Now I think that I have do to very little to present my latest action in a good light.
I have bought a bike. Not only a bike, but a folding bike to boot. That ‘boot’ is well said as I expect to carry the bike in the car so that when I find a suitably flat piece of ground I can footle about with the minimum of exertion, but the maximum of visible apparent exercise potential.
The purchase of this machine has been prompted by the construction of a paseo or promenade of sorts on the margin of the beach just outside our block of flats. It promises to join up with an already existing promenade further up the resort and so provide a walk way at least down to the Club Nautic. Eventually this will provide a flat (!) hard surface for the neophyte bike rider which will stretch for kilometres from Castelldefels down to pseudo Sitges and up towards and indeed into Gava. This will ensure that, with the minimum of effort, I will be able to aver that however little distance I travel I have actually gone to another town on my little journeys.
The actuality of the purchase was fraught.
Buying the bike – at a bargain price thanks to the vicious exploitation of the downtrodden Chinese by heartless capitalists – was the least of the problems that I faced. Not only social guilt, but also the fear of inevitable failure in the construction of the bloody thing.
Folding bikes are an exercise in construction and de-construction. They obviously have to be constructed to enable use, but they also have to be constructively de-constructed to justify their ‘folding’ nature.
Taking an approach which I thought demonstrated intelligence and experience I took the cardboard box which contained the newly bought bike to an unfrequented part of the Carrefour car park and proceeded to put the pieces of the bike together.
Which was impossible.
The instructions (not unreasonably in Spanish) comprised a small folded piece of paper with a picture of the assembled bike and unhelpful vague gestures or suggestionsw which could only have been understood by the makers of the bike to be in any way helpful in the setting up of the machine. They were impossible for someone whose technical skills in three dimensional problem solving are not noted for their high success rate.
Putting the saddle in place was not difficult; even I could manage that part of the puzzle. Opening up the frame of the bike, it being rather obviously hinged was also simple. I managed to work out the spring loaded locating thingy which acted as a sort of lock as well. The handlebars were a little trickier as they were not of the traditional curved type beloved on such bikes as my Raleigh Star Rider of happy memory. These handlebars looked the same from the front and the back and even the location of the brakes was not such a give away as you might think. However they too were eventually in place, at the right height in another hinged part of the bike.
The real problem was that when the handlebars were in place they didn’t actually move the front wheel: they moved, but nothing else did. I couldn’t help feeling that this was going to be a major disadvantage even taking into account that my proposed journeys were only along a fairly straight seafront promenade.
I did try and work out this problem. The instruction leaflet was of no help whatsoever and I eventually gave in and made my (short) way back to the shop – I was, after all only in the car park.
The man in charge of the bike section urged me to return with the bike and he then proceeded to check, change and construct with a complexity and mechanical detail that would have been well beyond me, even if I had known what I was doing.
He used a variety of inexplicable tools to make adjustments of things that I had not even noticed and at one point he used a hammer and chisel to effect essential modifications while he castigated the factory for not doing its job at source.
He also, at my hysterical insistence, demonstrated how to fold and unfold the bike. Again, there were details of how to proceed which were unexplained in the ‘instructions’ and would not have been intuitive to any other brain than the totally bizarre from a different galaxy.
After some forty minutes of simple adjustments (!) I eventually left the shop to go back to my unsequestered part of the car park for part two of my master plan.
It has been a frighteningly large number of years since I owned a bike and, apart from a single horrific experience on a mountain bike in Mexico (in an excursion which was replete with other physically demanding experiences!) I have not ridden a bike in anger for longer than Mozart was alive!
It is however a known fact that riding a bike is like typewriting – you never forget how to do it. I intended to put the theory into practice by giving myself a wide and spacious area to experiment so that the necessity of making sharp turns (or indeed any turns) would be obviated.
Small wheeled bikes are less secure than large wheeled bikes and my wheels were only 20 inches. My first assay into wheeled transport in modern times was a bit like the first breath you take underwater with an aqualung – a bit panicky but almost instantly comfortable in an uneasy way.
I did not fall off and even managed to make a wide (very wide) turn. My confidence grew to the extent that I even wended my twisted way through empty car shelters. I was prepared!
My first trip into the real world was fragmented as I rode along the sections of the promenade that had been completed and then carried the bike over the uncompleted stretches. Once I got to the older section I rode all the way to the end of the cycle track. I will not say what distance that was; I will merely say that my rear end was metaphorically howling with outrage at the indignity of being perched on a bike saddle by the end of my journey!
With expenditure of this sort I have a time honoured way of reducing the initial outlay by dividing use into the purchase price – this ensures that virtually any extravagance can be made palatable and seem reasonable after a time. So far each journey on the bike has cost me €70 – which is even more than the Heathrow Underground Link and arguably even more uncomfortable! I am determined to bring the cost of the bike down to single figures within a reasonably short time.
As long as the sun continues to shine.
I am determined to be a fair weather cyclist!