Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: bike

  • bike for Berlin

    I bought my bike second hand and we went all the way to Leipzig to get it. Leipzig is the new Berlin now that Berlin is the new Seattle. I took my new bike to the bicycle repairman on the corner. Oh no, he said: this bike has a rusted frame. You’d better throw it away entirely.

    Whut? I took my new second-hand bike to the swanky bike repair place on the park. Oh no, they said: this bike’s frame is rusted out. If you try to ride it, everything’s going to be fine until one day it collapses under you and you’ll end up with a broken back.

    Whut! I took my new second-hand bike with the rusted frame to the Dutch bicycle place near where they sell excellent ice cream. Their pistachio ice cream is so good and so green that the first time I tried it, I actually gasped. The man who makes and sells the ice cream is tall and dark with dreamy eyes. He feeds me little samples across the counter on a spoon. No, no, said the Dutch place: with a rusted frame there is no point in repairs. You can try to fix it, sure. Then one day it’s just going to crack in half like a wafer. And down you’ll go.

    Gosh. I wheeled my new second-hand rejected bike with its rusted frame home across the park. On a noticeboard outside the anarchist society library (“Shhhh! This is a library!”) someone had pinned a handwritten notice. Hej Berlin! Fahrradreparatur. Hey Berlin! Bicycle repairs. Call Maisie. (Let’s call her Maisie). I did.

    Sure, she said, komm einfach mal vorbei, just bring it round. Maisie lived in a large, organised squat. The bell was answered by two giant punks on their way to walk their dog in the park, by the looks. Oh no, they said. There’s no bike repair here. Maisie said, I began, and the smaller punk stepped back and opened the door. Oh, then – it’s right down the hall behind the girls’ toilets.

    Their squat had been a school. I went past the girl’s toilets and found Maisie in her well-oiled workshop. She was tiny and fearlessly tattooed. She welded a cross-brace to the frame and in three days I came back and paid her and rode my new second-hand rusted-out bicycle with its clever repair back to the Dutch bicycle shop. I bought it one of those festive Dutch bike baskets people thread with wreaths of flowers, which I had craved since I was a little girl riding a bike with green streamers. This was two years ago now and I have turned my whole life inside out. Better boyfriend, better apartment, better business, better income. I ride my bike everywhere and its sunny basket greets me when I come down out of the house in the morning, always ready for adventure. Every day we are building a Berlin life together, evading the potholes and skimming under all the trees, the one musketeer and her bicycle.

  • pedalling home

    Pedalling home along a tree-lined street which is set aside for bicycles, I heard a crash. A man reaching up to put his brown wine bottle in the brown glass bin had tipped forward and toppled like a tree – at first I thought he must be drunk. There was nobody about, just him and me. I had jammed on my brakes.

    He actually flung his legs up in the fall and took a few tips to settle, like a rocking horse set rocking. “Alles okay?” I leaned my bike and ran over. He was getting up painfully slowly and had that embarrassed expression that usually indicates want of serious injury. “Die Kante…” he explained as I reached him, the curbside had a camber…

    Falls, as we know, can be deadly in the elderly and I remember that Leonard Cohen had a serious fall, as so many older people do, in the days before his death. I remember locking myself in a wardrobe to cover my face and howl, when I heard that he had died, two weeks after Dad’s funeral. Our St Leonard of Koans.

    Shakily restored to his own feet, the man immediately turned to pick up his empty bottle and popped it in the open mouth of the brown bottle sorting station. They have three colours and beer bottles commonly have worn whited shoulders from rubbing companionably up against each other on all those trips back to the brewery and then the store. Och, Germany: you slay me. It’s like a magical land in which everyone behaves the way I’ve always done: we’re all in this together. I had just passed a crossing where another crash heralded a tipping bicycle, whose basket was filled with neatly sorted bottles, possibly heading for this same recycle station. They started to bounce and break all over the cobblestones. Before I could react a dozen people had swooped in to help, propping their own bikes and stooping like long-legged birds.

    I asked the elderly man, “Sind Sie verletzt?” Are you hurt? He passed a hand uncertainly over the crown of his head, showing me where there might be an injury, and in response to this mute plea for mothering I passed my own hand very softly over the tender scalp, as downy as a baby’s but for the sparse, short, grey, bristling old hairs. “How are you getting home?” I asked him, “you’re not driving, are you?” We stood there assuring each other. I told him the skin on his head was not broken. He told me he would be sure to be careful getting home. “Just be tender with yourself,” I told him, as I should rather more often tell myself.

    Nearer home I chatted on the phone for a long while with my dear friend, on a park bench under a stand of trees which were shedding their golden leaves as I watched. The light was just so. I found a stinking dog shit smear on the back of my hand, and made a face and started wiping it off on the grass, still talking. On the far side of the square a street dweller pulled from his breast pocket a little packet of paper handkerchiefs and drew out a fresh one and offered it to me. He bowed. I crossed over there and took it, still talking, thanking him.

    During the phone call I watched two dog owners whose dogs – one large, one small – had woven an enthusiastic wreath running counter-clockwise, passing the leashes over one another’s hands. They kept trying to untangle the beasts but the dogs running clockwise sniffing one another’s butts had passed into a blur. I saw a toddler pitched forward and running on the balls of his feet as he approached the road. There were no cars coming and his mother looked on unworried from a few paces behind but nonetheless a young girl stepping onto the pavement with her friend stopped her body in front of him, forming a kindly barrier. She stood mashing her feet and chatting to him, distracting him and making it a game, then stepped aside without a word when his mother had caught up with him and he was safe.

    This communal parenting moves me to tears. I told my friend and we both laughed with joy. I described to him the two dogs blurring themselves into a wreath on the cobbles, their owners doe-sie-doeing from above. It was dark when I put my phone back in my bag and walked uphill past the man who was still standing by his bench, with his beer, gazing up into the trees. He had on a leather hat with a feather to its brim and standing by him was a trussed wheelbarrow loaded with his things. I had gathered all my groceries in two hands and clutched them to my chest to stop them falling. “Thanks again,” I said, “for the handkerchief,” and the man said, ascending to the familiar or affectionate you, “You’re very welcome,” and I said, matching his informality, “That was love of you,” das war lieb von dir, and he bowed and pressed his hand upon his heart, and I pressed my crowded with bottles hand over my heart which was cluttered with a jar of honey, a bottle of biodegradable cleaning spray and a heavy bottle of milk; the other, free hand was splayed to keep hold of a second jar and a second bottle and I pressed the glass into my heart and we smiled at each other, at the end of an autumn day so beautiful it would make you want to resurrect belief of some kind in some kind of deity.

  • camera ambulance

    Is it Germans who are so trusting, or just Berliners? A woman cycled up with her grandchild, I think grandchild, in a netted baby trailer and parked her bike under the tree where we were standing. We were waiting for the guy who repairs cameras, as I had dropped mine onto the cobblestones an hour before. His window was dusty and the handwritten sign promising, “Ich bin gleich wieder für Sie da,” was not convincing. Peering in I had the impression he maybe hadn’t been “there for us” in a century or more. The woman glanced up at the staircase leading into the house she as visiting. She glanced at us. “Sind Sie noch ein Paar Minuten da?”

    The child was sleeping and the stairs were steep: she clearly didn’t want to have to rouse him carry him, lock everything. Oh, yes, I said: we are waiting for the camera guy, we’ll be here a few more minutes, “wir passen auf Ihr Kind auf.” We will look after your child. Oh, thank you, she said, and bounded up the stairs – actually bounded – without so much as locking her bike.

    Is it Berliners who are so fit, or just Germans?

    The camera guy came strolling magnificently down the street carrying a little notepad. His belly was broad and his gait wide and easy. “That’s him,” said my partner, “it’s got to be.” And we were right – the guy pulled up outside the shop window and gazed at the small group which had gathered. “Ein richtiges Kamera-Party,” I said, we’re just having a bit of a camera party. He laughed, the sun is finally out and everybody is happy. The shop is called Camera Ambulance. Just as he was unlocking the door the grandmother came leaping down the stairs to collect her child. “Danke,” she said, and I told her cheerfully, “Der wollte nach München, um seine eigene Karriere zu folgen – ich habe ihn überredet.” He was keen to set off for Munich in pursuit of his own career – but I talked him out of it. “Ah! that’s a relief, many thanks,” she said, giving her fresh beautiful smile. On the cycle ride home we followed a woman with such a gloriously high round arse that as she was pedalling I turned to point her out to him, and he was on the verge of pointing her out to me. Berlin is filled with beauty. And babies. Perhaps it is not so much an attack of baby fever as the fact that all the babies who exist hereabouts already have now woken from their long sweet winter sleeps and taken to the streets, they are strolling in carriages, towed by their parents’ bikes, sitting nodding in half dozens in the large buckets on wheels by which local kindergartens transport their charges. If you gaze in at the window of a Kinderladen (a local ‘children shop’) you will see sweet little low tables with tiny chairs set with plates and sturdy cups, at which the Kinderladen staff crouch down to sit at child level, while everyone is served a proper hot lunch.