Goliath Undefeated ...

Only now has it occurred to me that I could have used my motorbike to remove the bamboo; I could kick myself! How did I not think of that? A rope around the monster’s horns, attached to the back of the bike and: first gear, clutch out, bang, that would have been the end of it.

For the story of how this bike came into our lives, I must take you back exactly 25 years when, having looked through countless catalogues, I zeroed in on a Kawasaki VN800 (Vulcan Classic); there was only one available in London, in the Old Kent Road; a beautiful turquoise model;

I had all but bought it when the salesman received a phone call, after which he asked: Would you like exactly the same bike, brand new, but a thousand pounds cheaper? Loud bells, paranoia -bright, immediately started ringing and, after a perplexed pause, I said: What’s the catch? No catch. Brand new? Brand new. I said: Show it to me. He said: It’s not actually here, you’d have to go to a café in Soho to see it. A café?! Yes, it’s in the Fashion Café in Leicester Square, it’s part of the window dressing. Go and have a look.

Very intrigued, I went, and saw in the window — not a turquoise — but a red, cream, and chrome bike, flamboyantly-new, being appraised by passers-by on the pavement. I went in (they were expecting me) and admired the machine, checked the milometer: zero miles! The man in charge of the café said: Claudia Schiffer sat on that this morning. She never! She did. She owns this place, you know. I knew nothing of all that, I was discovering. I asked if she owned the bike and was told: Oh no, it’s just here for show. I didn’t think that the fact that the fashion-model had sat on it would have improved the pedigree of this particular motor-model but was, nevertheless, intrigued by the plausibility of the information. I asked why the bike would be a thousand pounds cheaper, especially if Claudia Schiffer had sat on it. He said: Ah! You notice it’s red, that means it is last year’s, each year of manufacture has its own colour; the machine is a “P” registration and that, despite it being brand new, devalues it. I said I had to call my wife. She was working a few blocks away and materialized with the alacrity of the proverbial genie. We stared together at the beast in the window. She said: It’s gorgeous. I said: Apparently, Claudia Schiffer sat on it this morning. Oh, well, she said: What’s not to like? I bought it there and then, with a thousand pounds discount; in those days, a tidy sum. Whether or not Claudia Schiffer’s involvement had anything to do with anything, we could never resist informing those interested in trivia of the fact.

Somehow, there was something in all this which was just too good to be true and, for quite a while, I wondered if the thing would soon fall apart under us but, to this day, it has been fantastically reliable, has only ever been in the garage for its regulation-services and, subsequently, MOT’s; as someone put it: That thing is under-powered and over-engineered, it’ll go on forever! … The only one thing that now betrays its age, is the front seat which shows a few wrinkles. I said to my wife: I’ll have to get a new one. She said: A new seat? No! You’ll never get Claudia Schiffer to sit on it again!

“Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety” :

 

Dare I say, I had, and then thought you can't do that to such a lovely piece of engineering. Besides tying a rope around the horns and with the bamboo fighting back you may have damaged the steering. Not worth the risk!

A great story attached to it and both that and the bike to be savoured in future years.

 

Really glad you enjoyed it; that bike is like our third child and, at 25 (26, really, if you count the year it spent in the café window) the eldest, and as well behaved as the other two!

I wasn’t clear about the “horns” (but imaginative of you to consider the handlebars as “horns” [Picasso did that before you – what excellent company you keep]); what I meant was that the monster was the bamboo clump and the horns the bits sticking out; arguably — and it’s a long shot — one could have taken one rhizome at a time with the rope attached to the back box metal support but, apart from anything else, it would have done untold damage to the lawn and, in any case, the garden is not big enough to accommodate the maneuvers of a motorbike.

Anyway, the bamboo saga is over (final report on Saturday); now I want to be the idlest man in the world; any hard task in the garden will have to be done by my wife or, better still, Aladdin’s lamp!

 

Final Report:

Your industry commends you. I’ll try not to take a leaf out of your noble book, but drown mine deeper than did ever plummet sound; if ever there was a case of me wanting to finish something before starting, this was IT! And I’ll never start (or finish) anything like this again. But all bad things come to an end …

Well done! And there it is, ready to receive.

It may have taken me more hammer blows than Michelangelo needed to carve his David, but herewith (at long last), GOLIATH IS DEFEATED … and, do you know, a few hours later I could barely remember the agony; it’s just like childbirth: just a few hours after my wife had given birth to our two boys, I had completely forgotten the pain.

And now for the mot de la fin: Scheherazade was right: there was after all, all along, at the end of the underground tunnel, a most beautiful woman, asleep, on a pedestal made of … bamboo!!!!! ... Rien ne se crée, rien ne se perd!

Over, not out.

 

Yes, I had misinterpreted the 'horns' as I was thinking of cow horn handlebars. I tend to pick up on these little things having been reared with a biking family, grown my own family of bikers and spent 24 years living on the Isle of Man. It's in the blood I suppose. Having said that I'm still glad you didn't attempt to remove the Bamboo with your bike.

That's a nice, empty patch of ground you have now, I wonder what it's going to be filled with? I suppose another Bamboo or even a Pampas grass is out of the question? Time as you say to take a rest and maybe think of a replacement.

 

Or on a less elevated note....
If anyone’s looking for a gardener, I can recommend Little Richard.
He came round to ours and lopped all the rhubarb, he lopped bamboo.
I'll get my coat...

 

Disaster has struck (even though this not the iceberg season, other than lettuces), and all my sloth has sunk! In a deep ponder (mulling over your advice and encouragement for idleness, I was watching my grass grow, observing the quasi-Napoleonic combat between battalions of fescues and regiments of poa annua), when my wife, interrupting her reading of a vitriolic article by Camilla Long, looked up at me and asked:

When can you start?
Start what?
Have you forgotten?
Forgotten what?

I must take you back to a conversation we’d had around Christmas time; on that occasion — I had just cooked the goose and was relaxing while it was resting — my wife was also resting, in her kindle garden, reading a poetry anthology dug up from her school days (she is very eclectic), and, interrupting her leisure, she looked up and said:

Can you build me a pleasure dome?
I said: I "Khan" … but what do you want that for?
To sit underneath it.
We already have a pleasure dome.
Do you mean the bell tower?

Yes. (we have, under a dome an old bell that strikes the hours between 11 am and 8 pm and which gives us a lot of rural pleasure (I associate [in a Freudian kind of way] its sound to rural France [there’s a story attached to that bell (for another day)].

What I could do, though, is build you a pleasure platform. It would be flat, but just as good as a dome; instead of sitting underneath it, you could sit on it.
Alright. When can you do it?
Some time in the Spring, I suppose.

And that was that. I forgot all about it ... until her:

When can you start? ... You could start immediately ... now that you’ve finished the bamboo!

So, here I am, despite all my resolutions, and all your encouragement, on all fours, excavating, building, constructing, currently laying the foundations for the pleasure platform (Khan you believe it?!?!):

 

So it's going to be a pleasure throne, not a pleasure dome? I now have Frankie Goes To Hollywood playing in my head.

 

When I walked into my office this morning, my wife said I am just using your computer, darling, my iPad is on charge.
Help yourself, I said, and thought no more about it.

During lunch, she suddenly said When my pleasure platform is ready, can I have a throne on it?
A throne!? ... What gave you that idea?
I just thought of it.
I see.
By the way, you don’t seem to have done much more to the platform, lately.
The foundations have to set, darling.
Oh, of course.

When I returned to my computer, I saw that the last Google search had been to target Gardener’s Corner ... Every little helps!

 

My telepathy still works then?

 

It's not Frankie Goes To Hollywood I have playing in my head, it's Frankly, what could be more pleasurable than this?