In summer the cottage next door is let out to visitors. Each week there’s someone new. I see them coming and going and sometimes circumstances dictate that I get to meet them. Last week a man staying in the cottage came to the door to ask about the television signal in the village. It wasn’t very good, was it? This visitor spoke with a Welsh accent and limped.
Reception does vary a bit according to the weather, I said, but our signal seemed fairly strong at the moment. Theirs was fine at the beginning of the week, he said, but now the picture was breaking up on all freeview channels. This morning they’d had to abandon the Jeremy Kyle Show and watch Homes Under the Hammer on BBC1, which they weren’t keen on, to be honest, and now even BBC1 was unwatchable. It was very disappointing to come away on holiday and find the telly not working. If his daughter couldn’t watch Holby City later in the week, look out, he said.
Life is too short, surely, I thought, to be watching Homes Under the Hammer on a beautiful summer’s day. But I made sympathetic noises and said I’d pop round and have a look at their telly. With my long experience of poor reception, I said, I should be able to determine at a glance whether atmospherics were indeed to blame.
Fifteen minutes later I was welcomed into their sitting room and he introduced me to his wife, who was placidly knitting, his daughter and his son-in-law. The four of them were seated in a homely semi-circle around what my father used to call the idiots’ lantern. I now saw that the man’s limp had been caused by his artificial leg, which he had now removed for greater comfort when seated in an easy chair in front of the telly. His good leg was folded easily under his stump. The flesh-coloured plastic leg was propped against the wall.
They’d turned back to ITV, to the Jeremy Kyle Show. The pattern of disintegration was all too familiar. ‘It’s the signal, definitely,’ I said. I checked the connection at the aerial socket. It seemed fine. Then I saw another, unused aerial socket on the other side of the room and I suggested we gave that a try in case the source was stronger. The one-legged man slid off the chair on to the floor and propelled himself across the carpet with a kind of unorthodox swimming stroke. The strength, vigour and rapidity of his movements were surprising and impressive. He got to the socket first and closely examined it from his ground-level perspective.
I couldn’t help myself. ‘What happened to your leg?’ I said. ‘I lost it in a motorbike accident years ago,’ he said. ‘I’ve been without it longer than I had it.’ ‘What was the bike?’ I said. ‘Only a little BSA — a 250,’ he said. His face, as he looked up at me from the floor, was a little ashamed.
Once a British biker always a British biker, I thought admiringly. Even after all these years he’s still apologising to people for allowing such an inoffensive bike to do him such a substantial amou of damage. He and I talked British bikes for a while. His wife continued to knit placidly. Daughter and son-in-law stared doggedly at the disintegrating picture.
I never had a motorbike, British or otherwise, but I once drank in a biker pub in Essex and sometimes rode on the back of a Norton Commando. The pub clientele struck me as well-adjusted, but on the road they must have been a bunch of lunatics because so many were killed or maimed in motorbike accidents in a short time that a television company came down and made a documentary about the pub. I told him that. And I told him that until my late twenties the only friends and acquaintances who died young did so as a result of motorcycle accidents, the details of which were mostly horrific.
I don’t suppose the statistics have got any better over the years now that it is a question not of how fast does the bike go, but have you got enough bottle to use the bike to its full potential, I said. What happened to him and his BSA, I said. Was it a bad smash?
His wife looked up from her knitting. ‘He fell off at the traffic lights and a lorry ran over him,’ she said pleasantly. It was a long time ago yet shame coloured his face again. And looking up at me, as he was, from a prone position on the floor, he looked terribly abject.
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