The Bike Ride Disaster of ’93

As a born tomboy, I don’t know which I learnt to do first: walk or ride a bike, but I know they were pretty damn close as they seem to overlap in my mind. In my bike-riding endeavours; I was an early bloomer. L.? Not so much. I was about six years old and had been bombing about without stabilizers for as long as my little brain could remember. This would have made L. about seven or eight – long-overdue to learn how to ride a bike in our father’s mind’s eye.
L. was a timid pupil and Pa was rather… overzealous. A few impatient pootles around the garden on my old bike that usually resulted in tears, scuffed kneecaps and muttered swearing from our father constituted as enough schooling to attempt our first family bike ride… along a canal. You can see where I’m going with this.

Dad planned the big day for a sunny spring Saturday along the near-infamous cycling trail from Bradford-on-Avon to Bath. Slightly ambitious for a rookie, perhaps, but it was sure to be a dandy day out. Fate, of course, had other ideas.

I don’t know why, but vehicular contraptions have never been big or even necessary in L.’s opinion as I don’t believe I ever witnessed her on a bike ever again. But perhaps the pending extravaganza may have had something to do with that. There was a similar incident about a decade later when our apparently short-memoried father decided to give her an ill-advised driving lesson around a cricket field, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Let me lead you down the valley of why my sister seems to have developed a phobia of all things wheeled…

It all started out so well. We drove to Bradford-on-Avon, found parking for the day, ate a pre-ride ice cream, hired out our bicycles and away we went. Spoiler alert: we didn’t make it to Bath. Hell, we didn’t make it out of Bradford-on-Avon. It became apparent that L.’s timidity in the transport world was amplified by the fact that this bike trail is very popular during the warmer months. I can only imagine that the horror of two-way traffic made her fraught, and she found it impossible to concentrate on both manoeuvre and obstacle. Let me give you an image: a high-speed train derailing. She’d banana in and out of fellow cyclists with a shaky, deranged momentum, as if she’d climbed on to the bike only to discover that it was, in fact, possessed by the Devil and its sole purpose was to escort her on a bumpy ride to Hell. Her cycling suggested it. Her facial expression confirmed it.
How it happened, Christ, I really don’t know. We had been cycling for perhaps fifteen minutes; my eyes solely on the carnage my sister could create in one simple ill-rearing of the handlebars. Our Dad, however, was absolutely soaking up his element. A keen cyclist as well as a fan of all things al fresco, he appeared to be lapping up the warm air, the bird-life, the narrowboats sailing to and fro and the endorphin rush of the exercise, and seemed to be completely oblivious of the torment of L.’s relationship with her bike. Or if he wasn’t, he didn’t anticipate the unlimited amount of doom that was looming on the horizon. He didn’t have to wait long though. L.’s first ‘incident’ happened as she attempted to open a gate whilst remaining in cycle-mode, perhaps fearing that if she dismounted, she’d never get back on again. A bold but foolish move. Just as the three of us had passed through the gate, her holding it open for us I think, she seemed to have become distracted by something, but sought to take off in her flight anyway. As she did so, she went sailing into the legs of a middle-aged pedestrian gentleman.
This man – a gem of a human being – couldn’t have been more graceful about it. My father mortified, my sister tear-stricken and my desperately trying not to laugh; apologies were mutters on my sister’s part, daggers were shot on my father’s part and giggles were stifled on my part.
Not letting this little incident deter him, our father carried on as he had started. In other words, not assuming that this mowing down of a man was a prophecy of what was to come.

I like to think I’ve already painted the picture: she went in the canal. Obviously, she went in the canal. It’s a bizarre mesh of comedy on my mind, though. Please understand this happened over twenty years ago and a lot of alcohol and various other substances that affect one’s memory have passed my lips. My memory is serving me a snapshot of her ploughing into a bush and then heading face-first into the canal, but I think that happened later. The bush in my mind was a good five foot by five, and I believe it would have taken some vigilant pedalling whilst in the clutches of thorn and bracken to make it into the canal, which just doesn’t seem at all plausible, even for a distressed eight year old. I think the bush came first. Hell, I’m certain of it as the only thing that came after the dip in the canal was a speedy journey home. So I think she went hurtling into the thicket of the bush and our father had to retrieve her, no doubt embarrassed, arsey and probably half-wondering if she’d sneakily necked some of his Bells Scotch before we’d left the house.
For the life of me, after both of those catastrophes, why our father seemed hellbent on continuing with this fiasco of an outing, I do not know, but he did and that was when the cherry on top of this bike-ride from hell revealed itself… in she went, narrowly avoiding being twatted by a passing barge, who kindly aided us in the retrieval of bicycle and child.

Naturally, a sopping, partially-drowned child is liable to put a damper on all activity, so to home we went; my father fretting the entire way about the arse-shaped water stain being imprinted on the back seat. It was a curious state of affairs, to say the least, and certainly a story that will be carried on through future generations of our family, much to L.’s mortification.