Prelude and Fugue

The boy stood on the burning deck,
Smoking a Craster Kipper...

I mended my eccentric bicycle. It wasn't a good-as-new repair, because I couldn't afford the cost of the replacement materials or the charge for fitting them. I did what I've always done when I'm in a tight spot, I cheated. In this case, I used my lathe to turn up a piece of tube which I then glued inside the two broken pieces with one of the modern two-pack resins. I'll say no more, but there'll be a detailed description over on Albert Ross's blog, (Just Give me the Wafers), soon. But don't all rush at once, you might overbalance the good ship bloggery and we wouldn't want her turning mock-turtle before the moon is abaft the mizzen.

And so I had to test my repair, and regain my confidence in the bicycle, and I thought that the best way to do that would be to ride through and beyond my jinx village, the place from where, twice now, I have had to walk the bicycle home. I packed a couple of bags with tools; masses of tools, because I was determined that if the bike should break down I was going to fix it then and there, no more pushing for me. I also took some water bottles (full), a handful of nuts (edible), and a plastic box full of meusli and oats and brown sugar.

They took some money, and plenty of honey,
Wrapped up in a B-sharp note...

I shan't bore you with facile descriptions of the joys of the countryside, or fill up this post with pictures of wild roses, I've gone beyond that. Today, I shall be mostly ranting on about the crassness of the richer people who think that because they are on the oldest form of transport they can do as they please. And later on, I'll mention the Angry Badger, and the teenage Midwich Cuckoos; but first, we have to begin at the beginning, and only then can we then go on through the middle until we get to the end, and make sure that we stop there, otherwise we could burst through straight into the middle of something that hasn't happened yet, and that could be awkward.

The time has come, The Walrus said,
To talk of many things;
Of Dead Mens Shoes, and Sealing Wax,
And Cabbages and Kings...

But the beginning is boring, just an odd man on an even odder bicycle riding along a bumpy tarmac road, huffing and puffing his way up the hills and rushing like a lemming down the other side. Let's skip that and go straight to the dirty bit.

I had done all my road-riding, satisfied myself that the glued tube hadn't split apart or bent despite the Wiltshire roads doing the worst, and I wanted to go off the tarmac and onto the muddy paths that lead through the woods. In particular, I wanted to go and see Ballands Castle again. So I turned off the tarmac roads in Penselwood and started riding very cautiously down a track. It went downhill at an alarming gradient, but in addition, the torrent of rain water had gouged out a snaking trough that lurched from one side of the track to the other and back again almost all the way down to the bottom, like the trail of a very drunk snake.

Pick up any map, and you'll see that it is criss-crossed by little dashed lines, some red, some green. These are footpaths and bridleways, usually public. That, to me, suggests that they're there for everyone to use, rich or poor, citizen or visitor. And when I started along the particular section of public footpath I wanted to use, I found that someone else had been along it first. Several someones. On horseback. And they hadn't had a thought for who else would have to try and use the path after them. At every soft and sticky spot the ground was churned into a miniature vision of the Somme, craters filled with water everywhere, (very alarming to a Sopwith Camel who had crashed full tilt into one such muddy shell-hole in the last few days of the war). And not content with churning up the middle of the path, other hoofprints had spread out to either side until the whole width of the track was impassable to anyone who wasn't on a horse or wearing wellingtons.

And, the trouble was, I was trapped. I couldn't have ridden back up the scarred road I had gingerly inched down, it just wouldn't have been possible to have pedalled up the one in three slope while avoiding the snaking troughs. So I had to go on for nearly two miles, pushing and carrying the bike through ankle, calf and possibly horse-deep mud and water. My dead mens shoes filled up, squelched, and got sucked off my feet, the bicycle rims and tyres got so clogged up with mud that the wheels stopped revolving, and I thoroughly lost my temper with the selfishness of rich horse riders.

I think I'm right in saying that they're rich. I might be wrong, but I'm pretty certain that you won't find many horses if you take a tour of the inner city housing estates. I mean, it's obvious that you won't find them in the tower blocks, but even the ground-floor flats and lock up garages aren't known for having a dobbin or three hanging around. There'll be cars and mopeds and motorcycles and mountain bikes a plenty, but I bet you won't find a single horse, not even one on blocks without any horse-shoes on.

It's awfully hard luck on Diana,
Her pony has swallowed a shoe.
She fished down its throat with a spanner,
But all that came out was some poo.

I could not see myself being able to lift the muddy bike over the stiles that separated me from Ballands Castle, it now weighed too much, and my feet were too slippery. I had no choice but to cut and run. Or slither and slide. When I finally got out of the wood and onto dry tarmac, I had to pick up twigs and scrape mud out from between the mudguards and the tyres, from the chain and the pedals and the gears, there were splatters over the frame that just smeared when I tried to knock them off, and I had to give up my attempts to get the bike completely clean and ride it as it was, back towards Gillingham. It felt sluggish and sticky and not at all a joy to ride, and I was still cursing the horse riders, when I had a brilliant idea. I would go to the Lost Ford, and wash my bike clean in the water.

The Lost Ford is an example of how you can have paradise outside your back door and still not be able to enjoy it. It was a beautiful little place that I discovered one year when we were organising a night rally. It had a deep water splash alongside a narrow little bridge that would challenge the drivers to either take the quicker way through it but risk flooding out, or creep round the tight bends and across the bridge and loose a few seconds. I saw it once in the daylight, then once again at night, and then I lost it for a couple of years. I knew it existed, because I had a photograph, but it seemed to be hiding from me, until I passed a road one day and said to myself that I had never driven down that particular one, but when I turned back and went along it, there was the Lost Ford, now found. The reason I had lost it was due mainly to the stress of meeting the Angry Badger.

As I said, I was on the organising team for this rally, not competing for once; and on the night, I was driving the course-closing car. My job was to drive the whole of the route fifteen minutes behind all the other competitors, picking up the marker boards with letters on them that were stuck in the banks and verges at odd points along the way, towing anybody out of ditches who'd not quite got the corner right, and letting each group of marshals at the time-controls know that the rally had, for them, officially ended. Normally, course-closing car had a navigator with a map to call out directions and warnings, because you still had to drive the route almost as fast as the competitors to try and make up the time lost stopping and uprooting every code board. Because we were short on official-type people that night, I said I would drive without a navigator, (cocky bastard), but I predictably went wrong in a couple of places. So, when I came round the bend and went shooting along the straight towards the code board gleaming in the headlights, I was not in a mood to hang about, but I still braked hard and swerved to avoid the badger that ran out into the headlight beams in front of me. It didn't keep going across the road and into the darkness, it turned and lolloped along in front of me, slowing me down, and then stopped just by the code board and turned round. I opened the door, thinking that it would scamper away in fright, and instead, it snarled at me.

It was a frightening and totally unexpected sound, especially from an animal that we all perceive as being soft and cuddly, (when it isn't flat and dead, that is). I stood there, half in and half out of the car, with the engine going bobbety-bobbety in that lovely way that V-6 engines do when they tick over, and the Angry Badger snarled again, and moved one step closer to me. It didn't care about my lovely car and the beautiful engine noise or how late I was. I got back in the car and shut the door, and thought that if it wanted that code-board so much, I wasn't going to argue. It had teeth and didn't look like it would enter willingly into a negotiated win-win situation. So I roared off again and got to the finish pub nearly an hour late, to find that they had eaten all the food, and worse than that, they refused to believe me when I told them about the Angry Badger. They all thought I had got lost and completely missed that section. Badgers just don't do things like that, they said. If I'd had a navigator, I might have had a witness, but then again, I wouldn't have been late and the Angry Badger might have gone and picked a fight with someone else. And, in all the confusion, I forgot to get a copy of the map of the route, so that, a few weeks later, when I thought it would be nice to go and see the ford again by daylight, it wasn't where I thought it had been. And then, as I said, I found it again by accident.

Those of you who understand organ music will probably have recognised that the episode of the Angry Badger was the fugue. And so, let's resolve the shifted melody and return to that which was left in abeyance; me, on a muddy bicycle, approaching the Lost Ford, determined to enter that cleansing water and rid us both of the sins of commission.

I baptize thee Albert Ross

I came down the slope towards the water with my feet held up in the air almost at the level of the handlebars, went "Whee!" at the top of my voice, and sailed into the stream. As I reached the middle of the stream, I had doubts and uncertainties, and began to lower my feet towards the pedals, thinking that the water was deeper than I had thought, and maybe I should be going a little bit faster; and then it was too late, because the water was over the pedals anyway, and I had to put my feet down to where I hoped the ground would be, at the bottom of the ford, because I had slowed so much that I was about to fall off. I had to hop and splash my way out from the middle of the stream and up the slippery slope the other side, with my dead mens shoes now sodden and squelching.

I took them off, and my socks, and rolled my wet trousers up to above my knees, boomed "Whom have we here" to the empty trees, and walked the bike back down into the water. Despite the force with which I had entered the ford, it was still caked with sticky brown mud. I used a pair of old boxer shorts that I kept the spanners in to wipe and swab the bike clean, then pushed it back put to where my socks and dead mens shoes stood, and left it to dry in the sun. I left the muddy boxers drying on the tarmac too.

Midwich Cuckoos (Two) - Teenage Gangst

I was not downhearted by my undignified exit from the ford, the sun was warm and the water refreshingly chilly, and I stood on the narrow bridge crunching almonds and brazil nuts, enjoying the solitude, and puzzling over the odd whiff of seaweed that would drift along with the tiny breezes. Where could the smell of the sea be coming from when we were forty miles from it? Then, I saw four figures walking along the road towards me. I could see that they were not going to turn back, but intended to cross the bridge. As they neared me I saw that they were two couples, late teenage or more likely early twenties, very neat and tidy. I felt slightly peeved that my solitude was to be un-completed, but I smiled at them as they came onto the bridge, and said hello. One of them, after a definite pause, said hello, maybe not back to me, but in my direction.

I thought for a moment about what to say next, and said "I've been puzzling over where the smell of seaweed keeps coming from."

There was another definite pause during which I felt that they had looked at each other, even though none of their heads had turned, and then the same person spoke again. "We can't smell any seaweed."

They were staring at the scene on the tarmac apron below the bridge, where my socks and shoes were drying at the water's edge.

"The water was deeper than I thought," I explained, "It gave me a bit of a surprise."

They didn't answer, even after the time for a definite pause had come and gone twice over, and then I realised that they were staring, with mild revulsion, at the muddy boxer shorts beside the socks and dead mens shoes.

I thought through several different explanations, and found a problem with all of them. If I said 'No, those weren't the boxers I was wearing', how could I prove it? Drop my trousers and say 'Look, I'm still wearing pants?' Pick them up from the tarmac and say 'See, it's mud, smell it if you don't believe me?'

My goodness Toto, we don't seem to be in pants-land any more.

So I said nothing. They seemed to come to a decision, and left the bridge. I was torn between relief at having my solitude again, and anger at being the loser in a battle of what was cool and what was not. But then, they did seem to have an unfair telepathic advantage

My only recourse is to become an author and use them like puppets in my fiendish plots. Godzilla meets the Midwich Cuckoos. See the monster have his evil way with the screaming teenagers.

Death by Bongo, Death by Bongo!

As a postlude to this tale, I rode the bicycle to and from the railway at Cranmore the next day, although I had to wear different shoes, the dead mens shoes were still wet as seaweed. The repair to the broken frame tube held, nothing else went wrong, it didn't rain on me, I met no Baby Badgers being chased by dogs, and I found it, although satisfying as an accomplishment, surprisingly boring as an adventure.

Footnote: This tale precedes the recent episode of the silly walk virus. I am a very slow typist.