Bike Mayhem

Q: What are the chances of beating odds of 30,000-to-1?

A: Pretty good, as it goes. Which the following story will illustrate.

So I’m up in Oxford the other day with the missus and, as I always get to doing when I’m wandering around Oxford, I start salivating and whooping about all the old abandoned bikes they have littered around their streets there. Millions of ‘em, I swear! Just stood there – not even chained to things – crazy rich Japanese students long gone back to Japan – Oxford undergrad rah-types dropped out or got drunk one night and can’t remember where they left it or just plain tired of the whole cycling business, lost their keys get daddy to buy a new one – and there they sit, chained all rusted and tyres flat, wheels bent, bits slowly being buzzarded away by tight-ass gypsy scavenger souls such as myself: millions of ‘em, I tells ya! And I gets to dreamin’ about bustin’ some of those locks – liberating ‘em, as I’ve done a couple of times in London, rebuilding and putting ‘em back on the road, easier than you think, with a couple of mighty swings of hammer and – lordy, lordy! – why didn’t I bring it and my spanner when I keep on telling myself, never go nowhere with a hammer and a spanner and…

We see a decent Dawes mountain bike. Rusty chain? Check. Tyres going flat? Check. Bits starting to go missing? Check. Though just the handlebar grips, nothing major. It’s on a combo-lock – puny little things, really, up against a couple of lusty swishes. But I ain’t got nothin’ to swish with. Ah, the dream – and then, the other dream: the dream I was having wherein I sit and wonder, hey, just how long would it take to go through all possible combinations anyway? I dream it out loud. I dream it with my hands. I think, let’s give it a little go. Except…

Except who can be bothered with that? Let’s just have a little play and move on (all this takes place, by the way, because through various circumstances we were late for the showing of a movie and ended up wandering instead – delightful synchronicities such as that, more of which later). I have a go at birth-years: obvious choice. I try the eighties. No dice. I try the nineties – young people are so young these days! – but nothing there either. Not seventies, surely? But it is. 1974 and off it pops. I hold up the two ends of the lock. I giggle. And off we walk with our newly acquired bike. Now we’re hungry.

Girlfriend wants to take a little trip. Girlfriend wants her own bike too. Rack and rack is perused. Some, blatantly left to rot and rust; others…you’re not so sure about, best leave them. And then there it is: a beautiful maybe thirty years-old black Raleigh racer with a bent back wheel and a hanging off rusty chain and the handlebars all drooping loose. And it’s not even chained to anything. And it’s on a combo-lock too: we can just wheel that sad old thing away, bust her and fix her in our own sweet time – fix her with found parts, naturally – but before we do that I think, well let’s just give her a try. I start near the beginning this time. And twenty seconds later I turn to 050X (the fourth wheel is missing) and off this one pops as well. Madness. It’s like I’m magnetised to the goddamn things or something: they’re just throwing themselves into my hands. More glee giggles and off we go again, two bikes and plans to return in the morning for a tooled-up jaunt around town for parts. We leave the Raleigh by the Sainsbury’s, right by another rusting broken down touring bike and with a bit of air in the Dawes’s tyres pedal on home elated and thrilled.

And in the morning? Well, wouldn’t you just know it – while we’re discussing what to do and I’m ideally playing with the combo-lock on that neighbouring horizontal tourer – I think, start at a thousand this time – that one simply gives up the ghost and comes apart in my hands as well. 1018. Three wildly divergent number. Yet maybe three minutes code-busting time in total. Thirty-thousand to one, baby: oh yeah. And now we two have three, and the work begins.

The racer needs some tightening, a new back wheel, some pumping and some brakes. We find the wheel and brakes by the train station on an almost crumbling old Peugeot with a sticker threatening scrappage if not removed soon. We fix her up, pump her up, and she’s a beaut. The tourer needs a front innertube and a rear tyre and a new seat: easy. And the mountain bike just wants a good pump and some grips. It’s a few hours work, a fiver for an innertube – did scavenge one but that blew up – and some fun time outside a bike shop cobbling it all together and borrowing the nice boys’ pump. And then we end up by the train station thinking about plans: what to do now (we’ve got camping gear, thinking about a little trip) and how to get all this back to London? Conclusion we come to: let’s cycle down to Avebury, via the White of Horse of Uffington, have some nights in a tent, and then come back to Oxford, pick up the spare, and train ‘em all back home and maybe keep ‘em, maybe sell some, who knows? I says finally, and prophetically it now seems, what we need is someone to sell the third to here, then we’re not tied to Oxford, we’ll be free (although there are a couple of wheels I want from the train station for another bike back home). All is decided. And outside we go, and right by where I’ve locked the three bikes – sort of odd the position I’ve chosen, right in front of the train station – there’s a guy standing and I’m thinking, here we go, our customer. More glee.

Hiya, I says, how’s it going? You want to buy a bike?

He looks at me puzzled, scratching his head.

It’s weird, he says, this bike here – the tourer – it’s exactly like one I had stolen a few weeks back, except it’s different. But the bell, these markings here, they’re definitely mine.

A slight gulp. But it’s all good, I feel.

What’s different, I say?

The back tyre, he goes, and the saddle. When did you buy it? he says.

Aha. We found it. We found it this morning. It was abandoned. Is that your lock? I ask.

No, he says, it had a different lock.

We found it by the Sainsbury’s on The Plain.

I left it on Cowley Road, he says.

And, blah blah blah, we do the boring bit of the conversation and it turns out that it is this bloke’s bike, and we’ve either nabbed it from the thief, or from someone the thief sold it to, and by some miracle upon miracle this poor nice chap has got his bike back all fixed and groovy and he gives us a fiver for the innertube and we send him on his way with a nice new lock and all three of us are standing there shaking our heads and laughing at this little slice of awesomeness. I mean, what are the chances? Of our being there, of those bikes being there, right in his view as he’s on his way home from work? Even when I chained ‘em up I thought it was an odd place, when on the actual bike rack would’ve been better – unless the whole purpose was to reunite this chap and his wheels. It’s the mystic icing on the beautiful cake of fate in a whole series of odds-busting events – and it solves our problem too, reducing our situation to a mere one-bike-each and freedom to get on the road. It makes my head shake for hours…

PS Notes on this story:

1. I don’t think it’s wrong to liberate abandoned bikes. I do take care to ascertain that they’re genuinely abandoned. And I really hope I’m right in this.

2. For hours afterwards we were obsessed with looking at bikes: my brain ‘n’ eyes were magnetised towards them. I didn’t even want anymore. But the possibilities, man, the possibilities…

3. Now when I look at combination locks I think, poor saps, it’s about as much use as a piece of string. Even to go through all ten thousand numbers would only take about two hours. But I’ll bet you I could crack ‘em much faster than that. Thank God I ain’t into nicking.

4. The Raleigh is now my main bike. Ali wanted it but it was too big for her. Shame. I was gonna give her my old Peugeot – smaller, actually a better bike – but what with the whole moving-to-Leeds thing coming up I figured a clear out was a better idea. So I sold it yesterday for seventy quid. Got that one for free off the internet; just needed the frame welding. I done pretty good out of bikes a-lately…

5. Don’t try this at home, unless you know what you’re doing. Cheers! :-)