Rollerbladers

Category: Humour

It never ceases to amaze me how I can be passed by rollerbladers when I bike down a path. I see these young girls of seventeen or eighteen zip by me, and for the life of me, I cannot keep up with them let alone pass them.

I observed one such girl while I was biking to see what the magic was. Was it the sound waves from the i-Pod headset that sent her floating effortlessly by me? Was it a hidden motor in the rollerblades?

I conjectured that it must be that back and forth swinging of the arms and the scissor like crisscrossing of the rollerblades – left foot to the right then right foot to the left. Back-and-forth. Back-and-forth.

"Ah!" says I (and this is where things turn ugly) as I attempted to switch pedals between the left and the right by sticking my legs through the bike frame.

This, as the staff at the Montfort Hospital will attest , is not a good idea. Just ask the nurses about the patient in rooms 3 and 7.

Apart from the tire tracks running down the middle of my face - as I lunged onto the front tire making those playing cards stuck in the wheel spokes sounds with my lips - my legs were crossed in such a way that would turn yogis green with envy and make sopranos yield the floor.

3 and 7 were, incidentally, also the settings of the high and low gears on my 21 speed bike at the time. 3 and 7 and I still couldn’t pass the girl.

Ah! Ah! That’s it. Next time I’ll try rollerblades myself then I’ll be able to pass them.

I don’t know if it is an after effect of my failed experiment, or the morphine drip running into my veins but, as I slowly fade away, I hear distant (warning?) bells ringing in my head. Dring-dring! Dring-dring! Dring-dring! … In my dream a young lad on a tricycle, overtakes my bicycle even as I roar down a hill.