Monthly Archives: April 2010

Let me just say that as much I love riding my bike, I do not love taking care of my bike. Cleaning it is always an ordeal, one that leaves me with cuts and scrapes on my hands and black grease under my fingernails (and often on my arms and legs as well). Tonight I needed to put two new tires on, and the whole thing was an utter failure. After some struggle I pried the tires off, put new tubes in, and pried the tires back on (and banged up my knuckles in the process). That was okay. But when I tried to pump up the tubes, they wouldn’t hold air. It turns out I punctured the tubes at some point while trying to get the tires on. In one case the tube got pinched, and in another some mysterious small, sharp metal object got in between the tire and tube and ruined everything. Sigh. Poor Hobgoblin got tired of listening to my complaints and curses and finally stepped in to finish up the job for me. Poor Muttboy was so stressed by the whole scene that he couldn’t eat his milkbone. I got grease on my jeans and on my t-shirt and had to scrub my arm so hard to get the grease off that I practically made myself bleed.

I should be better at this by now, but I’m just not.

I did go on a great 75-mile ride yesterday, however, with two other women on my racing team. We are well matched in terms of strength, and we had fun riding hard and enjoying the beautiful, sunny day. I have now made a good start on my summer cycling tan: I have an inch of burnt skin on my wrist, the part that’s exposed between my arm warmers and my cycling gloves. I also have about five inches of tanned skin on the lower part of my calves and shins, the part that’s between my knee warmers and my socks. I’m working on a pretty sharp line on my arms below my shoulders as well. I’m ready for the beach, right?

As for reading, it’s been up and down. I finished Jane Gardam’s novel Old Filth and was disappointed. When I last wrote about it here, I was enjoying it a lot, but immediately after I wrote that post, I hit a section where there were a number of odd coincidences, the plot took a turn I didn’t like, and all the sudden the characters felt unfamiliar. I never quite recovered after that. I was knocked out of the world of the book, all the sudden wondering whether I was reading it properly. The story just didn’t ring true to me anymore.

That said, though, the premise of the book is very interesting, and I’m guessing not everyone will have the reaction I had above. The novel deals with the vestiges of British colonialism, telling the story of a young boy growing up in Malay and left to the “natives” for his upbringing. His mother died shortly after giving birth and his father did his best to lose himself in his work, so it was only his aunt who paid him any attention. Eventually he was sent off to England to be raised by strangers, unfortunately, as it turns out, cruel and abusive ones, and after that he went to boarding school. It’s an absolutely awful childhood, one full of neglect and abuse. It seems like a fairly common one, however, since many British children growing up in the colonies were sent back to England by their parents who hoped they could get a good education and learn how to be properly English.

The main character, Edward Feathers, grows up to become a lawyer and then a judge, working for a while in Hong Kong (hence the “FILTH” acronym: Failed in London, Try Hong Kong), and then retiring in England, which is where we meet him. The present-day action of the novel takes place during Edward’s retirement, with lengthy flashbacks to his younger years. Gradually, we discover the full extent of everything that happened to him.

I liked the back-and-forth narration (in fact, it’s when the novel paused for a lengthy period in the present day that it started to falter), the gradual revelation of Edward’s life story, and the glimpse the novel gives into colonial culture. I just wish the narrative pacing had been better and that the characters had remained convincing throughout.

Because I seemed to be having a hard time with literary fiction (Old Filth and Vertigo leaving me underwhelmed), I decided to try a mystery novel and picked up Elizabeth George’s Payment in Blood. I did much better with that one, enjoying it a lot. Then this afternoon I just finished Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, which I surprised myself by totally loving. At this point, I’m hoping I’m out of the short reading slump I was in, and now I have the fun of choosing something new.

First about cycling: yesterday I went on a wonderful, epic bike ride with Hobgoblin and eight or so other people, up north into an area with all the hills and dirt roads you could want. All the hills and dirt roads you could want if you happen to be looking for those things, which, amazingly enough, I sort of am. Just to be clear — this wasn’t a mountain bike ride; instead, we were seeking out dirt roads to ride our road bikes on. I heard one person yell out “road bikes?!” in an amazed voice as he passed us in his car on a particularly nasty stretch.

The reason we were looking for such a course to ride on is this, the Tour of the Battenkill, a fairly well-known Pro/Am race that people travel from all over to compete in. It’s famous for being a brutal course — hilly, and with long sections of dirt roads. The race is this Saturday, and I’m a little frightened.

The ride yesterday was tons of fun, though; I love how after going over a horrifyingly frightening stretch with deep gullies and large chunks of gravel that send my wheels sliding all over the place, the regular sections of dirt roads with just plain old dirt come to seem easy. I was zipping down the hills at 20 mph or more, flying over potholes and feeling okay.

BUT, the forecast for the race this weekend calls for rain, both the day before and the day of the race. What will it be like to ride in mud? I’m frightened, as I said. Very frightened. I’ll let you know how it goes. Secretly, I’m hoping to come down with the flu or something between now and Saturday.

Now on to books: I’m happily in the middle of Jane Gardam’s 2004 novel Old Filth. A look at Wikipedia tells me this is her 23rd novel, after publishing her first in 1971, and she also has eleven collections of short stories. She is someone I wouldn’t have known about if it weren’t for blogging, though; I can add her to the long list of writers I’ve learned about that way. The term “Old Filth” refers to the main character, Sir Edward Feathers, who made up the acronym FILTH, which stands for “Failed in London, Try Hong Kong.” The novel is set in contemporary times, when Filth (as people consistently call him) is an old man. The present-day setting becomes a kind of frame narrative, as the novel takes us back in time to tell of Filth’s childhood and adulthood, spent partly in England and partly in Hong Kong. So far the story is interesting and well-told, and the writing is sharp and funny.

I picked this up after setting aside Rebecca Goldstein’s book 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction, which sounded very interesting as an idea-driven, philosophical novel. The chapters are each named after an argument for the existence of God, and the story is about a psychology professor who unexpectedly finds himself famous after publishing a book on religion that hit a cultural nerve. All this sounded good, but after reading the first chapter, I wasn’t hugely impressed. The story and the main character didn’t captivate me, and I got a little worried looking at the 400 or so pages left to read. So back to the library it went. I do want to read some of Goldstein’s nonfiction, though; she has a book on the philosopher Spinoza that sounds interesting.