Cycling and intergluteal cleft

Without warning, a cell phone addicted woman who was absentmindedly blabbering on her phone, crossed my path as I was accelerating through a very busy junction. To avoid hitting her, I swerved towards the railings and the predictable outcome of muscles colliding with metal happened. The pain was instantaneous and blinding as I nursed my bruised fingers.

Instead of stopping to check on me, she continued her phone conversation, and without care sneaked away. I dusted myself, got on my bike and proceeded to work. By now a veteran London cyclist, I am used to such indifference.

Uneventful is not how you describe cycling in London. If you can cycle here, you can very much cycle almost everywhere. Well, maybe with caution in India or Bangladesh, but you are skilled enough to avoid getting killed.

My pedal story started in July 2011, when I joined VSO in Putney. Compelled by necessity, I needed to find a way of reducing my travel cost. At £ 900 per month for train and tube tickets, it was neither economical nor sustainable.  Cycling with its health advantage was a logical choice. It would enable me to keep fit and save £ 250 per month, a big saving.  So for five days a week in the first two years, I cycled for 50 kilometers everyday. This distance increased to 56 kilometers 3-4 times per week when the office moved further out of London.

Regardless of the distance and time it took me, I was religious with it and endured; rain, hail, winds and snow. The only occasions I skipped it were when I needed to wear a suit and not look crumpled during high profile meetings. Most of the time however, I just pedaled my way to work.

Over a period of 4 years, I had 5 bicycles of which 1 was stolen and another had to be scrapped. I bought four inner tubes and recycled them until they were beyond patching. I secured my bikes with four locks; got 1 front wheel nicked and got all of my vintage brakes and cables stolen. I filed two complaints with the police service of which nothing fruitful happened. I bought 2 Lycra shirts and 1 cycling trousers which made my testicles protrude grotesquely and I stopped wearing out of shame. I had three bags, two panniers.  I cycled approximately 147,000 kilometers over that time.

I also collided with 1 lamppost outside the MI6 building which is now recorded by them and the stupendous circumstance made possible recruitment a very distant prospect. I hit 3 railings and 2 vans. A strong gust of wind lifted and slammed me against a parked van. Had it been in motion, you will not be reading this. I played Good Samaritan to 6 fellow cyclists and in horror witnessed a female cyclist getting killed by a lorry. She held a PhD and died on the same street where a fellow PhD from the same school got killed a year before. Either there is something wrong with this street or the quality of education where she went to study. Since then, I avoided that street.

I was told that I was brave for cycling in London and there is probably an element of truth in this statement.  But bravery has nothing to do with it, pleasure and freedom does. For once you have embraced the freedom of the road using your own muscles, other modes of transport pale in comparison.  It becomes an addiction that needs to be satiated.

My humble bicycles took me to places that I would have not explored had I not been lost. I discovered paths and enclaves in London that are idyllic and rural in character. I passed through parks and saw deer almost daily. When you think of London, seeing deer is the last you would consider but a herd of 2,000 live in Richmond Park. I once made a wrong turn and somehow ended in a bypass. I can confirm that it is scary, dangerous and no place for cycling.

Cycling, like life I suppose, has its ups and down.  The dangers are the obvious downs. What is not, are the dark moments of questioning, when you ask yourself why you just can't be comfortable by taking the train like other sensible people. But of course, I already knew the answer, I am neither sensible nor like other people. You also reach your physical plateau at which point you can’t improve your performance. And by the 3rd year I was exhausted and was forced to camp a day every week, in a field near Hampton Court, overflown by planes from Heathrow airport, to catch up on sleep. But nowhere was my daily resolve tested than at Broomfield Hill, a steep rise in Richmond Park near the office. It was my daily Calvary after an hour of cycling.

During these testing moments, you either brood or entertain yourself with silly games. Since I don’t do brood as it suits those who are dark, tall and play the guitar, I do the latter.  My entertainment was selecting and following nicely shaped bums.  This funny and arguably infantile activity was enough to give me the boost I needed for the final push to my destination. Once to my delight, I followed a curvaceous derrière that had a Lycra malfunction along the entire intergluteal cleft and pedaled way past the office. Luckily, I was not late and it was worth the extra mile.

Like most individual sports, there is no team to hide behind when you cycle. There is no one to blame or others to make excuses on your behalf. You rise and fall simply on our own efforts, something that suits me very well.  Digging deeper is necessary and one way or another; you find the strength to summon courage at the most trying moment.

But I don’t only creepily follow bums during these times. I mostly focus on the small pleasures; the delight of speeding down a hill on a deceptively strong frame, cool wind slapping your face, piercing sound of my bell as it cuts the air to announce to everyone I am there and woe to those who do not move out of my way; aching muscles and the salvation inducing taste of cool water.

Because of cycling I also learnt new skills. I developed an acute situational awareness of my surrounding to avoid getting hit by anything on the road. I got better with planning having to regularly gather Intel on train times, the weather, weight I carry and traffic updates. I learnt to manage my energy, when to relax and when to give it a push. I also became stoic about people’s stupidities on the road and have accepted that people are obsessed with their cellphones even at the risk of getting run over.

Cycling is truly never about the bicycle but if this palaver still does not make you get on your bike maybe this next one will. My bum as a result is extremely rotund, firm and quite a sight! If being profound does not help, try being vane. After all, everyone likes a nice bum.

A mango tree will always bear mango fruits

I know that one day my children will challenge me, break my heart and march to their own drumbeat, just like I did when I was young. The youth will always defy the old. As true in ancient times, as it is now, and will certainly still hold true in the future. There is no point denying or stopping it. We can either rave against fate, or accept it with aplomb. For children are also our punishments for our adolescent transgressions against our own parents, and as mine are after my own image, I now that I will suffer more than others.

When the moment of confrontation comes, I will be true to tradition. I will rave and rant as parents often do. I will not disappoint fate by being outwardly understanding and supportive. I will have none of this stoic self control. On the other hand, I will relish the drama and embrace the conflict as it should be, with theatricality. 

But deep in my heart and hidden from them however, I suspect that I will be inwardly happy, and be even impressed with their courage to take steps to be their own persons. And considering how big a shadow I cast over their lives, their youthful rebellion will be a herculean task worthy of respect.

Reflecting on this, I remembered my own defiance, and one of the many reasons for why fate will punish me through my own children.

Halfway through a Political Science degree, a possible entry to the college of law and a career in public service and politics, foundation for an upper middle class life, I changed direction. I resisted the prescribed narrative and instead pursued a Community Development course and became an activist. The choice was not glamorous. In fact it was predictably underpaid, unpopular, dangerous and the future is one of privation.

I did not take this route out of malice against my parents, who I knew, like most parents do, only want the best for me. But as I am their child however, they are partly to blame for the choice that I made. A mango tree does not bear papaya fruits, and children raised by generous parents who believed in social justice will predictably rage against inequity.

My parents were simple people with profound views. They believed in the nobility of the human spirit and the power of giving to make the world a better place. People like them, will always remain poor because they are drawn to sharing what they have with others. And as the poor are not often meek, even after being scammed by a few scrupulous individuals who took advantaged of their generosity, they still faithfully and foolishly probably, held on to their beliefs.

Having parents like them is not often easy. We, their children, always paid for their charity towards other people. We lived a simple life with very few luxuries after all the private schools fees have been paid. Being in private school was probably the only luxury we were afforded. But of course they did not see it as such.

Because of this formative influence, I became a student leader very early in life. I flirted with activism and joined the most militant student organisation in the country.  I became a believer of the cause for social change, had messianic tendencies and was on the extreme left of the political spectrum.

Because of my activism, I had seen much inequity and injustice. I was not new to poverty. I had experienced it with friends and comrades. We embraced hunger and were proud that we did so. It was a  badge of courage and a rite of passage for us.

But our self-belief and braggadocio are somehow hollow because we knew that we could always finish our degrees and still continue towards a path of social mobility and a life of comfort. In fact activism, hard as it was, is actually self serving and a great capital for politics later on in life. We can always claim that we once rebelled, got hurt during a rally and raged against the establishment. A tale of lost and redemption is an aspirational story and an asset in politics. I know of many former comrades who took advantage of this narrative. I could still have the nice job, big house, mestiza wife and the obese children nourished with fast-food, if I wanted to.

But there is always a moment when we will have an epiphany that will change everything, from which there is no turning back. Mine came one night in 1992.

On my way to my dormitory and slightly inebriated, I witnessed a homeless man scavenged food from the rubbish bins outside a fast-food establishment. It was such a banal scene in a developing country like the Philippines. Robbed of dignity, the man rummaged through the garbage for scraps of meat or bread, and his efforts seemed to have been rewarded very well as he started to accumulate enough to fill a bag. I realised to my astonishment that he was collecting food for others, probably his family, children, wife and extended relatives.

I am generally self-contained, almost stoic, but emotions took over and a feeling of unfairness and injustice engulfed me. All I can think of is how wrong it was. That a man has to rifle through garbage to feed his family is an abomination and an indictment of our society.  I have seen much, many much worst than this simple scene of injustice, but inexplicably, this one gripped me like a lover’s embrace and did not let go for a long time. It probably has not totally left me.

I blamed the series of events that happened later on to that particular moment in 1992. I arrived home and found myself crying for unexplained reasons for almost a week. To this day, I was not able to fully understand the unfolding of emotions that thrust me to the life I now have. I have accepted that it affected me to the core of my being. I also developed the view that we are moved by emotions and not logic, and that empathy is a powerful force for change.

The experience gave me a deeper appreciation of my parent’s generosity and of the reasons why they do what they are doing. They help others and at times suffer because they connected and are in solidarity with the poor against inequity.

I decided not to become a lawyer as a result. I changed degree instead to try and find meaning to my existence and to help addressed the injustice I witnessed. To this day, I am unsure if I truly helped made the world a little better. I have a nagging feeling that my efforts were miniscule and hardly made a dent in the overall scheme of things, regardless, we have to do what is right. I knew my choice disappointed my parents and in her final days, suffering from dementia, my mother was telling people that her son is a lawyer. Her desire to have a lawyer son did not go away but luckily for me, she forgot that I disappointed her.

I became more active in student politics, lived with a tribe in the mountains and have done many exciting things over the years after that moment (maybe I’ll write about it later) and surprisingly have lived to tell the tale. In this, I am luckier than other friends and comrades who died and were buried unceremoniously, unloved and forgotten by a movement that wanted martyrs for the cause.

And back to the circle of life. I am aware that this drama of youth defying parental authority will repeat itself. In this cycle, it will be my own children against me. And as they were brought up to be morally upright and to believe in possibilities, I imagine them to be more creative than me in their rebellion against my tyrannical parental rule. They will defy my life prescriptions; no tattoo, no vegetarian boyfriend, don’t be vegetarian, don’t be an artist, have a proper career.

But because I know that this will happen, I know how I will react. However, if my reaction is unsatisfactory and does not bring me contentment, there is  always the future grandchildren to spoil, needless to say, as a way of getting back at my own children. Such is the circle of defiance; parents are punished by fate using their own children, who are in turn punished by fate using theirs. We just play our part in this drama.