Chapter Five: A Bike Ride

Today a small parcel arrived in the post, with strangely familiar handwriting. I unwrapped the string and brown paper to find a small mother of pearl hearing trumpet, delicately engraved in amethyst with an Alpine scene. Under the horn was a card informing me that one of my second cousins by marriage in Bavaria had unexpectedly passed away, leaving strict instructions to forward me the enclosed.

"You know what this means, don't you?" I said to Alfonso, the small grey beetle (or weevil, to be precise) who has made his home on my desk.

"That they haven't left you any cash, again", he said, barely glancing up from his new Atari console Airwolf game.

"No, it means we can finally go for that bike ride I've been promising you."

Alfonso - it must be said - looked less than thrilled, but once I had carefully attached the hearing trumpet to the front of my helmet with an elastic band, and secured him in the trumpet with strips of masking tape, he looked positively furious.

But it was another beautiful spring day, and the city appeared bright and hard in the sun, like quartz. We sailed up to the top of a grassy hill, and took in the view, shielding our eyes from the glare with our hands. I produced a small picnic of pork pie and beer from my basket, and we sat under a tree wolfing it down in silence, feeling the warm light on our faces.

Later, we cruised back down into the old city, past the steps of the cathedral, and across the busy squares. We dawdled in the grand shopping streets, so Alfonso could press his nose against the windows of the golf sale shops, and snuck in and out of shady alleys. At some point there was a brief altercation involving a high-sided red van with blacked out windows at a junction, and voices may have been raised. (I wondered idly if it was the same van that I had heard backfiring the other day?)

We followed the large purple and green buses of our city, threading in and out of their elephantine convoy down to the river, where I belted hell for leather along the dusty paths, till the signs and railings of the city flew past, and began to disappear, blurring gradually into clumps of gorse and holly bushes.

As the sun faded, we suddenly found ourselves quite alone in the dusk, in a landscape I didn't recognise, with a distinctly unspring like chill creeping up on us. I turned around and steered us swiftly home, not pausing for breath until we reached the familiar broad avenues of the new town.

"Well," I said to Alfonso later, carefully unstrapping the conch, exhausted but happy, "what a city, eh? What a city we live in. What do you say to that, eh?"

He looked at me in that way which he has, and said

"I still think that van had right of way."

So, dear reader, I squashed him. But he will be back tomorrow.