As my bike had drawn attention to itself by being nicked, abandoned and found, I decided to renew our old friendship by taking it out for a ride. On Sunday afternoon I slung my leg over it and took it for an hour-long, 15-mile circuit that goes up hill and down dale and ends with an exhilarating three-mile freewheel down to the sea, followed by a final killer hill that normally finishes me off completely.
I am currently not fit. Tendonitis in my heels means I’ve taken no exercise for two months. During this time I’ve been further enervated by drink and some rotten, highly adulterated drugs. Worse still, I’ve become fat. And when I arrived at the foot of that final killer hill, I felt too out of condition to face it.
Rather than selecting the highest gear and pedalling dementedly up the hill, I got off, choosing instead to walk the bike up the cliff path. This shorter route is in places even steeper than the road. It is usually muddy and overgrown. But it is just possible to push a bike up it.
Dismounting and pushing the bike up that final hill is, of course, cheating. It is also absurd because pushing the bike up the cliff path can only be marginally less taxing than riding it up the road. As I set off up this path, pushing the bike in front of me, I was deeply ashamed of myself, and hoped that nobody would see me.
Of course somebody saw me almost immediately. Somebody from the village, too, worst luck. I hadn’t gone far when Ron Tranter, walking with his wife in a field above me, hailed me from a distance of about 70 yards. Ron had one of those extra tall shepherd’s crooks, which always seem to me to be a ridiculous affectation. My pounding heart sank. It wouldn’t surprise me now, I thought, if news of my effete capitulation wasn’t all over the village by the morning, and quite rightly.
I returned Ron’s greeting brightly, as though glad to see him. Ron and I have between us that occasion when my hob ferret escaped from his cage, and Ron came across it in the shed where he keeps his Harris hawk. The hawk was bating madly on his perch, he said, and my hob was looking up at it and regarding it calmly and speculatively. ‘What’s wrong with riding up?’ he shouted down at me. ‘Couldn’t face it,’ I shouted back abjectly. ‘Get on with you!’ he roared. Explaining — about the tendonitis, the rotten drugs — could only have made matters worse. Chastened and humiliated, I pushed on up the cliff path.
The path is a strenuous route in either direction, whether going down or coming up. This puts most people off using it. But about halfway up I stood to one side to allow a timid cocker spaniel then an elderly couple to pass by. They were not tourists or hikers. They lived in the village, too. What terrible luck I was having. I didn’t know their names. I’d only seen them around. But now I was surely done for. My faint-heartedness was now bound to get out and be repeated by one incredulous person to another until the whole village knew.
As the man passed me by, he gave me this look that said, I might be elderly, but I’m still game, and I’ve kept my sense of humour. And he said, ‘My goodness me! I would have thought a strapping, fit-looking chap like you would have ridden up!’ Then he laughed a conciliatory laugh, just in case, and I laughed a bitter one. Then I pushed on.
Fifty yards further on, at the steepest part of the ascent, I turned a bend in the path and who should there be on the path but a bloody parish councillor, deep in conversation with another chap. Now my depravity would not only be all over the village, there would also probably be a piece in the Christmas issue of our parish magazine. And if it was picked up, the story — Local Man Gets Off and Pushes — might even make the South Hams Gazette.
‘What’s this, Jeremy? Taking up cycling?’ said the parish councillor, polite as always. ‘Taking up pushing a bike around, more like,’ said his friend, less politely. I tried to speak but could only pant. I stood there with my mouth open, panting uncontrollably at them. Quickly impatient of this, the councillor’s friend dismissed me with: ‘Whatever you’re doing, matey, I’d give it up if I were you.’ And then he curtly turned his back to resume their discussion of presumably weightier matters from the point where I’d interrupted it. I panted at his back for a while, then pushed on up the hill.
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