Wattle’it be
With Canberra in lockdown, along with NSW, and pockets dotted around the wide brown land, it may be awhile before I get to review any eggs benedict again.
Instead of eggs benedict reviews and pleasant reflections of by gone times, I thought I’d share some of the thoughts that have occured during my one hour of exercise outside within a five kilometre radius of my house.
I also may share a few tanka. ‘Cause for some reason I’ve been inspired lately.
I’l give you a warning: this one contains plenty of swears. People are f*cking idiots.
As many of you may be aware, due to life long issues with my right hip I generally walk with a stick these days. While I can walk very short distances without it, when venturing further afield I can be found armed with Harry Hare.
He’s looking a little worse wear now because as is the nature of walking sticks he gets dropped. A lot. Mostly because every time I stop and need to lean him there’s zero provision to prevent him sliding. Such is the ablest world we live in.
He’s hand-carved from jelutong, huon pine and recycled jarrah floorboards by Doug Collins. I’m pretty protective of Harry so it says something that I have an intense desire to jam him into the spokes of any cyclist that rings their bell at me when I’m out walking.
I’d like to give you some context for this. When I walk on shared paths I stay as far to the left as I can without actually walking in the mud. So there’s plenty of room for them to pass.
I can hear them coming.
If they slowed down when around people, as they are required too by law, ringing of the bell would be completely unnecessary.
The bell ringing often makes me startle reaction, which likely means I twist to check behind me as I jump, which really f*cking hurts me. Hence an almost uncontrollable need to share the pain in the form of them going straight over their handle bars. A number of times I have been required to jump out of their way onto the grass or cobbles beside the path. Only once has a cyclist thanked me for vacating the pathway completely missing that I’m doubled over in pain.
So far I have resisted, but mainly because I acknowledge that, yes Harry would be damaged, by so would I, because the bicycles are generally going upward of 25kms per hour and that would definitely see me being wretched to the ground. And I already have an issue getting out of bed, let alone off the ground when damaged farther.
I shall talk of the arseholey of cyclists (#NotAllCyclists) no more.
So I’m going to talk about me as a cyclist.
When I was a teen, living in Chichester (UK) I would often leave the house in the AM on a Saturday and/or Sunday morning and ride for hours along the country lanes. I didn’t have a mountain bike or anything suitable for off road, but I would occasionally venture along bridleways if the weather had been dry.
I’d ride, take a left if I fancied or maybe a right. If I got lost I’d keep riding until I found pub (there was ALWAYS a pub) and I’d pop in and ask for directions and a top up of my water bottle. Sometimes I’d be given a lemonade.
In summer I’d be gone until eight or nine at night. No mobile phone to call home. No GPS to guide me. Never any money in my pockets, and usually not even a set of house keys.
Oh, and I’d be wearing jeans, a t-shirt and a pair of trainers. Maybe if it was really hot (over 18°) I may have thrown on some Jean shorts. Sometime a jumper would be wadded up and strapped under the seat. I never took a backpack.
Lycra didn’t even exist in my vocabulary.
tinkling bell
sending shock wave
stabbing the heart
bygone memory -
the girl is gone
Fast forward to the bike I have now. I’m scared to ride it because I’m terrified of falling off. This is partially because of my hip and exacerbated by the speed most cyclists pelt along the shared pathways. I’m afraid to go round corners so I stop, get off, walk round the right angle corner, then get back on. I feel ridiculous. So why bother?
Maybe this is why I feel like I do about cyclists?
I reflect that I still mourn my days of being a long distance, cross-country, runner and cyclist. I still miss running. Every day. For years I was a walker instead. Fè and I would ramble around the bush for hours putting up to ten kilometres on the clock. These days walking a kilometre and a half to the lakeside is my one hour of exercise and that results in a need for pain meds and a good lie down.
As a client I have done many hours of therapy around the loss of my physicality. Like any grief the pain has dulled over the years that I could still do something. Now I’m using a stick, I’m limited to about 300m without it, and I’ve only got about two kilometres in me for the whole day with the stick. The mental and physical pain have come flooding back.
It’s breaking my heart all over again.
Seeing others whizzing around on bicycles and ringing their bells at me is like the tweezers touching the sides in Operation. It creates a jolt that sends me right back to rainy days running through cow fields. Or doing laps of the track for the 1500m. Or rounding a corner and finding a tractor bearing down on me.
Frankly it p*ssed me off. Because I know. I’ll never be that girl again. I am now truely unseen, something I’ve struggled with my whole life.
Now I’m the old lady with wild hair and the stick that stops to appreciate the spring flowers and the golden glow of the wattle.
