(Now) I Want To Ride My Bicycle

One of the sure fire ways you can tell a series is flailing about, trying desperately to cling on to viewers, is the episode where we learn a weird, odd, unusual Thing about a character. Maybe they're allergic to something, afraid of something, or there's some character from their past that crops up and offers an unrealistic insight into them. They usually suck.

It seemed fitting, therefore, to use this crumbling, outdated blog (which flails about, trying desperately to cling on to readers) to write a piece about me overcoming one of the biggest (and most ridiculous) problems I've had to face.

They say getting older is inexplicably linked to getting wiser, and there's been several things lately that I wish I could impart to my younger, terrified self. Glasses being so cool that people who don't need them would don them being among the first.

But something else that's followed me around for years had been an even bigger problem in my youth, and last weekend I was able to put it to rest, not peacefully, but violently, hitting the problem on the head repeatedly and kicking it a bit. It was very cathartic.

Something that always held me back was that I never learned to ride a bike. Well, that's not quite true. I did learn - Mum and Dad both helped me understand the theory behind how bikes stayed up, and on several summers, autumns and springs I tried in vain to get the knack of it. Eventually, though, I gave up.

I'm under no illusion that I'm a quitter. My attitude is that if it's tough, bail, protect yourself, if it's your health, your wealth, your dignity, just get out there. If a fight kicks off, I'll scurry away and hide under a pile of coats; if something becomes difficult, I shift the blame, and if I can't ride a bike, well, I'll tell everyone that it's an awful mode of transport and convince myself I had an awful accident involving a bike that scarred me for life. Even at university, if (/when) I failed an exam, there were many reasons why. The teacher was a jerk, the pavement was slippy, my dog was feeling blue.

Eventually, when I was at the age when my friends were pros at riding a bike (what age *is* that, 7 or 8?) all it did was highlight my own failures. I couldn't grasp something that my mates younger brothers were fast learning, and that realisation drove me to hate myself just a tiny bit. Also, I'd just found out I needed glasses, so I was eaten up with more self-doubt at my social standing (because I'd been bullying my neighbour, Laura Murphy, something silly for having glasses, and went bright red when I learned my sky-blue frames would be the same brand as Laura's).

This was only a problem only once or twice; thankfully I don't live in Amsterdam, where students have to do modules in Casual Biking at school, take exams perched in a kitschy wicker basket mounted on a bike and their History syllabus is focused entirely on the Penny Farthing and it's impact on society.

The first bump was in year 6, when we did cycling proficiency. Just the name scared me (only because I didn't know what proficiency was, though if I had, the irony of it would have been all the more frightening) and I confided in my teacher, Mrs Corlett, that I couldn't ride a bike. She called a meeting with my parents one night after school.

"This isn't a problem at all," she said, after discussing how CP worked. Every day, a group of us would go with a policeman and prove we could manoeuvre around some cones before being given a badge. "No, this is very salvageable."

The plan was simple. Since balance was all in the ears, I'd spin a crafty tale that I had a very bad earache. Since my ears were infected, my balance would be off, and I wouldn't be able to take the test. I remember so vividly the sense of triumph I felt when I heard Mrs Corlett's solution - how brilliant that science can trump the system? Where there other ways to get one over on lifes hard comings, maybe using maths, or geography? Only now, when I look back on our ruse, do I realise nobody in the world would have bought it for a second.

The second incident came when I was about 14. We used to go swimming in Hynem, a lake near my friend's house, and one summer's day I got a call asking if I wanted to come along. I said yes, got dropped off at my mates house (with towel and trunks) and looked forward to having a bit of a splash.

"Didn't you bring a bike?" one friend said. I felt petrified, like an ice cube was dropped down my back. "We're biking there from my house."

Mum's car disappeared over the end of the road, my palms became sweaty. I was going to have to ride a bike, but how? How on earth could I get out of this one? Why wasn't Mike's parents driving us there? Was there maybe a pile of coats I could hide under? My fear turned to anger; this was deception of the worst kind.

"Don't have one, do I," I said, hoping my lack of a bike would fix the problem. Nope, a pink one was wheeled out the garage. I felt my heart hammering against my chest, wanting out.

"It's not ideal," the friend said. I agreed, but tried my best. I don't remember it much, but needless to say we didn't end up swimming. After making it ten minutes down the road I pulled over and was sick in the bushes; a mix of terror, stress, anxiety, and two fingers I kept ramming into my throat.

"Oh no, I'm so ill," I think I said, dialling Mum on the Nokia.

That sense of debilitation was crushing, especially at an age when people talk. What would people say, what would it say about me? Luckily when someone did tease me about it some years later, that person had lost their virginity to the biggest, scariest girl in school, so I had some ammunition to bring him down a peg or two.

Anyway, flash forward to last weekend (bypassing a story from my trip to Thailand which involves me speeding down a hill on a bike and colliding into a bison) and a few of us had gone to the zoo. But being with hangover, being unorganised, and many other things, we got there ridiculously late. It was 3pm, we'd not have enough time to get the most out the zoo, and we were bored. A boris bike terminal faced us, and a housemate suggested biking through Regent's Park.

By 22, I'd managed to laugh at my own shortcomings, in a classically self-depricating way. Some people knew I couldn't ride a bike, but it was just an amusement, similar to how I look when I jog (like an ostrich) or my lack of general knowledge (Africa is a continent, etc). But despite telling my housemates I couldn't ride a bike, they were adamant we biked through the park. No traffic, costs a quid, and how bad can you be all being arguments supporting it.

You don't understand, I'd say, imagining lying, knees scuppered, on the ground in the middle of a park, picking myself up and wheeling the scratched frame to the bike terminal, avoiding the look of disgust on my younger self's face. Why did you try? You know you couldn't do it...

I was sick of talking about it, since it made me sound like a moaning old coward. I couldn't emphasise enough how little I'd like to fall over in public, graze my knees, ruin my good hoody. I came here to mock animals, not to face the biggest thing I couldn't do.

But in an attempt to shut up the persistent housemates, I did it. I borrowed a quid (I may be about to be humiliated, I thought, but I definitely wasn't going to pay for the privilege) and swallowed my pride. If people couldn't fathom my ineptitude at cycling, well, I'd have to just show them.

We wheeled the bikes across the road (the traffic looked fast) and I fiddled with the seat (a bad seat had been an significant reason for my failures in Thailand, I believe) until there was no more arsing about to do. Alex and Jackson had kicked off and made their way through the leafy park, leaving me to do the same.

Off I went, veering to the left slightly and wobbling to the right, but within a few moments I had steadied myself. I fiddled with the gears, letting me push the pedals more smoothly, until I was gliding along the park like a pro. I couldn't quite believe it, especially since the incident in Thailand had me thrown over the handlebars, losing my glasses and sticking my white, flip-flopped foot into a bog filled with bison poo.

I was riding a bike through the park, and as I tried the brakes (again, a sensitive issue in Thailand as I gripped both brakes tightly enough to give myself hand cramps, causing me to veer into a thorny overgrowth, much to the amusement of a farmer) I felt in control.

The housemates looked baffled as I soared past, and I started kicking myself for taking everything so seriously. We spent the rest of the day biking until our legs were sore, though I was cautioned for cycling on the wrong side of a main road at one point. In my defenc- you know what, I won't even try and justify that one.


Sitting at home that night, it felt ridiculous that I'd treated the bike like a horrific monster I'd managed to lock in a suitcase, but feared it would burst out at any moment. Finally, I understood why people liked cycling, even if it was the hipsters with their retro bikes and skewed sense of identity. It was fun.

But the crucial thing was not that I felt like I conquered Everest - nobody really understood my excited yapping about what I did at the weekend, and I'd be the same if someone told me they finally mastered swimming, or successfully navigated ASDA without having a panic attack. The best part was that sense of enlightenment that I wish I could share with my younger self; things are never as tough as they seem.

I imagined telling him that - first and foremost - you could laugh about it when you were older, that you wouldn't need to resort to making yourself sick on the side of the road to get out of hanging out with your mates, all because an ugly, two wheeled beast stood in the way. And, better yet, you'd eventually jump on a bike and enjoy it so much you'd want to do it again. You can do it.

I was so elated that I took up jogging that week - after all, what other brilliant things had I shunned in my youth?

Well, I quickly gave up, but I'll leave it to the guffawing Japanese tourists to tell you why.

Moving House

Something reminded me that I started this blog little over a year ago, and it got me thinking about how much can be achieved in such a short space of time.

As I've blogged countless times, journalism is a tricky one; it's a sloppy slope, but as well as a slope it's also a ladder with rungs, and there's also loads of marbles. And you sit at the bottom of the hill, downtrodden, thinking "Maybe I do want to be an Estate Agent," and you rack your brains for funny/sexy/aspirational estate agents, before realising they're all dead inside.

So you do the only thing you know - you try, and you try, and you know that it'll pay off, eventually. Also,   if I'm going to take my work home with me, I'd rather find depth in the state of the media then tell my friends that their house will never sell if it's next to an abattoir.

I moved down to London with nothing but a suitcase and a very skewed idea of how the tube worked. I found a place to live, eventually, and trained as a journalist with the News Associates in Wimbledon. Then I wound up at FHM.

But there's been a bit of a problem. My landlord, Ki-Man Chu, texted me to tell me he was not going to be renting our place anymore, and we had to get out 'Very quickly, or September 27th?'

Okay, so keep this to yourself, but we had a bit of a weird set up. No contract, but we could leave whenever we liked - two weeks notice maximum. I always assumed that my landlord rented off someone else, and sub-letted (which is Quite Illegal) but he paid all our bills, internet, council tax, and was quite easy to convince that we were always right and needed to be kept happy or we'd tell on him.

That didn't mean he was easy. When our washing machine broke, his first response was that clothes lasted longer if you washed them by hand anyway, and we should just stop using the washer. When we insisted that we needed a new machine, he turned up at 11:45pm with three models in the back of a van. In our slippers, we wandered outside and picked one, before he sped off, assuring us we'd get it soon.

My housemates seemed nonplussed; they'd been here around three years. Two have conflicting types of OCD; while one likes things to be spotlessly scoured, thinking an area only clean when you can see the fumes from cleaning products curling into the atmosphere, the other has a compulsion for things to be at very specific angles.

Unfortunately we don't know what angles are good, bad or ugly. I will, however, be severely reprimanded if things are wrong. Or Wong, as she says.

Naturally these two conflict; while Housemate #2 isn't clean, she's tidy, and things are very neat and stacked and organised. Housemate #1 meanwhile, loves things to be shimmering with chemically-induced cleanliness, but isn't bothered about how it looks.

This means that, during the last year, there have been a lot of discussions about what is right and what is wong. That's now coming to an end, but instead of something leisurely and planned, flat-hunting is what it was last September - scattered, frantic, mental.

It's actually quite a fitting way to end the year - one last thing to be completely clueless about, running around in the rain from Estate Agents to Estate Agents. Still, it could be worse.

I could work as an Estate Agent.

How do you solve a problem like locking yourself in?

It’s times like this that make you wonder if God is testing you.

It’s about 6am. A dream about Harry Potter taking too many Es in my garden wakes me up. I’d been out the day/night before, pondering the greatest questions while sitting in the sun drinking Strongbow. As I clutch my head, I realise that, given how little I remember, I was probably a bit drunk.

Counting on my fingers Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. It’s been an expensive extra-weekend thing, with me spending most evenings gargling alcohol.

But this morning I woke up, really needing a piss, and went to my bedroom door only to find it locked. Eh? I gave the handle a quick jingle, but it was definitely, firmly, truly-madly-deeply locked. I don’t know why I’d got into my head it was a good idea to lock myself in, so grabbed my keys and jammed them in the door.

It didn’t unlock.

Crouching down, I peered at the edge of the door, turning the key back and forth. The bolt that my key controlled was working fine, but keeping me inside my room was another bolt going through my door.

I went from crouching to sort of sitting in an odd yoga position on my floor and pondered. This was either (a) quite a conundrum or (b) I’d taken more pills than Harry last night and my perception was fucked.

I tried again. Still locked.

Something not dissimilar to a memory jabbed me in the head. Charlene, my housemate, had come in last night. I had resorted to watching Desperate Housewives (and shocked to see 24’s notorious President Logan has now moved to suburbia and needs a new kidney) and she came in to say she needed the shower at about 8am today.

Then I remembered. She’d gone, and as she left, my door handle fell off and we started laughing. Oh, what joy it is living in a house-share. Little calamities become the only thing you really have in common with each other and you learn to milk them.

AHAHAHA THE DOOR HANDLE FELL OFF we yelled.

She put it back on, and left.

Truly I felt like Sherlock Holmes as I paced up and down my room, my bladder fit to burst. I also had that fuzzy morning breath smell circulating my room, and it was starting to annoy me.

What I knew at this point - at 6.23am - was that my door was seemingly locked from the outside. I was inside. One housemate was at home in Bromley for the weekend, one was not on speaking terms with me (and would relish the thought of me being stuck inside the top room of a block of flats) while another - yes! Charlene had to get up early to have that 8am shower. She can help.

I got my phone and sent her a text, wondering how best to phrase the situation. Would texting her the lyrics to ‘Help!’ by The Beatles be a good idea? No. The reference would be lost. I’ll keep it simple, but also lighthearted, since I don’t want to scare the girl.

Hi! Fuck, sore head today. AHAHAHA THE DOOR HANDLE FELL OFF! In all seriousness, I’m trapped in my room, I’m about to piss myself, and it’s starting to make me have panic attacks.

What if Charlene left early, and there was nobody in the house? What would I do then!? I wondered if I could ring a Fireman and he might hack the door apart with an axe, but is that what I wanted?

I tried to recall one housemates words…she’d had this happen before, I think. What did she say she did? With my mind riddled with other thoughts - my breath, my sunburn, and the need to wee being just three - I found it hard to concentrate.

Then it came to me. She screwed the door handle off, and there was a steel rod going through the middle of the door that the handles were attached to. Sometimes, her handle misaligned, or something, and you needed to guide it back to the handle so it would work.

This felt like a small triumph, but it was fleeting. I didn’t have a screwdriver. In life, when you need something you don’t have, it’s hard to stop berating yourself for never having what is now considered a salient piece of equipment. As I tried using all manner of things in lieu of a screwdriver, I pictured the hardware shop down the road. Stupid, stupid me for not having a screwdriver.

As soon as I get this fucking door open, I thought to myself, I’m going to invest in a good flat-head screwdriver. For I had sunk to a new low, snapping a pair of tweezers (my good tweezers) and using one leg to gingerly unscrew the door handle so I could tinker about.

This felt like one of many hurdles that seem to follow me in life. For those unaware, I’ve locked myself out the flat, I’ve found pigeons roosting on my wardrobe, and at work this week, I spent some time ringing my own number, angry that the person I was supposed to be interviewing had a dead phone line.

Finally, the door handle fell off. I twisted the central bar and my door popped open with a satisfying click. Wandering into my hallway, a pair of feet whipped around the corner and the bathroom door was bolted shut. Then, after a moment, the sound of rushing water. Of course, Charlene needed the shower at 8am.

It would be some time before I could finally have a piss.

Surgery and stuff

Inspired by Sam Parker, who recently had his tonsils out and blogged about it, I realised I might be (literally) sitting on a goldmine of writing ideas following my own surgery last week. Yes, my blog focuses on The Real Real World, but I'm sure there is a tenuous link there.

So, last Thursday I went to the doctors with the feeling I had tonsillitis. I had it a lot at University and felt, after fainting in the shower, I must be coming down with it again. My throat was swollen, my squeaky voice was replaced with a horse, gravelly murmur and I had a penchant for hacking coughs. All the signs were there.

"Well, your tonsils do look quite horrible," said my doctor, staring into my mouth. "But they're not infected."

I was stumped. As my doctor mused, biting the end of her pen, I half expected Sherlock Holmes to burst out the medicine cabinet, desperate to solve this marvel. Boy thinks he has tonsillitis, but doesn't. Guuh? Unfortunately, something else happened.

"Let's get you on the bed and give you a physical," she cooed. I'll point out at this point that my doctor, while lovely, was the size of SuBo and had hands like shovels. Her feeling my every curve was going to be rather harrowing.

So, after a bit of a feel, 1/3 of which I found strangely arousing, my doctor found the problem. What I thought was a nagging lower-back pain, something I expected I could ignore until it reared its ugly head in my later years and force me to stoop like I was inspecting pavements, actually turned out to be a big ol' infection.

Naturally, I'll leave the ins 'n' outs to one side, but let me break it down. I had to go and have some surgery to rid me of the infection that was purging my body, spreading like red wine knocked over a tablecloth. I imagine the infection looks like this:

I imagine 'groo' is the sort of noise an infection makes.

After surgery, I'd need about 4 weeks of doing sweet FA so my wound, which wasn't allowed to be stitched up, could be padded and re-padded with gauze until it healed naturally. Healing naturally? I'd just read Harry Potter 5, whereby they go to a magical hospital and a simple spell heals most wounds. This, in contrast, was a massive downer for me. Alohomora, or some shit.

When my family heard I was ill, and worse so, I was in hospital, they naturally assumed, in their Northern way, it had something to do with terrorists. After explaining none of London was blown up (to my knowledge; I had spend all day in A&E being examined by trainee doctors, who knows what I missed?), they still decided they'd come all the way to London to check I was ok.

After surgery, I was discharged and went back to Carlisle with the rents, which, due to the effects of morphine was dream-like and passed quickly.

It feels as if this tale is age-old, one I recite countless times, but it only happened a week ago. A week. Seven sodding days. Because the problem with sitting at home and doing sweet FA is that time goes very slowly. My Nintendo 64 has been sold, and my Nintendo Wii has bad games on it. Daytime TV is a clown-car of mild idiots, from the goofy homoeroticism on To Buy Or Not To Buy? to the vampish harpies on Loose Women. On Friday, they invited Ronan Keating to sing a song on the show, before clawing at him with their talons and devouring his manhood.

Luckily it's not been all bad; FHM, who miss me dearly while I'm away, send me series 1 of The Wire on DVD, which is good, because I never got into it, and always wanted to, and now I like it. I'm also going to get into Mad Men since everyone wails on about it a lot.

Next post will be detailing my hellish existence in the house as home comforts turn to nightmarishly dull things. Calm down, I know it's exciting.