From The Complete Works of Piers Q MacBean, volume 8, Despatches From a Dark Cupboard (or Closet)
Reluctantly, as I sit here in this dark cupboard (or closet), I remember a meeting with DH Lawrence.
I had climbed the steep road to the top of Wurmsley Hill, in order to admire the view of the slag heaps and the rows of miners' cottages, when I saw the author coming towards me, wheeling a bicycle along the pavement. I confess that I always found him rather distasteful, and I tried to avoid him, especially after the time he tried to engage me in a wrestling match on the rug before a log fire. However, one has to be civil, so I felt obliged to greet him. "That's a smart-looking machine you have there."
"The bicycle!" His exclamation seemed disproportionate to the humble bike. "Liberty!" he continued, more to himself than to me. "Could you even know, in your civilised pedestrianism, the liberty this contraption, most brilliant of products of the human soul, can bring?"
"I suppose it gets you about, as long as the weather is fit."
"Yes," he spoke scathingly. "It gets me about. And that is that all you see?"
"I don't cycle myself these days."
"I suppose not. And I suppose the time will come when I too will cease my cycling, will be pulled back to the stones, the cold, dead stones of these pavements. Or close myself up in some motor-car, like a snail in its shell, suffocating on fumes, detached from the world, slave to the internal combustion engine!"
"But now, you tell me, you prefer to cycle?"
"I prefer? No, it is the bicycle that prefers to carry me. I must let it carry me where it will."
"How interesting!"
"And what ecstasy in that carrying! To burst out of the potting shed, called by the inexorable road, the outward pull that reaches within, the answering swell of the body, ready to merge with the machine. The tyres rolling over the black tarmac that surges through the whirling spokes, the power of the pedals turning, turning wheels, two wheels turning as one over the blackness that rises through the frame into the saddle, embracing the loins, pulling onwards, the surge, the road, blackness, the loins, the loins!"
"Steady on, old chap." But I could not calm him. He flung his leg over the cross-bar, leapt into the saddle, and sped off down the road, his frenzied cries of "The loins! The loins!" becoming fainter as he pedalled furiously down the steep hill. I gazed in alarm at his frantic descent, as he hurtled downwards, oblivious to the bumping of the cobbles. Racing into the bend at the bottom of the slope, he applied the brakes. Too suddenly, too hard. As the brake pads grasped the wheel rims tightly, the bicycle came to an abrupt stop. The writer did not, but flew over the handlebars, crying "Ecstasy! Transcendence! Oof! Ouch!". The bicycle, relieved of its burden and the embrace of the brakes, rolled slowly along the road, and came to a halt leaning nonchalantly on a lamp post.
I shook my head sadly as I murmured to myself A fool and his bicycle are soon parted.
