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.