Random reminder

Press, 25 November 1982, Page 29

Random reminder

PASSING BY It is not cheap to run a car these days. To save petrol and to forget about weight-watching, she bought a secondhand bike. .

At her age, two score 15 to be exact, and not being practical, it took her quite a while to get , used to five gears. She practised as much as she could in the flat streets of/Christchurch. After a certain' time which she. didn’t want to reveal, she plucked up all her courage and decided to ride via the Main North Road to Belfast. By the Styx Mill bridge she was not so well prepared for the hill leading up to the bridge.

Why had her 11-year-old son never mentioned to her that he always changed gears before he came to the rise in the ro’ad? It had never occurred to him that it, could be at all hard for anybody to go from top into bottom gear. After a lot of fumbling with the gears she managed to almost reach the crown of the road. She was proud of her achievement.

But suddenly she was rudely disturbed in her self-satisfaction. A car stopped right beside her and she heard a male voice:

“Get off your bike!” Terrified, she obeyed at once. But before her feet touched the ground all her sins, omissions and all the dangers of . modern life rushed through her head. Could it mean a hijacking of her bike? Or a rapist? Or was anything wrong with her bike, third or fourth hand as it was? Had she run over, unbeknown to her, a dog or a cat and was being arrested as a hit and run bicyclist? “There’s a house coming,” said the traffic officer. She has no eyes at the back of her head, and no rear mirror on her bike. She had not seen the lights flashing on the car behind her. She had just time to press against the railing of the bridge before the house — the wide load — passed her and by the time the 20 odd cars held up by the house on wheels had slowly driven by, her heart beat normally again.