Taking flight

I have acquired a bike. The circumstances in which this happened are probably best not mentioned, since they're very sordid - that lucky, lucky saddle!
It isn't actually operational at the moment, it needs at least a new chain and brake cables, which I'm going to have a go at myself. I've borrowed a book from the library and it's quite nice to have my blokish strain brought out. No doubt when it's still in the dining room in the same or worse condition in a year, I'll get an expert to look at it!
Despite my claim to the motto, 'why have a bike when you can be one', bicycles do have some major personal significance for me. When I was a teen my bike was to me my freedom, since I grew up somewhere where the public transport was patchy & my mother refused to have a car despite being able to drive. She did get me a blue racing bike for my birthday one year, replacing the second-hand orange Raleigh Commando (without the cool and sexy value of a Chopper) I'd had till then & would only ride round the garden because I was too embarrassed to be seen in public with it. The bike was for a cycling holiday we went on together but underestimated what a bike can do for a 14 year old boy.
I failed the cycling proficiency test at school, but nonetheless my bike allowed me to take off. In the evenings after school & all day in the holidays I must have cycled miles. As a teenager I had legs like tree trunks because of this. In the derelict industrial landscape of the Black Country of the 1980s I also partook of what would now be called urban exploration: easier then because there was less attention to sealing building sites and derelict buildings. I cycled over and over again down a nearby old railway line with the sleepers removed. It was while I was doing that that I saw a couple having sex in a car & the reality of sex & its power came home to me for the first time.
So having a bike again brings all of this up for me. The only little thing is: it's yellow & I feel it may have to have a coat of black smoothite at some point!
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