I Mend My Bicycle

On my way to see a friend yesterday, I punctured my front tyre. Not deliberately, you understand. I was enjoying a downward stretch when my front wheel juddered. Twenty metres later, the tyre was flat as a flip flop.

The queue at the bike shop was short-ish, but by this stage I'd pushed Boudicca two miles in the heat, was bothered, needing lunch, so when it was my turn, I booked her in for a repair. Only then did I find out that the waiting time would be 8 days. 

Previously, when I've had a puncture, I've been able to get it fixed as a 'walk-in' job. But everything is different. Cycling has become the new ... cycling. Freewheeling brings a sense of freedom at a time when freedoms are curtailed. And people are buying electric bikes like they're in fashion. Everybody suddenly needs a bike shop to fix the bikes that have lain in sheds for years, or to show them where the on switch is.

You'll realise from the title of this blog that something else happened after I left the shop. As a matter of fact, what happened, dear reader, was that I drew inspiration from this very blog. Back at the start of things, hadn't I bought a new washer? Hadn't I fixed a leaking tap? Hadn't I boasted about this in public, and also about my other skills: shelf-fitting, and ... well, other stuff. Why not buy an inner tube and fix my own bike? 

I took courage and a credit card in my hands after lunch, ambled back downhill and re-joined the long-ish queue. Two Americans were buying electric bikes. A man was getting his electric bike fixed. Another customer struggled to fit two electric bikes into one car boot, refusing the assistant's suggestion of taking off the wheels. The car park was gridlocked; the shop staff were calm, impressively kind. 

Forty-five minutes later, I reached the front of the queue retrieved a rather relieved-(or exasperated?) looking Boudicca, and bought an inner tube. And a Brompton Toolkit. Expensive, but think (as I did) of all the money I was saving.

This magnificent piece of design includes tyre levers, and a spanner - all I needed, plus the advice of a YouTube video, to change the inner tube. It's gorgeous, and fits inside a sleeve that can be stashed inside the bike frame for future emergencies.

I Channel the Feelings of a Geranium

As lock-down eases, pigeons have been taking liberties, disregarding my guidelines and landing in my window boxes. This behaviour leads to crushed plants and irritation (not photographed). It has also scared away the blue tits. 

So far, in an effort to communicate the rules, my rules, I've resorted to:

• deploying kebab sticks arranged like pikes ranked on the edge of the window box in the 'at charge for horse' position, 
• shouting, 
• hanging a CD of jazz poetry from the bird feeder. 

Using the CD as a means of shiny distraction /disorientation rather than buying purpose-built shiny distractions saved me £12. This action brought enough calm for me to consider responding to a prompt from Jean Atkin as part of a poetry course I'm taking.

So, my fourth and I hope final, effort to deal with the pigeons has been to channel the feelings of a geranium: the one on the right of the photograph below. This geranium shares my thoughts about the importance of boundaries. 

SAID THE GERANIUM TO THE PIGEON

I’m rooted to the spot, boxed up on this ledge

with trailing lobelia and other plants whose names

I’ve been told but have forgetten … and you?

You’re coming onto us like a crash-landing,

all plump mass and feathery undercarriage.

(And those ugly toes, angled like dead twigs!)

Remove your backside from our broken stems!

Lift your fifteen indistinguishable greys from our pinks!

Repent your savaging of shoots, your squashing of leaves!

Be gone! Scram! Piss off from our miniature Eden!

I Organise My Things

An advantage of a colder, greyer weekend day in lockdown is that it leaves time for organising things. I mean, I do a lot of organising Monday - Friday, but this is focused on other people's things. Last week, for example, I organised essays by marking them, and organised names on a spreadsheet, and organised some interviews.

On sunny weekend days, I like to organise my plants - I ordered six geraniums last week from Pomona Grocery and spent last Saturday morning blissfully sequencing them on my rooftop garden. At the same time, I noticed that the rescue-hosta is coming into bloom, and that the blue tits seem to have been put off visiting the feeder by the vocal presence of pigeons.

This Saturday, so far, I've been inside, organising things like poems, my website, and, well, poems. It takes longer than you'd think.

It takes hardly any time at all, however, to organise an event on Facebook, which is what I have done for Sunday 13th December 2020, 5-6pm. This is the Sunday closest to Beethoven's 250th birthday ... I think. He was baptised on 17th December 1770, which leads historians to believe he was born on 16th December 1770. Not knowing for sure which day one of the greatest ever artists was born hasn't stopped me organising things for a celebration.

In contrast, I know exactly when my younger son was born. It was 20 years ago last Thursday, at four minutes past 9pm. An hour later, we were on our way to hospital, but that's a longer story.

Here's Jonty, in Beethoven's birthplace: Bonn, July 2018. 

Beethoven and my son dance through my sequence of twenty poems, Great Master / Small Boy. To mark Ludwig's big day, I will be reading the whole, around 45 minutes' worth, either on-line, or maybe, if allowed, in closer proximity. Things being back to new normal by then, the shops will have closed, it will be dark, and you might be wanting to sit still in the warmth, amongst poetry friends, listening to my voice. This is the same voice that sent someone to sleep recently, after I'd organised them into a meeting on Zoom. So if it has to be a virtual event, that will have its particular benefits. We will be amidst that busy, shopping time of year, browsing stores, or the interweb. You will need a doze, or a dose of Beethoven.

It seems a long way off, but organising this thing has given me a sense that's been missing for a while - a sense of a plan, I suppose.



Here's a poem from the sequence, which appeared in a recent edition of Poetry Wales, chosen by Jonathan Edwards:

Before You, 4^th June 2000

I’m in labour in the bath.

I’m a whale,

a ship in full sail

beached on the rounded island of myself,

by thirty-odd years and thirty-nine weeks

and your sheer impetus.

Your fist

(or knee, or elbow)

prods at the surface.

I prod you back.

These are the last hours before I’ll see you,

come to learn your sex, your starting weight,

how your heart will beat in air.

I wallow in this human mystery –

and you already know me inside out.