We hire bikes and decide to cycle
across the island to the Animal Welfare Centre and then on to the beach on the
farthermost side. We hire the bikes from our friends, B and her partner, who I
will call Boris, largely because he is about the most un ‘Boris’ like person we
have met. Thai, laid back and always cheery, he is constantly inviting us to
join him, smiling and saying ‘it will be alright, baby love, it will be fine’
to B, who is actually fairly laid back herself.
I am in a paradisical wonderland,
with plans to do things today which most people would envy, and yet, I am
actually dreading it a little. Cycling, as I have mentioned before, is
something which for some reason I am quite afraid of. I have never been able to
place why.
There are plenty of theories. I
managed, somehow, to fail my cycling proficiency test twice when I was nine.
People, when I tell them this, tend to exclaim in amazement. How could anyone
fail their cycling proficiency, they ask, they didn’t even know it was possible
to fail it.
This doesn’t really help. It was
the first thing I had ever failed. Being eager to please and a bit of a swot I
had passed most things with flying colours, and still suffered with a sense of
inferiority. To fail this test was a tragedy for me at my tender, and vastly
oversensitive, age. I remember running home to find my mother in the playground
which was en route back home from my school, with my sister, who must have been
young enough still to be playing. I ran into her arms and burst into floods of hysterical
tears. It’s still a hugely vivid memory now, though I tend to use it as an
amusing anecdote rather than focusing too much on how bitterly I took it. I
think my Mother must have thought something awful had happened. In my mind, it
had. I don’t actually remember whether I ever passed it. I certainly retook it,
and failed it again.
In my best amateur psychology
therefore, I could theorise that I associate cycling with failure, and am tense
on a bike, waiting for the humiliation. There is also, I think, a sense of
humiliation waiting in the balance even as an adult. The fear that I will be
left behind in a group, that I will be the only one unable to power myself
uphill, and the very worst, that I will somehow be a let down for M.
M loves cycling. He likes nothing
better than to set off on a bike, cycle all day, challenge himself with longer
and ever harder routes, feel the wind in his face and in his hair and race
downhill at astonishing speeds. He cycles, or did cycle, each day some ten
miles to and from work, without breaking a sweat, and when we go out together
he hangs back for me. He is deeply patient, never letting on how much he would
really like to speed off into the distance, and never accusing me of being
unfit or slow. But I know him. So I know he is itching for the off. What he
wants, deeply and fervently, is for me to love cycling with him. He wants to
spend days at the weekend in British summer sun, speeding along with the wind
in our hair on our bikes, wild and free and in the beautiful outdoors.
My bike doesn’t get used unless M
initiates such a day, and when we have one I expend huge energy on keeping my
fearfulness under wraps for his sake. In fact I often do enjoy these days. I
don’t spend every moment on the bike wishing I was off it. I too, get a
euphoria with the wind in my hair. But I relax noticeably when the bike ride is
over, and am obviously and openly tense on roads, flinching visibly and
dangerously whenever a car passes me, often completely panicking and pulling
jerkily to the side of the road and stopping if there happens to be a larger or
faster vehicle. My sense of panic, M tells me, worriedly, leads me to act on
roads in a way that is likely to put me in the danger I am initially so
exaggeratedly feeling. I make it as dangerous as I think that it is.
This unbalance between my
enjoyment and ability in relation to cycling and M’s, tends to serve to
exaggerate the problem. If it began with a sense of inferiority, this is
greatly enhanced by my constant feeling that I am inadequate on a bike. Feeing
inadequate leads me to be grumpy. Feeling grumpy leads me to be what I hope is
uncharacteristically short tempered. Being short tempered makes that initially
perhaps untrue sense of being inferior to M, rather more true, and makes me
utterly unlikeable, and no fun to be around. If I wasn’t ruining his day by
being slow – I am certainly ruining it now by being nasty.
Today is no exception. When we go
to pick up the bikes, Boris is in the middle of setting off in his kayak with some
guests they have staying. This makes him uncharacteristically terse as he tries
to find, sort out and give us the bikes before the tide goes out. The bikes are
clearly his pride and joy and so he urges us, several times, to look after
them, to treat them as our own. As a person whose worst nightmare is to upset
someone else, a tense and rather sterner Boris, is not a good start.
My jitters increase once we have
the bikes. One of them has a tyre which needs pumping – mine in fact – and it
can only be pumped with a special attachment which a shop down the road happens
to have. M and I set off with the bikes down the road to the shop, where M’s
tyres are pumped but the man who knows which attachment to use for mine, is
out. There is a lot of hanging around, greatly lengthened by the fact that the
shop, being Thai style, is not obviously open, and I, being me, am reluctant to
cause anyone any trouble, so we spend about twenty minutes hanging around
uncertainly outside. This gives me longer to feel jittery, longer to wonder if
I really want to do this, and instills a certain amount of uncertainty. If,
perhaps, we can’t sort the tyres out, then perhaps we won’t go. My resolve, for
things that I am afraid of, is usually made up of a sense that I have already
passed the turning point. There is no going back. If there is any hint that
there might be an opportunity to do otherwise, my resolve dissolves.
When we can’t get the tyre pumped
up, my nerves increase. Some of the problem, I suspect, is that I have never
considered the bike to be a friendly entity. I have a friend who had a ‘sit up
and beg’ dutch style bike, which she rode everywhere on, hilly terrain or
otherwise, and which she decorated with flowers. That bike seemed like a
friend, a part of her. I think she even gave it a name. Riding mostly on
mountain bikes, and disliking the posture they require you to adopt, stiff
necked from looking up and back aching from the bent position, I view them as
hostile creatures who are in control of me, rather than I of them. They have
mastered me, required me to adopt a painful position, and are likely to try to
hurt me further, or to grow a mind of their own at just the wrong time. As we
travel, the bikes we use have been hired vehicles, so always unfamiliar. It has
occurred to me since, that I should perhaps adopt my friend’s approach to
cycling, and give myself a friendly pet bike. I do own a bike at home, a good
bike. It’s a mountain style bike because in the UK that is the most common
model. But perhaps I should name it, adorn it with something.
Right now, however, all I am
thinking about is my increasingly tense and grumpy state of mind. By the time
we swing ourselves onto our bikes and set off I am convinced of the sincere
hostility my bike has to me. It must be treated very carefully or Boris will be
upset, it has a limp tyre that cannot be pumped up, and it has made me grumpy
to M, which makes me feel miserable and petty and mean.
We set off and I renew my
determination to enjoy this. And in fact for the most part it is fine, the
breeze in my face and the quiet, well surfaced roads help me and I am doing
quite well. The usual tension is there – I think on a bike I tense my arms and
shoulders and hold my breath a little. Often the next day I ache in a way that
suggests far more strain than can strictly have originated purely from the
length or difficulty of the cycle.
A little way in, however, a car
suddenly swerves to avoid a pothole in the road, moving quite fast and
essentially racing towards me in my lane. I stop in panic, launching myself
forward so suddenly I almost hurtle over the handlebars, and it is only my self
imposed speed limit of about one inch per hour which stops me from
somersaulting. Instead I do a sort of panicky squeaky hop off the saddle and
onto the floor and give the passing car the most evil filled look I can
possibly manage. The car, and its driver, speed off happily.
I rant for a while to M about the
car. M seems a little out of patience which I understand and can empathise with
but, in doing so, begin to fire up a familiar and deeply unhealthy spiral
inside my mind, which runs something along the lines of, ‘the fact is, I don’t
like cycling, this fact is shameful, no one else is afraid of cycling so this
is another prong to my wheel of general inadequacy, I feel angry and miserable
which is horrible for M, who I love but am making unhappy, so perhaps he would
be better with someone else, someone more sporty, that girl for instance, in
the tiny bikini, she’s probably lovely and not scared of anything, or that
other girl over there, or really anyone
else.’
I am irritably dismissive of the
gears, which don’t, and never have, made sense to me. M tries to explain them
but finds himself having to try to describe something which is really
instinctive.
“You change gears when you feel
uncomfortable,” he says, helplessly, “and if it feels better, that’s the right
gear, if it doesn’t you change it. You have to feel it.”
“But I don’t feel it,” I say,
covering the fact that I am somehow close to tears with crossness, “I am not
you. You have a natural affinity with your bike. I don’t. I don’t like it, I
can’t ride it. I’m no good at it. I’d love to be you. But I’m not.”
The upshot is that for much of
the ride, M cycles ahead, probably trying to rid himself of a burgeoning
irritation it is unlike him to feel, and I plod (as much as you can plod on a
bicycle) miserably in his wake, fighting back tears. The tears are unlike me. I
am not a crier. I am not, usually, a very negative person. But over a period of
time, (dare I admit it, since we have been travelling), I have found myself
miserably noting a new tendency to be crotchety as a result of a sense of
ingrained inferiority, either against other travellers, against others
generally or against M. That series of emotions leads, inevitably and
inexorably towards a strongly felt and embittered anger with myself, and in
turn, a change which is not for the better.
I am becoming more and more
convinced of my inadequacy, and each new challenge, each cycle ride, each climb
up steps, each motorbike, only serves to show me more and greater inadequacies
and fear in myself. I am discovering myself, and what I am discovering is not
something I can respect.
The rest of the cycle allows the
wind to dry my tears and soothe my thoughts to some level, so that when we
eventually arrive back home again both M and I are cycling together, talking
calmly, and I am suggesting that we try cycling again but a shorter journey
(today’s was a 30k round trip), though M’s response, a gentle suggestion that
perhaps we should simply not go on cycle rides at all, leaves me feeling sad. I
am a terrible wife. I am a wife who takes something M loves, and makes it
miserable for him. That fleeting thought, that he should have married someone
else, starts to take up a semi permanent residence.
Postscript: Around this time,
this sort of mentality, which had been building as we travelled, gained
momentum, aided, I suspect by my feminine cycles. As I started to feel this
way, I stopped blogging. I was a few days behind and the few days seemed a long
time, and then became a longer time for each time I didn’t write. I am recounting
this some weeks later, when the dust has settled and I can look back on it, remember it
vividly, but regard it now, with some sort of distance. Essentially I think
these few fraught days formed a sort of peak in a rather negative state of mind
which I had been battling since our first plane took flight from the UK, three
months ago – or arguably, for ever. I can call it a crisis of confidence or a
meltdown, but now I have the hindsight which allows me to tell you that I
believe it was a fire that cured the burn. I hit rock bottom and it gave me a
surface to bounce from. All is well that ends well. But not straight away….
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