about town Brora? Yummy skirts that make tweed flirt, cashmere to die for. (Or at least give up your monthly membership at the not quite local health club for). And the secret side benefit of shopping by catalogue -- you avoid looking at your thighs in a badly lit (by that I mean unflatteringly – shall I say brutally, lit) dressing room.
Which brings me back to the postman. Gloves were one thing. A simple act of charity. He returned them a few days later, silently, posting them through the letter box so that when I returned from wherever I was they could be run over conveniently by the pushchair, immediately at home again in their rightful chaotic mileu of childmud and floordust. But last week in our brief unseasonable pretence of summer it was shorts. Poor postman on laden bike rings, then in the shuffle of envelopes and packets, drops small parcel onto floor. Instead of getting off the bike, which is heavy and difficult to balance, he leans forward to pick up parcel still astride the bike. Either he has eaten too much curry last night or his shorts (that have not seen the light of day since last year) catch on part of the bike, because there is an audible rip from somewhere near his seat. Am just beginning to be grateful again for onset of familial deafness when I see his hand instinctively check out the seat of his shorts.
“Oh god, torn um haven’t I” he says.
Do I let this denizen of postal provision cycle off home in tatters, his smalls on show to the entire village? Perhaps I should have, but I do not. I glance at his girth, make a quick calculation about the size of my husband’s old cut off cycling shorts (not of the Lycra Rob variety) and invite him in to change.
I thunder up the stairs, have a quick rummage in chest of drawers and descend already wondering if I have done the wrong thing with a capital WR.
“Look, try this pair,” I say sliding my hand round the door of the downstairs loo as if he were my self-conscious ten year-old son in a high street changing room. Half chagrined and half relieved, he re-emerges, hops on his bike and speeds off, absentmindedly leaving his torn shorts behind him (more ten year-old there than I thought).
These same shorts I folded, left ready in the porch where they hung around waiting for the opportune moment. When out of the corner of my eye I caught a glimpse of a red bike go past the window this morning I hurried to the porch, grabbed the shorts and, wanting to catch him this time before he had gone, shouted, not very loudly, but loud enough.
“Here. The shorts. You left them the other day.”
There she was. Old Lady Marlow. All ears and eyes, all techni-colour memory and mouth of her. Right there across the road from me, stick, cardigan and sensible tie-up shoes included. With a cat that got the cream look written on her face. The rotten luck of it.
Showing posts with label cycling. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cycling. Show all posts
Monday, 14 May 2007
Wednesday, 2 May 2007
The Princess
My bike is a beauty. A Pashley Princess bought on ebay from a woman in Leicester selling up and going to Spain. She kept it in her bedroom and never rode it in case life happened to it. Then life happened to her in the shape of Rodrigo and she didn’t need a bike with a hint of passion in its name. Or princess; I’m sure he made her feel like a queen. So the Pashley, more state of the nation than state of the art with rod brakes, retro chrome and leather saddle, came to me and has never looked back. It doesn’t mind the rain, the puddles I splash it through (on purpose sometimes just for the juvenile thrill), never groans under the weight of Spar bags and butcher’s bags, hasn’t even complained about the recent addition of a small toddler seat just behind the handlebars. A loyal friend.
Like all good friends though, it isn’t what she does for me but how she makes me feel that matters. With her I am weightless, I am winged. It’s how my daughter feels on her scooter. I see it in the gleam of her eyes, freedom snapping in the tips of her flown back hair. We travel like this to her music lessons. Her on the scooter, me on the bike.
“I’ll wait for you at the corner” I shout when we get to the traffic lights, even though she knows the routine perfectly well. I signal and turn, wait for her with one foot balanced like a ballerina in toe shoes. She hunches down watching for the pedestrian signal then flies like a greyhound let loose. No idea how amazing she looks, or that it has taken her brain twenty-three thousand signals to her body to get her from one side of the road to the other. No idea at all that at the speed she is going one bit of brick in the path could catapult her headfirst into tomorrow.
Last summer my husband and I tried out our deeply low-tech bikes on a new cycle path along the river. River to the right of us, miles and miles of fertile farmland on the left in large rectangular blankets of green and brown stretched out to dry. Purple stripes of lettuces, limy green romaine. At the market gardener’s plot you could have mistaken the farmer for his scarecrow, but he moved. We took a sudden turning that looked like the main one, dipped steeply down a rutted bank and found ourselves on dirt track to somewhere. Side by side now we talked. Effortless, the whole thing. There is no cost to cycling here in this flattest part of England, other than the bike on ebay. No pay for it tomorrow in your legs, no huffing up the hill. The dirt track discovered a road that seemed to say left, the next one right. By accident we passed the enormous new hostel built for migrant workers where huge signs delineated private land, ingress and egress in the kind of Gestapo speak that put a burst of power in your pedal. Then open roads, two cars wide with not a car in sight. The sheer delight of it. For the best of five miles we saw only swallows and hedges, trees and sky. The cage of my heart flung wide.
There were rooflines then. A road sign. Two suburban planters like an obscenity scrawled at the drive of a mean faced bungalow. A distant windmill dark brown above the tall grasses its white sails welcoming us beyond. Hot and thirsty, we started to dream of drinking. A long thirst quenching glass first, then stout slow pints of rich brown ale under the umbrellas at the Maid’s Head.
We entered the village abruptly at the side of the village green. It is the village’s best side I think. All timber frame and thatch,a pond with ducks. We always wonder which house we would live in, though we both know we prefer our slightly less postcard perfect village that still has its shops, its school, its vicar, and an old-fashioned garage with overhead petrol pumps – a particular delight to my husband (must be a boy thing). Like my husband’s Saturday morning cycle ride with Lycra Rob. A boy thing if ever there was one. Rob rolls up at quarter to eight clad in go faster skin tight black, and shoes whose heels do not touch the ground. My husband, in cut off trousers and chewed old trainers gives him a friendly run for his money. (Lycra Rob and his Italian/American wife Corrine deserve a blog in their own right. Generous and hospitable, they know cocktails betteren Pa Larkin and share their parties with a whole host of darling buds of May.)
Men dressed like Lycra Rob had colonised the last table in the garden of the Maid’s Head. They were folding up their maps as we clattered in on our boneshakers, screeched the brakes and flung our bikes against the stone wall, eager for a drink. They had the good grace to offer us their outgoing table and not to laugh when we said we had cycled all the way ‘on those’. (the bikes they meant, but my legs would have aroused as much incredulity I am sure). A few raised eyebrows, a nod towards the Pash with its basket the size of Scotland. My husband went in to order and I sat down and tried to figure out on their map exactly how it was we had got there. These men plan their routes in advance. Months by the look of it.
“Short run today” one of them said “only twenty miles”.
One by one they boarded their bikes like chargers. “Two and a half thousand” one of them confided in me against his chum with a swagger in his voice and pound signs for eyes. My husband returned with the glorious drinks as the last of them was wobbling, his ballerina shoes not clicking in properly to the pedals. He did this jiggly little dance with the handlebars, struggling to keep the bike upright till his foot could find its place. Then there, right on the lush green grass he fell, in slow motion, like an eight-year old. Unhurt, but deflated. I had the good grace not to laugh. But I couldn’t resist shouting, with a friendly wave, “My bike never does that to me”. My bike is a beauty. It’s the way she makes me feel, the cage flung wide.
Like all good friends though, it isn’t what she does for me but how she makes me feel that matters. With her I am weightless, I am winged. It’s how my daughter feels on her scooter. I see it in the gleam of her eyes, freedom snapping in the tips of her flown back hair. We travel like this to her music lessons. Her on the scooter, me on the bike.
“I’ll wait for you at the corner” I shout when we get to the traffic lights, even though she knows the routine perfectly well. I signal and turn, wait for her with one foot balanced like a ballerina in toe shoes. She hunches down watching for the pedestrian signal then flies like a greyhound let loose. No idea how amazing she looks, or that it has taken her brain twenty-three thousand signals to her body to get her from one side of the road to the other. No idea at all that at the speed she is going one bit of brick in the path could catapult her headfirst into tomorrow.
Last summer my husband and I tried out our deeply low-tech bikes on a new cycle path along the river. River to the right of us, miles and miles of fertile farmland on the left in large rectangular blankets of green and brown stretched out to dry. Purple stripes of lettuces, limy green romaine. At the market gardener’s plot you could have mistaken the farmer for his scarecrow, but he moved. We took a sudden turning that looked like the main one, dipped steeply down a rutted bank and found ourselves on dirt track to somewhere. Side by side now we talked. Effortless, the whole thing. There is no cost to cycling here in this flattest part of England, other than the bike on ebay. No pay for it tomorrow in your legs, no huffing up the hill. The dirt track discovered a road that seemed to say left, the next one right. By accident we passed the enormous new hostel built for migrant workers where huge signs delineated private land, ingress and egress in the kind of Gestapo speak that put a burst of power in your pedal. Then open roads, two cars wide with not a car in sight. The sheer delight of it. For the best of five miles we saw only swallows and hedges, trees and sky. The cage of my heart flung wide.
There were rooflines then. A road sign. Two suburban planters like an obscenity scrawled at the drive of a mean faced bungalow. A distant windmill dark brown above the tall grasses its white sails welcoming us beyond. Hot and thirsty, we started to dream of drinking. A long thirst quenching glass first, then stout slow pints of rich brown ale under the umbrellas at the Maid’s Head.
We entered the village abruptly at the side of the village green. It is the village’s best side I think. All timber frame and thatch,a pond with ducks. We always wonder which house we would live in, though we both know we prefer our slightly less postcard perfect village that still has its shops, its school, its vicar, and an old-fashioned garage with overhead petrol pumps – a particular delight to my husband (must be a boy thing). Like my husband’s Saturday morning cycle ride with Lycra Rob. A boy thing if ever there was one. Rob rolls up at quarter to eight clad in go faster skin tight black, and shoes whose heels do not touch the ground. My husband, in cut off trousers and chewed old trainers gives him a friendly run for his money. (Lycra Rob and his Italian/American wife Corrine deserve a blog in their own right. Generous and hospitable, they know cocktails betteren Pa Larkin and share their parties with a whole host of darling buds of May.)
Men dressed like Lycra Rob had colonised the last table in the garden of the Maid’s Head. They were folding up their maps as we clattered in on our boneshakers, screeched the brakes and flung our bikes against the stone wall, eager for a drink. They had the good grace to offer us their outgoing table and not to laugh when we said we had cycled all the way ‘on those’. (the bikes they meant, but my legs would have aroused as much incredulity I am sure). A few raised eyebrows, a nod towards the Pash with its basket the size of Scotland. My husband went in to order and I sat down and tried to figure out on their map exactly how it was we had got there. These men plan their routes in advance. Months by the look of it.
“Short run today” one of them said “only twenty miles”.
One by one they boarded their bikes like chargers. “Two and a half thousand” one of them confided in me against his chum with a swagger in his voice and pound signs for eyes. My husband returned with the glorious drinks as the last of them was wobbling, his ballerina shoes not clicking in properly to the pedals. He did this jiggly little dance with the handlebars, struggling to keep the bike upright till his foot could find its place. Then there, right on the lush green grass he fell, in slow motion, like an eight-year old. Unhurt, but deflated. I had the good grace not to laugh. But I couldn’t resist shouting, with a friendly wave, “My bike never does that to me”. My bike is a beauty. It’s the way she makes me feel, the cage flung wide.
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