On being old and awkward

Another beautiful sunny autumn day, another long delightful ride, gliding along – no wait a minute, the Pedersen with it’s high upright position isn’t exactly a gliding bicycle, not unless there’s a wind from behind. It’s a steady determined push, but I actually find that beneficial. After two hours going around the back roads I feel refreshed, even though I’m glad to get home and get off.

Contrast that with twenty-five minutes in the passenger seat of my partner’s car when we go shopping to a neighbouring town. My ankles go stiff during that short period and I am hobbling painfully for a while until something finally lets go and I can walk again.

This might be due to old age, of course, I didn’t used to be like this. I will be 69 this year, and the Pedersen will be 37. We are both of us showing certain signs of having been around for a while.

So after two hours of enjoyable travel, which includes a quite substantial hill to cycle up before I get home, I am obviously hungry. There’s crackers and humous, wolf -wolf, the remains of a roast chicken, chew-chew, fruit, munch-munch, and then the inevitable tautness in the stomach – indigestion. I wish I could stop this over-eating at the end of the ride, it’s something I am going to have to work on during the next few years.

I am assuming I’m going to have “a next few years” of course, but there are no signs that suggest anything otherwise. I fear more for the Pedersen than I do for me, the headset needs adjustment but the top bearing has galled onto the threaded tube and I am petrified at the thought of bending the front forks or snapping something by being too forceful so I just leave it as it is and massage grease and other lubrication into the bearing when I remember.

One of the delights of riding the Pedersen is that in the stillness I can think my thoughts and explore them without too much interruption. There might be a passing car, a horse-rider to be ting-tinged with the bell, a passing cyclist saying hello, but generally I am left alone to think. Sometimes a cyclist will come up alongside and want to start a conversation, and I am forced to pretend to be breathing too hard with the exertion to be able to reply with anything other than a grunt.

I have grown old with a strong inclination to do what I want to do, and an equally strong disinclination to do what others want me to do.

Somebody wants me to drive over to their house for a meal. So that’s an hour and twenty minutes to get there, with all the agony of cramped feet, followed by an enormous meal, with all the subsequent slow digestion, and a period of having to talk about things they choose rather than think about things I want to think about, and finally the hour and twenty minutes back home again, with the subsequent pain. No. It’s not me, I don’t want to go there.

I feel guilty about being selfish, however. I feel that I am supposed to endure all that pain and discomfort because it is more important to socialise with other people than it is to indulge oneself in personal desires?

I recently watched “The Prisoner” series once again,still bemused by the final episode, but something I hadn’t spotted before caught my attention: When he has taken the cheque book, the money and other blandishments, and steps up to the podium to speak, each time he starts with “I” the robed figures behind drown him out with a chorus of “I – I – I”. (I have seen somebody else claim they are chanting “Aye – Aye – Aye” but without closed captions or the screenplay I cannot be certain they are right. “I” makes more sense because he has always insisted he is an “I” when they are determined he should be one of them.) So nothing has changed, he is still the individual refusing to give in to the society in the village. Is that good or bad?

I need to go out on the Pedersen again to think about this. Hold my cocoa, I may be some time.