I had been riding along for a minute or two on my sit up and beg style, not quite, but nearly, new blue bike this morning when I realised that I my choice of riding garb was not altogether suitable; still, it hardly seemed worth going back to change. And it’s always colder when we set off. There are two good reasons why: firstly, because we haven’t had time to build up any steam, and secondly, because Exeter Road is like a wind tunnel!
“I’ll soon warm up when we turn off onto the bridle path,” I thought.
“Wish I’d worn gloves,” Chris complained. (It must have been really cold because Chris hates wearing gloves!)
I nodded. I was too cold to speak.
“This is the Arctic wind that was forecast two days ago – they were right!” Chris said, rather pleased that they had got it right (because I always point out when they get it wrong). I’ve told you before that he has a slight obsession with meteorology.
I nodded again. The air was freezing, my legs were freezing, and my “tiny hand was frozen”, just like Mimi’s in “La Boheme”, except that my hand is normal size.
“This is when drop handlebars are better than the sit up and beg variety,” said Chris when he had caught up and we were two-abreast again.
I’ve never had drop handlebars so I didn’t comment, beside which, I was too busy fighting the wind.
“It will be with us most of the way when we come home, as least we can look forward to that,” Chris must have seen the anguished look on my face as I braved onwards into the biting wind. He was very talkative this morning. I tried to force a smile.
The wind continued to hound and bite us the whole way to Cockwood. As we laboured in low gear down the hill to Dawlish Warren Chris shouted into the wind…
“Just think how it will be on the way back!”
On the way home we could have been fooled into thinking that we were cycling in still air, but for the icy chill, which felt like the hand of Frosty the snowman on our backs. Had it not been for the wind we would have been warm – it was a beautiful sunny day. Another cyclist, a young man, riding against the wind, stopped on the cyclepath as we passed. and I called out,
“It’s so cold coming from your direction.”
“And it’s windy,” he shouted in a friendly fashion. (Well, he was only young.)
Whilst flying up the last incline I asked Chris why my bike is often referred to as a “sit up and beg” bike (you’ll think me a bit slow but I hadn’t really thought about it before).
“It’s because the relationship between your saddle and the handlebars make you look like a dog begging for food,” Chris answered very patiently (though he must have be thinking I was thick).
“Of course, I forgot,” I said, realising how thick I must have sounded.
We laughed. If he doesn’t know me by now he never will!
Oddly enough, the subject of begging has been very much on my mind ever since we returned from our special night at the opera last Tuesday night. But no, it didn’t have anything to do with “La Boheme”, except perhaps in a tenuous way, owing to the effect of the tragic story (set in the poverty-stricken artists’ quarter of Paris in the early eighteen hundreds) upon the opera-goers as we mostly all returned to the multi-storey car park nearby. For sat on the concrete at the entrance to the car park was a young man dressed in ragged denim; he had a beard and in front of him was the lid of a cardboard shoe-box with only a few small coins inside (looking very paltry); and yet the young chap looked clean and cheerful. He wasn’t drunk or drugged up. He looked at each of us as we went to pass him by and he smiled nicely, and, in a mellifluous Scottish brogue, he wished us a safe journey home.
Beset by feelings of love for my fellow man, and having just shed tears for poor consumptive Mimi who died with her “tiny frozen hands” at last in a warm fur muff, I searched in my purse. It was full of coins of all denominations, but somehow the brown and silver ones looked too small – they matched the ones already on the shoe-box lid – so I found a gold one. It would have seemed patronising to throw the pound coin on the grotty lid on the cold and dirty concrete (and how demeaning for the nice young chap to have to scrabble around for it if it should bounce off!); of course, I placed the coin in the boy’s outstretched hand, and our hands lingered for a moment, making a private connection.
“Thank you so much,” he said sincerely, “goodnight and have a safe trip home”.
My sister, Mary, who followed me, made her connection too; as did the gentleman who came behind us, and the couple after him; and we all smiled and said in our little huddles, “what a nice young man to wish us a safe trip!” It didn’t even feel like begging – it actually felt like he was giving us something… something special enough to make me think of him even now.