It had to happen sometime. Coming round a gravelly corner, brakes off so I wouldn’t skid, a little too fast to avoid the monster pothole on the other side of the bend: thump, thump, crunch, rumble rumble rumble… the back wheel had a flat.
I thought I’d planned things so well, too. Supper cooked and out of the way as the kick-off started, other half left parked in front of the tv (which seems to be malfunctioning: everytime we turn it on to watch the football it makes this angry droning noise as though there’s a hornet trapped in there), and plenty of daylight left. I was going ’round the block’ which around here is about 8 miles and I was almost exactly at the half way point. Keep going or turn back – either way it was going to be a long walk back…
Fortunately some instinct had prompted me to go in and grap my mobile phone at the last minute – I don’t always bother – and it was charged up and, amazingly, had a signal too. And even better it was half time, the USA had scored their goal, and so the other half actually answered the phone and agreed to come and get me. I think he’d have got me anyway, but I’d probably owe him enough favours to be in hock for a long time. That would have been an awful lot of back rubs.
Now I know what you’re thinking. Mobile phone? Ring a man up to come and rescue me in a car? Surely, if I were a REAL cyclist, not to mention a real feminist, what I ought to have been carrying was my bicycle repair kit, so I could whip that back wheel off, fix the flat, and true up the bent wheel one handed, preferably while not even stopping pedalling. But, even if I’d had the kit with me, the only think I’d have been able to do with it is scratch my head with the tyre levers while wondering what to do next. I do, somewhere in the dim and distant past, have a memory of mending a puncture before but that was when I was about twelve and I was obviously far cleverer as a child than I am now (I also worked out how to solve the rubik’s cube by myself and now I just look at it and wonder where all those brain cells went).
And so yesterday morning was spent with the other half allegedly teaching me how to mend a puncture. We got there in the end, although about half way through he gave up telling me how to do it and moved to the much quicker method of just doing it while I stood around making helpful remarks. And from now on I won’t be setting out on my bike without my emergency bike repair kit, spare inner tube … and mobile phone. And if that fails, I’ll also be carrying an emergency short skirt so I can flag down any random bloke and get him to help me change my wheel while I practise my helpful remarks. Although maybe not during the next World Cup. There just don’t seem to be that many men on the road…
Posted by disgruntled 
