Cycling News

A few months ago I quit running for good, because of a chronic problem with my right heel. Three weeks ago, I finally got ultrasounded, the upshots of which were a diagnosis of probable Achilles rupture, and my grateful acceptance of injections of cortisone and a saline solution. After a couple of days of discomfort, it's worked a dream. Thanks be to the NHS, and to Dr Hussain and the young lady assisting him.

During the episode, Dr Hussain remarked that he was very pleased that I had bought a bike, which is what we now turn our attention to. A few weeks after quitting running, while casting about for an alternative way of keeping fit without subjecting my heel to constant impact (hence Dr Hussain's approval), I bought an entry level £550 road bike.

Cycling has been great. I don't use my bike for commuting - just, two or three times a week, taking my bike out for fairly long rides, taking advantage whenever possible of the fairly extensive and growing network of bike paths around Bristol. I wear some moderately ridiculous luminous gear - for me it's all about the visibility, even if it makes me a bona-fide mid-50's MAMIL.

Last Sunday, as a guest of Justin, a friend and fellow ex-philosopher, I participated in the Bristol CTC 50-miler, from Blaise Castle over the Severn Bridge, detouring through several Welsh villages and hamlets to Tintern, where we had lunch before making our way back more directly to Chepstow and over the bridge back to Blaise Castle. I was absolutely knackered towards the end, and can only thank everyone for their forbearance, especially with my two punctures and impossible tyres. I must be quite fit all the same, because despite my Sunday prostration, I felt fully recovered on Monday, and quite looking forward to getting back on my bike.

Which brings us to Friday morning. I left home, and took my way down through Bristol city centre, where I very much like the dedicated cycle lanes. I got over onto Spike Island, behind the M Shed or whatever they call it now, and merged right towards the waterfront. The area is criss-crossed with tram lines, and I thought I was being scrupulous in riding quite slowly and avoiding them, but I'm guessing a wheel still got caught in one. It all happened very suddenly. My left hand, left ankle, and helmeted head struck the pavement.

And here's the thing. My helmet completely saved my head from any injury whatsoever. So from now on I am a vehement partisan of the compulsory wearing of helmets.

As to the rest, they x-rayed my ankle and wrist/hand. My ankle is ok except for being fairly swollen, and is in fact very walkable. My wrist/hand is in slightly worse shape. It's swollen and somewhat sprained, although thankfully I can type with it. The main thing is that I was wearing my helmet, as I always do, and as everyone should, and should be made to.

An Extract from Ch14 of Helix Folt the Conservative

Upon the morning following a further day’s elapse, Sir Hearty Luncheon broke his fast by making free with the haunch of an urchin slain and gibbeted for six weeks, and then frozen for the duration of its flight in the executive jet of Dives the Billionaire. It had arrived with an epslootly charming handwritten note from the Billionaire himself. Couldn’t thenk a chep enough for being an epsloot brick about one shedding one’s skin in the back of the poor chep’s Lexus, and, had m’beaters flush this one out from a system of culverts on the East side of the terroir: ten year old, which I trust you’ll agree has the makings of an excellent vintage. Baste well, blowtorch and serve with garlic, yak butter and parsley. Sir Hearty, crunching the grilled arse between his dental implants, rogering its soggy fragments with his tongue, swallowing them, inclined on the whole to share the Billionaire’s assessment. There was no suspicion of cant in la vie gourmandise. The sin, the cant if it must be insisted upon, lay only in the thoughtless persecution of innocent pleasures.

Very much contented with these ruminations, Sir Hearty looked up from Metal Bulletin tittle-tattle he had been reading on the screen propped up next to the remains of the urchin’s haunch. In a not unpleasurable abstraction, he gazed along the length of the very long and very shiny oak dining table at which he sat alone and in state, to where the French windows gave upon a sunlit lawn patrolled by three or four pairs of gentlemen in very sharp suits with submachine guns and guard dogs. It was all too delightfully perfect. Whither Arcadia, so transient and fleeting! The Second Law’s inexorability. All was vanity indeed which, when Sir Hearty came to think of it, bore a disconcertingly close relation to cant. Wherefore Sir Hearty Luncheon, who never did bear the cant, now forbore by effort of will to consider beauty’s transience or other similarly morbid abstractions.

As if on cue Lady Luncheon bustled in, and flopped down next to Sir Hearty.

“Wot-ho Luncheon.”

“Good morning Pandora, I trust you slept well.”

“What’s for brekkie?” she barked, peering over Sir Hearty’s elbow, “hmm, slum kid’s bum again. Did we epslootly establish once and for all that it was organic?”

“Since I considered the matter entirely jejune,” said Sir Hearty, “I naturally did not enquire further into it.”

“Well rilly,” said Lady Luncheon, “one would begin to incline to describe us as flirting with the margins of a brown study.”

“Not at all,” Sir Hearty replied, “It is quite otherwise. That to enquire into jejune matters is to engage in cant is a matter of analyticity, I would have thought. The embedded proposition is surely a member of the set of propositions which are true in virtue of the meanings of their parts. For this reason alone, I have made it my solemn and universalizeable principle to refrain from enquiry into jejune matters, seeing as I never did bear the cant.”

“Poo-poo,” said Lady Luncheon betraying certain marks of mild dudgeon, and “fiddlesticks.” There was a brief pause, while she fished from her cleavage a folded sheet of paper. “This came,” she said.

Sir Hearty Luncheon bestowed upon the sheet a cursory perusal.

“It is from that nasty old Communist of yours,” he said, “he claims to have found your little yap dog. What is that to me?”

Lady Luncheon drew a great breath.

“What is that to us, Luncheon? One suspects that our cursory perusal did not make us as thoroughly acquainted as perhaps we might have been with Golly Roger’s missive.”

But Sir Hearty would persist.

“I can personally attest to the strength of the correlation between adjacencies of communists and canines on the one hand, and endemic cant on the other hand. I never did bear,” he added very hollowly, “the cant.”

Lady Luncheon replaced her great breath.

“Poo-poo,” said she once more, and “fiddlesticks.”

Sir Hearty was nonetheless moved to further expatiation.

“Where once cant is suffered to encroach upon the perimeters of the Pale,” said the Mendip Marcus Crassus, “it proves virulent and becomes very soon endemic. Cant is virulent and becomes very soon endemic where once it is suffered to encroach upon the perimeters of the Pale, and for this reason alone it is imperative that cant be extirpated wherever and whenever we have the misfortune to encounter it. I never did,” he very hollowly added, “bear the cant.”

“Poo-poo,” said for a third time Lady Luncheon replacing her second great breath, “poo-poo and fiddlesticks. We are over-egging the pudding. And we are doing this,” said she, “this over-egging of the pudding, because of our callow milquetoast refusal to recognise a blatant affront.”

“I cannot be expected,” said Sir Hearty peevishly, “to concern myself with matters pertaining to your little yap dog. You might instruct a minion, Pandora. You might indeed.”

“This pertains to concerns,” said the Lady Macbeth of the Somerset Levels, with a certain froideur creeping into her tone, “this pertains to concerns rather wider than the restoration of Mr Widdles. Wider concerns about the sort of behaviour which we accept as respectful of our station in life, and equally about the sort of behaviour which we regard as an impertinent affront to our station in life. Golly Roger,” said she, “will not bring Mr Widdles to us. We are instead to go to him, as though we were his supplicants. It is all very base. One would have expected those of us pretending to a sensitivity to the infliction of cant to appreciate the impropriety of such a notion, one would indeed.”

“You might instruct a minion,” said Sir Hearty, “all the same.”