Bike Pump

Recently I went to the tip shop and there was a bike inside the shed. Bob's yelling at me, 'Oh Sarah, take this bike. You can have it for five bucks. FIVE BUCKS!!! Look at the brand. Look at it this bike.' 

He stepped aboard and pumped the front wheels. The bike had shockies so he was able to bounce this bike up and down on it's front wheels. This particular tip shop guy had managed to distract me from the red lady's bike that was of a proper vintage with a front basket and carrier, to a welded, factory bicycle, sporting only a water bottle bracket and shockies. Anyway, I bought it. Five bucks after all.

'Front tyre's a bit flat,' he said. 'But it's FIVE BUCKS.'

I've been more in need of a decent four wheel drive car recently, than a bicycle, because living 35 kilometres from the nearest town tends to make you need to drive everywhere rather than do the school or shop run on foot. But when the bar breaks at the inlet, there is this long beach to ride along. The sand is hard and I've often wanted a bike to ride along that beach. 

I bought the bike with dreams of riding it along the shore ... but then I needed a bike pump for the front tyre. So the next time I ventured into the city, I went to the nearest bicycle shop.

As soon as I entered, I realised this was not that kind of hipster bicycle shop where kind, bearded men sold hot cups of cold-pressed coffee on leather lounges, while asking me to peruse their cargo bikes. No. These blokes were the enablers of the lawyer and accountant clique of cyclists. They came towards me in tiny shorts and with their hard, chiselled faces asked me what my business was.

'I'd like to buy a bicycle pump,' I said.

So they sold me this really expensive thing that looked like it was from outer space. I got it home, unscrewed the top (there's no tube here) and all the valves fell out and I couldn't work out how to put all the valves back together again. Apparently you can reverse the valves to release air from the tyre in this one trick pony.. Awesome. We used to do that with match sticks when I was a kid.

I was telling this story to a mate of mine yesterday. She looked at me, incredulous.

'So let's be clear here Sarah. You paid five bucks for a bike, right? That's cool. And then you paid forty bucks to pump up the front wheel?'

 

Bike pump

Recently I went to the tip shop and there was a bike inside the shed. Bob's yelling at me, 'Oh Sarah, take this bike. You can have it for five bucks. FIVE BUCKS!!! Look at the brand. Look at it this bike.' 

He stepped aboard and pumped the front wheels. The bike had shockies so he was able to bounce this bike up and down on it's front wheels. This particular tip shop guy had managed to distract me from the red lady's bike that was of a proper vintage with a front basket and carrier, to a welded, factory bicycle, sporting only a water bottle bracket and shockies. Anyway, I bought it. Five bucks after all.

'Front tyre's a bit flat,' he said. 'But it's FIVE BUCKS.'

I've been more in need of a decent four wheel drive car recently, than a bicycle, because living 35 kilometres from the nearest town tends to make you need to drive everywhere rather than do the school or shop run on foot. But when the bar breaks at the inlet, there is this long beach to ride along. The sand is hard and I've often wanted a bike to ride along that beach. 

I bought the bike with dreams of riding it along the shore ... but then I needed a bike pump for the front tyre. So the next time I ventured into the city, I went to the nearest bicycle shop.

As soon as I entered, I realised this was not that kind of hipster bicycle shop where kind, bearded men sold hot cups of cold-pressed coffee on leather lounges, while asking me to peruse their cargo bikes. No. These blokes were the enablers of the lawyer and accountant clique of cyclists. They came towards me in tiny shorts and with their hard, chiselled faces asked me what my business was.

'I'd like to buy a bicycle pump,' I said.

So they sold me this really expensive thing that looked like it was from outer space. I got it home, unscrewed the top (there's no tube here) and all the valves fell out and I couldn't work out how to put all the valves back together again. Apparently you can reverse the valves to release air from the tyre in this one trick pony.. Awesome. We used to do that with match sticks when I was a kid.

I was telling this story to a mate of mine yesterday. She looked at me, incredulous.

'So let's be clear here Sarah. You paid five bucks for a bike, right? That's cool. And then you paid forty bucks to pump up the front wheel?'

Hurt

They Know How to Bicycle Party in Copenhagen

Oh please, please visit Copenhagen Cycle Chic's latest post on a bicycle street party. It's just splendid.

The Bicycle Sagas #2

It's serious business when you are reduced to a bicycle. That's not reduced, as in the bucket of tomatoes on a Chef Consolation, it's reduced to humanity's base level as a result of dodgey alternator/slave cylinder in the brakes/not enough money to say 'fix it' (please). ie. the temporary lack of a motorised vehicle.
But it's kind of fun. You get fit. You begin to appreciate the fact that time (that is the hours between nine and five) can afford the squeeze you in for an appointment and a coffee. You also understand the need for bicycle clips.

I wish I had a picture of my bicycle. I bought her from the bike shop for $40. She's pink. She's a Malvern star. She cranks.
Usually with the ever-expanding universe that is my family, there is always a ute to humbug from someone. Last year the whole lot ran away to Scotland for the gathering of the Clans and I, being the only responsible one left, ended up with 100 chickens, an anorexic thoroughbred, a serious alcohol problem, 20 sheep and a pink bicycle.
Comes the Sprung Writers Festival. I ride my bicycle into town. Every year it's my big AWOL weekend. The kids understand. So do the Ex's. It's mine. It's all mine.
So on the Friday night I go to a great after-party at Shark and Catherine The Great Artist's apartment and park my gorgeous pink Malvern Star on the foot path outside, the way you park a Harley Davidson or a brand new burgundy 4WD Kluger ...

I think this kind of hubris is my undoing.

When I came down the stairs, I discovered her missing , after standing her so beautifully on the footpath for only half an hour.
I was so pissed off. I think I whinged about my bicycle being stolen for, oh, about the next 24 hours, to anyone who would listen. About the duration of the entire Saturday night Poetry Pub Crawl to be exact. The poets got sick of me. They wanted to hear poetry, art, literature and somehow throughout the night, there was Sarah Toa, in their ear about her fucking bicycle.

"24 hours and she'll be back." A perverse side of me believed this to be true and I decided to manifest it.
So that that night as we ambled down through a cavernous car park towards the last good or bad poem ( and by then the stolen bicycle had become a theme, like a bad Seventies Night,) I saw a boy riding a bicycle towards me in the dark.
"That looks like your bike!" Rua and Jaybird both yelled at me.

They were joking really. It could have been any random cyclist but as he pedalled towards me out of the gloom, I recognised that set of the handle bars, that desperate way that you ride that particular bike in the dark, the sensual sway of the fruit box on the back wheel.

I don't know if Rua and Jaybird were quite ready for the moment when I grabbed the handlebars of the pink bicycle in full, beautiful Malvern Star flight and glared straight into the whites of the eyes of the rider and said
"This is my fucking bike. Give it back."

At that point the poor bastard started started to get flaky. He was really young, like fifteen, he was a boy, he had a bike and he was on some kind of a freedom flight from one illicit pub to another, then suddenly out of the dark was ME grabbing the handle bars of my own pink bicycle and doing a Big Sarah Toa.

Rua and Jaybird, seeing his distress, said, "No, mate. It really is her bicycle. She had it stolen last night.We've heard the story (like, over and over) She just wants it back. Just give it to her hey?"
So he did. He said, "Well, have you got five bucks?" which we handed over, quite happily. I think it cost fifteen all up. (There was three of us.) And then I rode my bicycle home.
I rode it down Grey street (Grey street being the perpendicular bisection of the proverbial Twin Peaks - it's always great fun on a bike in an Easy Rider kind of way) and wobbled into my driveway, drunk and triumphant. Which is perfectly normal behaviour for a Toa Sister ....

In the morning I got up, fully literate of course after a whole poetry weekend, and inspected the Malvern Star.
The chain was connected to the back cog by a joint or so and the nut that's supposed to hold the whole back shambles together is missing. It's a serious hill. I pat myself down, in the clear daylight of the verandah. Yep, all here.

the bicycle sagas #1

This was a mad night peopled with Mauritian Patagonian Toothfishermen and glamour. The South Bound Champion is in town with a story to tell. Blowing a con rod five days out of Mauritius and then lying up for two weeks at sea, the crew borrowed each other’s DVDs, raided the alcohol stash and got bored out of their brains. They limped into town a week ago for running repairs and have been setting hearts on fire ever since.
Becoming a town mouse has changed my social life somewhat. Being without a car or a CentreLink approved job for a while has too. (I’m starting to feel like Bob. Dammit, I’m even starting to look like him. Mr Moon’s eulogy for Bob mentioned his pink tredley, polystyrene helmet, bicycle clips and perpetual poverty. Hmmm.)
So last night I pedalled off into the metropolis to attend Shark’s exhibition of photography, images I’ve seen before but are thrilling all over again on the wall. Trousersnake boys mingled, shared canapes and a brilliant local whisky with the Glamazons. It was. It was a glamorous affair. Lots of great shoes.
This story is not about exhibitions or con rods. It’s about more pressing and important matters than that. This is the sordid and complicated history of how I got drunk and fell off my bicycle. Twice.

An artist recently criticised me, for being a fish murderer and plundering the ocean’s resources for cash. He took a pin to my ballooning ego, at the crucial moment when I was being greased up to feel like a ocean going hero by everyone else, an intrepid fisher woman with biceps like a … a fisher woman.
This is rather small scale plundering though, when you compare it to the Toothfish industry. The Patagonian Toothfish has only recently been discovered in the deepest of Antarctic waters and is probably the ugliest fish you’ve ever seen. They grow to the size of a man and weigh about the same. They can live for 120 years. Because they are an oily, ice water fish, their omega 3 count is through the roof. And that’s about the extent of our knowledge of this fish. We don’t even know how many there are. We do know that people will pay lots of money for dead ones.
Toothfish poachers led the Australian Navy on a merry chase through the Antarctic a few years ago. The poachers – the age old gamers, the modern day pirates, chancers with a visionary streak and one eye on the horizon - were portrayed in the media as mercenary thieves in dastardly rusting hulks.
The Fed’s issue with toothfish poachers is not territory or ethics but money – serious money. If it was about territory, conservation or the ethical marauding of natural resources, then perhaps we would see the same reaction from the Navy, when the Japanese whalers cruise through Australian territory and the Antarctic whale sanctuary to slaughter Minkes.
The fleet of Australian owned Toothfish boats (read – Australian = non poachers, folks) head down to hunting grounds around Heard Island for a bracing three month’s sojourn. For a few years, they returned to Albany for the boat unload, a seasonal employment bonanza for strong young men who didn’t mind a touch of frostbite, hurling 100 kilos of leviathan from one freezer to another. Now they unload in Mauritius, closer to the market action and a source of much cheaper labour.

Sitting outside Shark’s exhibition last night, I watched the extravagant scene unfold through the window. The menswear shop was decked out with a kind of Zen opulence (an oxymoron perhaps) and peopled with the most sublime creatures I’ve seen in a long time. Shark’s ethereal and gritty desert images completed the vision.
I was woken from my whisky induced reverie by a bunch of sturdy young men, one of whom I’d met a few days earlier. What an assortment! Please refer to my theories on this in "Overpaid, Oversexed and OverHere. (Haven't worked out the link thang yet). Mauritius, South Africa and New Zealand, the United Nations of Toothfishermen stood before me.

“Hey, Sarah! I’ve gotta ask you mate. Do you know where we can get some … you know … some hootie?”
I get asked this by strangers all the time. Maybe it’s because I look like some kind of shaggy stoner. ‘Hang on,’ my internal polylogue explains patiently, ‘he said Hootie. Not Hooch. W t f? O-Oh.’

“I’m kind of out of the loop with those things,” I explained apologetically. Why was this nice young man asking me to pimp for him? I got all flustered. His Mauritian mate smiled at me with carnivorous intent and took my photo with his mobile phone.

Mr Mauritius, the small dark man of tarot and myth, took another hour or so (roughly on closing time at the pub) to decide he was definitely coming home with me. He was a decisive sort and there was no changing his mind. Small Dark Man was on a quest to uncover the sensual gifts of a true Albanian. He would not consider ‘no’ as a reasonable obstacle. Unfortunately for him, he was dealing with Sarah Toa, the Warrior Princess and she possessed a bicycle.

I fled into the WineDark night. I am fleet of foot but fleeter by wheel. I could hear his footsteps thudding behind me and his anguished, throaty cry. “Sarah! Sarah!” I rode that bicycle like a demon. My heart thumped with whisky and hubris.
I made it all the way up the main drag in one piece. Don’t know what happened to the polystyrene helmet, collateral damage I expect. Took the corner at the town hall and gunned it home.

Well. It sounds good. Gunned it. Like I ramped the throttle on some iron charger throbbing between my thighs and performed an attention seeking rumble-streak down the highway.

The truth is I came to grief quietly and in slow motion when I hit the kerb outside the day care centre. The whole Christmas party came down with me, 2 half empty (yes, not half full) bottles of wine, handbag, mobile phone and my beautiful grey coat which I still haven’t retrieved from the gutter. (If you find it, give it back. You will never be able to wear it in this town and anyway, it’s itchy.)
It hurt, but still my my whiskied adrenaline helped me to my feet and I rose to travel the road once more. I’d forgotten all about my bereft toothfisherman and was alternately giggling and nursing a rapidly expanding elbow.
The second crash really hurt.

(With aknowledgement to Banjo - who can spot the lifted line?)