Incredible Bright Red Man

It may surprise many, including me, but I used to cycle a lot.

Yes I know, sounds funny me saying that doesn’t it ?

But I did.

Well not a lot compared to our Ned, he was The Incredible Cycling Man, cycling to work everyday, once getting run over by a bus, literally run over his leg it did after it knocked him off his bike on a roundabout, folded his bike in half like it was a paper bike but he said it didn’t hurt and he walked all the way home carrying his bike with just a bus tyre shaped bruise on his leg – The Incredible Cycling Man.

Up to about ten years ago we would have weekends throughout the summer where he would turn up at our house on his bike, panniers packed, and I would have forgotten to tell Suzanne he was coming so I’d have to sneak around the house packing an overnight bag, then wave her and my young children goodbye with a “I’m going outside, I may be gone for some time…” and off we’d cycle for fifty or so ridiculously hilly miles through the Yorkshire Dales until we’d find a pub or hostel to stay in for the night where we would get gloriously drunk and dread cycling back the next day.

Those weekends were fun and a small crowd of participants would step forward to, erm, participate.

Almost the last one that I can remember was the weekend when I became known to the whole of Cookridge as “Incredible Bright Red Man”.

They’d left me halfway back from Stainburn where we had spent the previous evening getting gloriously drunk in a fine pub and then sleeping in a barn with our bikes as pillows, the rest of the lads heading back to Bradford while I needed to be in Leeds, we parted company outside Skipton and I pedaled my lonely way home on the main road on a scorching hot Sunday afternoon – that one reference alone should enable anyone with a meteorological chart of Britain to pinpoint the exact day – the day it was scorching hot, it doesn’t happen very often.

I pedaled and pedaled, the pedaling getting slower and slower, the hills getting longer and higher, my thirst growing, well, thirstier as the afternoon wore on, I stupidly had not brought water, or food, or money.

Somewhere between Skipton and Ilkley I felt it – the burning of my legs – at some point on the route I was cycling in exactly the right vector to be in direct line of the most powerful of the sun’s rays and having stupidly worn shorts and stupidly not even dreamed of bringing along a sun screen lotion I copped for the worst that le soleil could throw at me.

Hour after hour dragged endlessly by, its not that far from Skipton to Leeds except for when you are pedaling a bicycle on the hottest day of the decade with no sun screen, or water, or food, or money, under those circumstances the journey takes on epic proportions – anyone who has seen the old film “Ice Cold In Alex” will understand.

Eventually in Otley I reached breaking point, I could turn the pedals no more and yet I still had Otley Chevin to climb, the last final hill, the biggest and steepest last final hill, a hill that even cars can sometimes not climb and here was me on a bike contemplating it without water, food, or money – it had all seemed so easy flying down the Chevin the previous day.

There at the side of the road stood an Asian Convenience Store, how I love our Asian brethren for opening their stores during every hour of daylight and most of the night too, if this story was being told from ten years previous and the store was owned by Cooper of Cookridge fame then his fekkin store would have been locked shut all day Sunday and I would have died, right there on the roadside, perhaps clutching the door handle forlornly, having scratched “you bas’tad Cooper” in the paintwork with my fingernail before croaking it.

“There must be some money in here somewhere” I garbled, tongue swollen and parched inside my head and I scrambled in my overnight backpack, and god bless the god of the dehydrated there was – just fifty pence.

I walked stiffly into the Convenience Store, the skin on my legs already an angry throbbing red, face and tee shirt crusty with salt and stiff from dried sweat, holding my coin of the realm aloft I demanded the largest bottle of pop that fifty of the Queens best pee’s could buy, the very nice man behind the counter gave me a 1.5 litre bottle of lemonade, I’m sure it should have cost far more than fifty pence but maybe he was already terrified by the sight of Incredible Bright Red Man, or maybe I just smelled really bad and he wanted rid.

I walked stiff as a zombie in a bad B movie back outside the shop and sat on the kerbside, a few seconds later I heard him pull the shutters down and lock the shop until I’d gone, just in case. I sat there on the kerb and drank all 1.5 litres of the sweet sticky water, burped, farted, then got back on the bike and with the ten minute sugar rush that 1.5 litres of lemonade can offer, just made it up Otley Chevin and thence home.

Later that night I sat in a chair like a petrified rock man of Pompeii – arms and legs held horizontally to my torso, not daring to move any of them for fear of pain – I glowed the brightest crimson known to man, standing in the bowels of a nuclear reactor would not have created this glowing freak, and as my children were only too keen to point out my, by then, balding and shaven head was also a very angry crimson colour, but only in places as I had worn a cycle helmet and of course only the bits exposed via the holes in the helmet had burned – the pattern on my head resembled one of the coneheads of the well known television programme of the same name.

It was almost the very last time that I cycled anywhere, but not quite the last time …