A new blog is born

Ok, so.  I am the new official lord of the Sweetshop Blog.  Therefore I annouce that is now Graz’s Best Prancer blog.  That is my new zine.  I am going to post some of the stuff on here for your enjoyment.  Enjoy it.

My Bike.

 

In my first year here I didn’t have a bike.  This was firstly because I lived about as centrally as one can possibly live and secondly because I had a deep-seated fear of cycling on the ‘wrong’ side of the road.  In my second year, when I moved to what I affectionately call the ‘vegan punk dump’, I required a bike to stay in contact with civilisation.  This is my bike story.

 

Graz is a city ruled by cyclists.  The bike paths cross the city, along the river, through the parks and against the flow of traffic in the dreaded one-way system.  Like many mainland European cities, the paths of Graz are populated with the usual cross-section of society; cliché Euro-grannies with a loaf of bread propped in the basket of their 1950s city bike with still-functioning dynamo light; the fashion conscience racing biker with luminous skin-tight lycra covering the body like a blinding second skin; crust punks and hippies with black painted bikes or flowers gaffa-taped to the handlebars; and…people like me.  I needed a bike and I needed one cheap.  The options included buying a stolen bike from one of the Turkish shops, spending hundreds of Euros on an uber-trendy lowrider from the cool independent bike shop, paying through the nose for a proper bike from the sports shop or simply stealing someone else’s bike.  My flatmate has had seven bikes in seven years, six of which he had stolen.  He has a policy that if he sees a bike unlocked it deserves to be stolen.  Unfortunately¸ even after having seen my dream bike unlocked the very day I was out looking for one, I realised this policy wouldn’t fly with me.  The good news was that I got a tip from a friend about buying second hand bikes from a charity called Caritas, which I decided to follow up.

 

Upon arriving at Caritas a slightly nutty guy with long hair and a full leather suit came out and offered to help.  He informed me most of the bikes from the latest batch were sold, but there was one left that I could take.  I rode around for a bit and it seemed ok.  It was a rusty post-war granny bike with a basket coated with peeling paint, but it was mine for 50 euros.  The guy, Tscho, convinced me to go on a bike adventure with him to the cash machine, which I thought was a good idea.  He seemed nice, although he kept saying he had been on tour with the Boston Symphony Orchestra for the last decade and had ‘dozens’ of cats.  On a side note, he said he needed my email for his records and the following day this appeared in my inbox –

 

Tscho Findeis to me

show details 07/10/2008 Reply

 

cheap poetry by someone who

´s got reminded by you -

due to ya appearence

and laughter

20 years after

her humour

died due a brain tumor

 

zero – one

digital

life

has gone

unnatural

in chinese signs

i´am a dog

and i like your habits

analog

 

(one of the eight cats i´m taking care of

might ask you for some translation on my gmail

account)

 

ever mind

–

tschau tscho

the crux of the biscuit is the apostrophe (´)

 

Uhhhhh.  Yeah.  The crux of the biscuit is the apostrophe?!

 

That day, riding home with the autumn air and splatters of rain hitting my face, I felt positive.  Graz is a great city to ride in, largely because you don’t feel like you’re in the way of motorists or in any danger, which is how I felt cycling around Leeds.  The only problem with cycling there is that there is always the danger of getting a tyre stuck in the tramlines which transverse the city.  Experienced city riders know that because of the width of a wheel generally being thinner than that of the tramline, you always have to cross it at an angle.  I know this now.  I learned the hard way.  I had left my friend’s house on the very day I bought the bike and was heading home when the accident happened.   I remember crossing the tramline because I was at a point where it was too close to the pavement to cycle between them.  I remember seeing metal bike racks flying towards my face, except they are bolted down, which means I had to be flying towards them.  I knew my face and the metal were going to come into contact so I threw myself to the side so that my shoulder smashed down on it instead.  The bike came down hard on one thigh, the handbag went flying from the basket and I felt concrete against my cheek.  For a moment I wasn’t sure what was happening because the girl waiting at the tram stop barely looked at me.  It was like in a strange film where I kept thinking to myself “If I don’t try to move then I won’t know what I’ve injured and then it’s simply not real.”  Every time I fall when skiing I do the same dazed thought process while lying face down in the snow.  But then all of a sudden a couple were standing there with my handbag saying “Alles OK?” again and again and again while I got gingerly to my feet.  An Australian woman picked up my bike, which was bent and had one break handle hanging limply on its cable, and told me to walk home.  So I did just that.  I limped home with tears running down my face, pushing the crippled bike along the darkened streets.  With every turn it said “clackedly-clack, clackedly-clack” angrily.  It had survived 50 years without this kind of carnage.  So it was that as day one as a cyclist in Graz drew to a close I was preparing myself for my first excruciating Austrian hospital visit and the bike stood broken and dejected in our garage.  Not a great start, I have to say.

 

Luckily my friend John hooked me up with a mountain bike shortly after. Once my shoulder and my fear had healed we went on some great rides up and down the river and now I can successfully face down pedestrians and trams on the streets of Graz.  We are preparing for a bike trip to Slovenia in a couple of days, which is flat run of around 50kms down the River Mur, a path dotted with forests and bars.  I can tell that my bike and I are going to have plenty more adventures together before I leave.  On the downside my flatmate may not be joining us because his bike got stolen… How’s that for karma?

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