Thrashing around on a supermarket floor must attract quite a reasonable sized crowd - something for any balloon sculpting street artists among you to bear in mind. At least two people have told me they were personally responsible for picking me up and several more seem to have been interested onlookers. Even the local police chief asked me today how I was getting on. Lots of people know about the incident and they seem to know it was me. In fact, at times, I've felt like a bit of a minor celebrity. It's a celebrity I would rather have avoided but, every cloud, as they say.
There is medical advice that I shouldn't drive. So now I can feel virtuous cycling from Culebrón to Pinoso. It's not very far, it's more or less level and yet the effort makes me breathe like an steam train. Nonetheless, as I take my first unsteady steps on reaching my destination I feel righteous. Ecologically sound, part of that group that goes into sports shops to buy things other than shoes.
Getting to town or back home on the loaned road bike is already a relatively quick and only mildly painful process. I expect it to get better as my muscles adapt to something more strenuous than pushing the brake or clutch pedals. The bike is useless for transporting anything other than me of course. I've already had a couple of logistical failures with my lessons when the attempt to keep the weight and angularity of my backpack down has meant that I've forgotten some key bits of paper. My lunchtime menu planning/food buying now also takes account of the weight and bulk of foodstuffs. Night time cycling is out (though much against my better judgement I rode home after nightfall yesterday). I was not and I am not at all keen on mixing with 100km/h traffic after dark but it was actually the oncoming traffic, on the narrow lanes, that caused me most problem as I lost sight of the edge of the road.
As a driver I think those flashing red rear bike lights are great but, as a cyclist, I've had a couple of eye to eye conversations with drivers in broad daylight where there has been no doubt that each of us is aware of the presence of the other. They've cut me up anyway. They are presumably working on the assumption that, even if I persist, I will hardly mark their paintwork. I am certain that even the flashiest of flashing rear LEDs and the most fluorescent of fluorescent jackets will offer very little protection against just the slightest tap from a vehicle driven by someone much more engrossed in their WhatsApp message than spotting that unexpected night time bike.
When I rode in a couple of days ago I was heading for the bank to talk mortgages and I thought we were just about to buy a house. I was quite taken with the idea. Culebrón is great with space and trees and stuff but it's a pain getting a gas cylinder or a bread stick. And, as the years pass, more things will become a nuisance or worse. So, living in town and being able to leave the gas cylinder outside the door to be replaced or only having to walk around the corner to the bakery sounded good. Pinoso is hardly the big city after all and Friday evening's jaunt to Santa Catalina, where we talked to Spaniard after Spaniard, was also a reminder of the pleasures of living with neighbours in a community.
Maggie knew the house or, in fact, the bunch of houses we were going to see. I reckoned that if she thought they were good then they would be. The houses are owned by a bank, collected as part of a bad debt, probably from a bankrupt builder, and sold through the bank's real estate arm. The prices are low, and similar houses are usually really good value for money. Typically they are "sold as seen" and most of them need a bit of tweaking in one way or another. We're not really rich enough to take on a mortgage but figures can be remarkably elastic when you want them to be and the bank seemed to be as flexible in their sums as we were in ours.
I was ready to having to fit a kitchen from scratch, I knew about that, but, try as I might I couldn't like the house. I looked at the cupboards, described as rooms, and wondered how anybody had decided to make the only suitable length for a bed run from under the window directly into the door. I looked at the toilet absolutely flush to the wall, wondered why, and tried to calculate if there was sufficient leg space between the stool and the bidet without actually squatting down to check. I balanced everything against the price and decided that sometimes being cheap just isn't enough.
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