CYCLES

Have you noticed that whenever you’re fulminating against the state of the world, and delivering a recipe for its radical transformation, somebody always dismisses your passionate involvement and penetrative insight with the words These things go in cycles?

What they mean, of course, is that Fortune’s Wheel goes round (as it says in Carmina Burana) and we can’t stop it, but as they happen to be at the top at the moment, they see no reason to hasten its inevitable rotation. They are also implying (at least as I see it) that all value judgements are meaningless, because the premises on which they are based can be turned through one hundred and eighty degrees without disrupting the consistency of the system. Only you, of course, are still too naïve and jejune to appreciate that, so yar boo sucks to you and no returns.

Ill-disposed as I am towards Hegel in general for his mechanistic justification of all kinds of dubious forms of government, I nonetheless find something very attractive in his notion of the dialectic and progress by opposites, thesis, antithesis, synthesis. If I am stimulated by the lack of discipline in schools to call for the return of capital rather than merely corporal punishment to the educational arena (believe me, I choose my words carefully!), then this should lead to some effective compromise a bit sooner than simply saying These things go in cycles.

After all, do you really want to admit that you’re just going round in circles? That’s what a cycle is, when all’s said and done. Those lumps of sun-baked rock, the Cyclades, major producers of olive-oil and major consumers of sun-tan oil, are arranged in a rough circle, whereas the Sporades (ditto) are simply scattered, as it might be sporadically, or like spores, at the eastern end of the Middle Earth Sea.

No, no – rather than saying that Things go in cycles, it would be nicer to say that People go on cycles. And sometimes I do.

Now, if they admit it, most people are bi – I know that – I’m open-minded. But I’m tri. It makes me a little – different. A little more stable in most circumstances. A little more likely to tip over the edge in some. In general, though, more down to earth. Fifty per cent more, to be exact.

There are historical reasons for this – well, there always are. I grew up in London, on the long steep hill between Lewisham and Blackheath, so my parents considered cycling to be neither a safe nor a practical option for their sole offspring, though I did own and love a very impressive maroon tricycle.

As you get bigger, so the distance to the ground increases, as does your understanding of the possible injuries. Physical activities have never been one of my strong points, though I enjoy walking. The discovery of the adult tricycle, therefore, was by way of being a major liberation.

Now, I have not always had a beard. (Obviously – otherwise my mother would have been tickled by my birth – and I’m not entirely sure she was.) For a long time I cultivated bushy side-burns on the Franz Josef model, so that when I was mounted on my trusty iron steed, in my panama hat, I lacked only the butterfly net to complete the picture of the Edwardian curate.

It was at this stage of my personal development (which I don’t think will go in a cycle, unless you regard the migration of hair from the crown of the head to its antipodes as such) that I found myself riding through the countryside somewhere between Great Pigford and Little Oxton. (The names, as you will appreciate, have been invented for illustrative purposes, to represent standard English villages with church, pub and post office – at least for the moment.)

It was a hot afternoon, the tarmac sticky, the gravel loose, the air still. Cycling through the drowsy countryside felt timeless, as it so often does, though that may have been partly due to what seemed a large discrepancy between the distances indicated on the signposts and those actually traversed by the rotating wheels of my conveyance. Rabelais offers an interesting account of why country miles are longer: it seems the King dispatched his map-makers from Paris to take the measure of things, and those worthies each took a female companion along for the ride; where mutual desire overtook them, they erected a milestone, but life and human nature being what it is, the longer they were together, and the further away they got from Paris, the less frequent the occurrence became – an explanation which may well apply to the depths of Brittany, but seems altogether too risqué for the well-nightingaled vicinities of Pigford and Oxton.

Indeed, it seemed to have taken so long to reach the crucial turn on my route, that I feared I must have fallen asleep while cycling and missed it. (On a bicycle, of course, dropping off would have meant dropping off – but not on a tricycle! Just one of the many advantages: two wheels good, three wheels better, as they say!)

Anyhow, I found myself unexpectedly at an unsigned T-junction, where I had expected a cross-roads, at which I would have gone straight over, in order to reach, in next to no time, a pub which claimed to offer cream teas (I do my research, you know!)

Not unnaturally, I stopped, in order to consult my map. And that was when I noticed my fellow-cyclist (I’m generous enough to be inclusive with the term – I would even call a uni-cyclist brother, should I meet with one such anywhere other than busking for money in a town square, and I would not disdain a sociable couple on a four-wheeler.)

His machine was an old-fashioned, stand-up-and-beg model, and he was dressed in what looked like cricket whites, with the odd splodge of cycle-grease. A classy kind of cap protected him from the sun, but no precautions had saved him from the terror of all cyclists: a puncture.

With rolled-up sleeves, he was drowning a partially inflated inner-tube in a smelly-looking, green-scummed, galvanized iron cattle-trough and waiting for the bubbles to start. This particular party-trick is one I have long since abandoned, preferring to rip my fingers open as I run them round inside the tyre, hunting for the nail or the rose thorn, and then, once the malevolent object has been found and removed, to insert a totally fresh inner tube and pump the thing up. Life, as they say, is too short to mend punctures or stuff mushrooms – though, in the present instance, as I later discovered… but I anticipate.

Flummoxed as I was by the way in which (not for the first time in my experience) reality was signally failing to match up to the Ordnance Survey’s schematic depiction of it, I thought I might devote my attention to a problem which was not my own and which there was a chance of actually solving.

“Can I help?” I asked, leaning over the submerger of the tube.

“If you wouldn’t mind getting the indelible pencil out of the kit, and marking where the bubbles are coming from, I’d be most awfully obliged.”

I complied with the request at once, as he fed the tube through his hands, like an old-fashioned sausage-maker, and ringed three widely-spaced spots.

“Thorn-branch,” he said.

Indelible pencil, I thought. How long had it been since I held one of those? Odd, darkish-grey, when first applied, turning iodine purple when wet, but never washing out or wiping away. When did they stop making them, I wondered?

“Could I trespass on your goodwill again?” he said, waking me from my reverie. Frankly, you need to be an eight-armed Indian god to deal satisfactorily with the average bicycle tyre, for all the specially patented tyre-levers, or imaginatively bent Britannia metal tea-spoons pressed into service by the spirit of divine improvisation. But as there were two of us, we got the tyre back on with only one skinned knuckle and a pinched thumb-nail between us, and my fellow-cyclist began gingerly pumping away.

“Shouldn’t you let it set for a bit longer?” I asked, as diplomatically as I could.

“Yes,” he said, slowing down, “I suppose I should, but I’m particularly anxious to be on my way. You see, Cynthia’s waiting for me at the pub – they do teas, you know. I ran over that blasted thorn branch back there, and had to stop to disentangle it, and as she was feeling the heat I told her to go on and get into some shade, because I knew it would take a little while to get sorted out, and then I stupidly lost my way. If I hadn’t, I don’t think the tyre would have gone down until I reached the pub, because the thorns were stopping up the holes, but – you don’t know the right way to Great Pigford, do you? I mean, I’ve got a map, but it doesn’t seem to be much help…”

He fished it out of his saddle-bag and began unfolding it. What interested me, though, was its cover. I love the graphic art of the 1930s – you know, London Transport posters, Batsford guidebooks, all that sort of stuff – and I was amazed to see such a fine example of it, so fresh, so unthumbed – in mint condition it must have been worth quite a lot, and here was this fellow just carting it round the countryside, as if its major purpose was to show him where to go! I almost said something about it, but then I decided not to. Not least because the actual map was more or less identical to the one that I had.

“You see,” he said, “this is supposed to be a cross-roads, not a T-junction – unless I’m there, but I can’t be there, because that’s all wrong, so I don’t know where I am! In fact, I’m rather afraid I must have been riding round in circles! Though it hasn’t taken as long as you might think – unless my watch has stopped!”

He held out his arm, and gave his wrist a violent shake, and checked the time. I held out my arm, too, for comparison (I always prefer analogue to digital – you can read the time, even in low or awkward light), and we were pleased to see that we agreed, though I, too, was puzzled how little time my watch told me had elapsed, when my mind (and my stomach) was telling me a completely different story.

“Should I try now?” he asked.

“A little longer,” I said, cautious as ever. And then he began to make conversation, off-handedly, but also a little daringly, the way you do when dealing with someone you’re unlikely ever to meet again.

“What do you think about the Prince of Wales?” he said. I shrugged expressively. “All that scandal,” he went on, “divorced woman – I don’t think he should be king, not really.” I nodded, in the way you do, and he took it for agreement, and tried another tack.

“Weren’t the Olympics marvellous?” he said. I nodded. “Those ceremonies! So impressive! So – so – nationalistic! Really showed what the country was capable of!”

“Did you go yourself?” I asked.

“No,” he said, “bit far for me – but I saw it on the newsreels. I go the cinema a lot, you know.”

“Oh yes,” I said.

“Yes – have you seen the latest big film? Wonderful special effects! Wonderful! Can’t think how they do it!”

I wondered whether I should tell him all about computer graphics and digital images – and then I began to reflect on why he didn’t know all about them anyway, and kept my mouth shut.

Suddenly his face went all serious, and he leant closer to me and said, in a lower and more earnest voice, “Do you think there really will be a war like the one in the film – I mean, it’s not that far ahead in the future…”

Now, the film that I had seen most recently was Terminator 1, or Terminator 2, (I don’t remember which) and I didn’t really think that… but before I could launch into my usual reasoned argument, with its impeccable structure and carefully cited examples, my conversation-partner had carried on talking. Inconsiderate of him, really.

“Things To Come, that’s what it’s called, the shape of things to come, and the war’s supposed to start in 1940, and that’s only four years away, and what with chappies like Hitler around – I mean, Mussolini seems to be content with Abyssinia, but Hitler… hmm… even if he does know how to put on a good Olympic games… and our future king going round with Wallis Simpson…”

“Try it now,” I said, not wanting to pursue this line of conversation, for all kinds of reasons. What, after all, could I say to the man? To begin with, was he in my time, or was I in his? Or, more likely, were we both, in some strange way, out of time, going round and round, on a summer afternoon that was never actually going to end? And did it, in fact, matter? He, after all, was happy – or seemed it. Would it do him any good to be returned to 1936, where war was a little closer than he feared? Could he, indeed, get back to the time he had left, or would he pop out in my day and age? And what effect would that have on him? Was Cynthia still waiting at the pub in Great Pigford? He thought so, and although that worried him as time went on, it was also clearly a source of consolation, on the Grecian Urn model, “forever wilt thou love, and she be fair”.

In the long run, it was the inner tube that settled it. No sooner had he pumped up the tyre, than we both heard the tell-tale hiss. I helped him get the tube out again, he found and extracted the fourth thorn, I marked the hole where the bubbles came out, and then, my duty done, I looked at my watch. Needless to say, it hadn’t moved, but nonetheless I exclaimed, “Is that the time?” which wasn’t actually a lie, and then, “I have to go!” which wasn’t a lie either, and finally, “I’m meeting someone at Little Oxton,” which was a lie, but two out of three isn’t bad.

“Oh dear,” he said, looking at the task before him.

“Never mind,” I said, “to travel hopefully is better than to arrive,” knowing I was safely avoiding an anachronism with Robert Louis Stevenson.

And he smiled. And I smiled. And I pedalled away. And maybe because I wasn’t set on getting on with my life, and was prepared to go back the way I had come, I… broke – not, of course, the tricycle, which took me safely back to Little Oxton, but the cycle, which would otherwise have taken me back and back and back….

August 7^th 2003, 9-10 am, 4.30-6.30 pm