Bogof Cycle Ride

When I was younger I would ride my bike everywhere. I would spend all day riding around my estate with my friend Dominic. It was one of those council estates with loads of steps, alleyways and tunnels joining houses where they had a bedroom over the top of the tunnel. It was award-winning, apparently, designed in the early 1960’s by the Great London Council to house those leaving London. It’s design rested on joining terraced houses the wrong way (placing doors in unusual places), and making optimum use of space by building the whole thing on the side of a hill. It made for a mean cycle track.

The thing was, I always had this unfortunate habit of making a pedal fall off my bike (most people remarked it was the result of my unusually large feet). This wasn’t so bad on the estate – there was always a hill to freewheel down – but was a nightmare when I started going further afield to Wratting, Finchingfield and Linton. Pedal off the bike = a long walk home.

Today I was lucky, in that I got to relive my childhood memories. Two and a half miles into my cycle ride (I must start talking cooler and call them just “rides”), and the pedal fell off. I love the spirit of the people where we live, always saying ‘hi’, but it made the experience so amazingly humiliating. There I am, with my sporty helmet and cycling stuff, pushing my bike along, with a pedal in one hand. The granny cycling past me was probably only smiling in sympathy, but it certainly felt like gloating to me…

Still, bikes are much easier to fix than cars, and 1 hour later I had my bike back, fixed for a fiver. So today I got a buy-one-get-one-free ride – ten miles in all, but 2.5 of those were walking carrying my delinquent pedal.