I bought a bike! It’s green, shiny, and my new best friend. Ok, it’s no longer in the first flush of it’s youth (who amongst us is?) but the wheels go round more or less in the same direction and several of the gears work almost all the time. What prompted a stolid advocate of shank’s pony such as myself to opt for the adrenaline fueled world of bicycling you ask? Was my head turned by the lyrca-clad thighs of lady bikers flashing past in the dying sunlight? Well, yes it was, but what’s that got to do with it? A’s been subtly suggesting that I should pop down to her place and go for a bike ride with her for months. As I’ve probably mentioned before one of the notable features of A’s neck of the woods is its scenic hills. All very nice to look at, but you wouldn’t necessarily want to wobble your way over them in a sweaty saddle. Eventually, having run out of excuses and fake knee complaints (there are only two of them after all) I had no option but to take the plunge a couple of weeks ago. A has her own bike of course and I was to use her brother’s. He assured me that the gears would enable me to tackle the slopes ‘without a problem.’ The fact that the bloke is just 21 and fresh from a 12 month stint in the parachute regiment didn’t ring any particular alarm bells. Anyway, there was the prospect of lyrca-clad thighs at close quarters clouding my jugement. I did surprisingly well in the initial downhill stages and was feeling quietly confident right up until I hit the first incline. As gravity exerted its cloying influence I suddenly remembered the gears and twisted what I assumed was the relevant lever in a random manner. Peddling instantly became a lot easier. Suspiciously so in fact. I realized there may have been some kind of malfunction when my rapid pedal pumping appeared to be resulting in nothing more than a slow backwards motion. About 4 and a half days later we got back to A’s house. I was dramatically oil stained, mud spattered, soaked in sweat and sporting several amusing abrasions. My mood was less than light. A was slightly out of breath. I used my very best sophistry to explain how the wrongly positioned saddle had been the chief cause of my woes. A’s mother was all for calling an ambulance. Through the haze of my pain and humiliation however I had felt the dimly remembered glow of innocent days biking around Pembury rec and the fun of weaving in and out of pedestrians on the Barcelona boardwalk. I wanted a bike.
Shortly before this incident I had got caught up in one of D’s schemes. The practical upshot of this was that we went haring off to some second hand ’shops’ trying to buy chairs. D was on his wife’s bike and I was on his. It was the first time I had been on a bicycle since my brief two-wheeled tour of Barcelona three years ago. We headed north into the tangle of undecided flyovers and ramshackle streets that constitute most of Krakow beyond the blessed ring of the old town. D had lived out that way until about 18 months ago and was fairly confident about where we were going but, like everything in this country, the situation had not remained unchanged. There were several comments along the lines of ‘well blow me down, that wasn’t there six months ago’ as we pondered the possibilities of circumventing major motorway junctions and once or twice we gave road crews something of a start as we emerged from semi-constructed underpasses at attack speed. Waving our British passports at potential trouble spots seemed to do the trick. Gin and tonic, “boots, boots, boots” etc. http://www.thegoonshow.net/scripts_show.asp?title=s05e18_under_two_floorboards
Second-hand shops in Poland are a hoot. A refused to believe that they exist, which says a lot. We made an impromptu tour of three or four of the best and emerged with a deal for 13 chairs at a bargain price. There was a lot of spirited but grammatically poor haggling that could be translated as something like “60 zloty each! Them old chairs is like the same 70 zloty in pretty new shop! Are you a loony tune?” Much as I hate to admit it D has comprehensively closed the gap that used to exist between us in terms of Polish language skills. Anyway, the chair expedition was a great success and along the way I noticed that these very same shops also sell second hand bikes. D immediately assumed that they were loot from knife muggings while I tried to argue that they were probably treasured items left in wills and such like. D has something of a reputation for cynicism that he carefully guards against in sober conversations. After a couple of glasses of the local brew however, everyone from the bewitching barmaid to the staggering bar flies are pretty much instantly guilty of bribery, laziness, wife beating or some other form of not getting their arse sufficiently in gear. Born 200 years ago he would have happily wiled away his years decimating the wildlife of India with a smoothbore or going hand-to-hand with Pashtuns in the foothills of the Hindu Kush (ok, make that second one ‘born 20 years ago’).
The secondhand bikes played on my mind and a connection was made somewhere on one of the freewheeling sections of the ride with A. I trotted out to a couple of the stores on my own the following week, but all the glittering rides of my memory seemed to have been replaced with clapped out death traps when I got there. One day D and I took a walk across the river with young S asleep in the pushchair to track down a hot tip on the second-hand bike shop front. The delights of these shops were unparalleled. One of them had what I swear was an ex-Spetznatz diving suit among the recently burgled flat screens and hideous paintings. There is more bad amateur art in this country than in the rest of the world put together. Everyone in Poland seems to have ambitions as a major figurative artist and all of them are sadly misled. I spied my future two-wheeled friend languishing in a pile of the now-familiar clap trap and instantly knew I had to have her. Apart from her handsome leather saddle she has a slender but well put together frame that can’t help but set the heart racing. D immediately adopted the pose of hard-bitten negotiator, a stance that was only partially compromised by rocking a two-year-old to sleep. There was a great deal of comedy negotiating as we beat the poor guy down from 400 to 350 Zeds. “400 zloty are you a loony toon! That bike had around 20 years or I’m a monkey’s second brother!” Apparently it’s a Kettler, which might mean something to someone. All I know is that it weighs almost nothing and has all kinds of intriguing adjustable bits. D later claimed that it looks ‘a bit gay’ but I know he wants it really (and the bike).
What my bike looked like when she was young
By the way ‘rower’ is Polish for ‘bicycle’ for those of you who were wondering about the title of this post.
