Wednesday 27 January 2010

bicycle repair man

i've had this line i've been wanting to use for decades
i've been meaning to read To The Lighthouse for years but i've never got round to it
but have never used it as its the kind of in literary joke most people find annoying and i do too ... but in fact, i have been meaning to read To The Lighthouse for years but have never got round to it
have got as far as page 4 in the past
and page 40 in the past
but i either left town or it fell in the raintub, probably both ...

and who's afraid of virginia woolf ? well me well i'm irrationally intimidated by her and was annoyed by Nicole Kidman's prosthetic nose in The Hours ... i'm not sure what gets me about Virginia Woolf but maybe its just that i see her as one of those intimidatingly Upper Middle Class women who always put the frighteners on me the uppermiddle class mothers of college friends doing their best not to look down on pleb me
in retrospect these mothers were dead nice but at the time they got to me ...

so today, as Priscilla is on a pushed-back deadline, the best thing for me to do is toddle off and leave her to it ...so, as its looking cloudy, i rent a bike and head off... i just motored through White Tiger by Aravind Aviga, which is an excellent read and Cafe Gopi, the rooftop where we go every morning for flagons of coffee, while writing with the clear-head of early morning, has a bookswap shelf but the only half decent book is... To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf... so i get it and take it with me in the bike's basket as i belt way too fast up the steep hill which confronts immediately you leave [which right now has fifty drummers, 10 Gods, including 4 monkey Gods and a couple of coconut-macheteing Krishnas, ten fanfare-type trumpeters and eleven bedecked elephants winding their way off it] ... so the hill half ruins me for the rest of the day and, having realised after the first hill that my thighs are whacked and the bike is even more severely decrepit, is in fact rubbish, i cycle 15 or so km, head into a long dead-end between a river and power station...whereupon i get a puncture...
ollocks
so i'm reduced to walking the damn creaky thing of a bike back in the ever-heatening sun... stopping at tea shops and amazing temples... with nothing to do in the tea-breaks and shade-breaks except ...read To The Lighthouse... laughing at how things turn out...
so i walk a good few miles thinking, this is gonna be a long one, i'm gonna finish the book... with kids jeering and catcalling and helloing at me, motorbike teenagers sneering at me, and with old men on cycles, passing me at a very little more than weary walking pace, giving me what i think are smiles of fatalistic sympathy...
when, as i approach a town, two ragamuffins kids, bruv'n'sis, find me and say, puncture... puncture... and point me to a bike repair shop ... which, being deep in the misery of reading Virginia, and sometimes being a decidedly unproactive person [much too loath to consider bettering my position] hadn't occurred to me...
do you remember a Monty Python Tv sketch called Bicycle Repair Man...?
well, hoorah, he was my superhero... and fixes the bike so... Monty Python save me from Virgina Woolf ...
while i'm sitting there, with chickens getting butchered me in a small stall 18 inches behind me, a motorbike with a man and two kids stops for a second while the bloke throws a cat on the gravel and they drive on with bike repair man and others shouting at them... cos they've just dumped the scrawny bigheaded scared-looking kitten on a random roadside...
so i tip the kids and i'm off...hoobloodyrah i was already despairingly thinking, i'm only on page 45, there's seven times more of this... SEVEN
i mean, its lyrically written... and there's something appealingly human about well-observed it is ... and the sentences do roll very nicely... though frequently they disturb the clarity of her description... but BLOODY HELL am i relieved?
so i can still do the joke i'll never do... i've been meaning to read To The Lighthouse for years but i've never got round to it ...
...
meanwhile rereading the above i realise i'm been getting a bit self-centred... a bit wholly me-oriented with my punishing introspection when of course the interesting bit... the bit that should be expanded is ... is the bit which went ... the main-drag / bazaar of Hampi which right now has fifty drummers, 10 Gods, including 4 monkey Gods and a couple of coconut-macheteing Krishnas, ten fanfare-type trumpeters, and eleven bedecked elephants complete with satin-uniformed mahouts, winding their way off it ... more later
...
speaking of intimidating middle class women, one thing you never get in england anymore, that i see anyhow is women who wear heavyish overcoats and walk about with their hands in their pockets creating a unique kind of silhouette
you see them in old english movies say, a canterbury tale
well... you might not get those women in england anymore ... but you do get them here
the vicar's wife in Ooty
busybodies, purposeful, no-nonsense, intelligent
they're another thing you used to get in england you don't get anymore ...but do get here ...
...
kids with catapults
kids playing with a wheel and a stick
groups of kids playing cricket
leyland cars and trucks
royal enfield bikes
standard fireworks [?]
a complete disregard and loathing for the poor
...

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