9th June 2009
Unbelievably, my cycling career has once again come up against what seems to be a conspiracy twixt environment and bike manufacturer to fuck any attempts at physical activity right up. I’m the first to sign up to the bespectacled club that is the Apostles of Physical Caution where we all ease ourselves into beanbags and sup lukewarm water out of plastic cups lest someone snag their lip on a stone particle in the ceramic, but I at least gingerly relish the occasional opportunity to pretend I’m throwing my habitual self-preservatory caution to the rather gusty wind.
Until very recently I had congratulated myself several times over, many of them out loud in public places – and even at the people in them – for never having broken a bone, smashed a tooth, impaled myself on a fence, had a non-alcoholic lapse of consciousness or induced a blood nose despite having been punched square in the face by Matthew Chapman whilst passing him in the grade 6 classroom. I put this sub-superhuman hardiness down to a general genetic good fortune that also saw me able to throw myself about, not sleep very much, and work long hours for ridiculous stretches of time without adverse effects except maybe a gradual morphing into a not-chic embodiment of heroin chic. Then it tapped me on the shoulder that the number of times I’d put myself in the path of bone-crushing, tooth-chipping, impaling and swooning adventure is diminutive and not much to look at. Apart from a 12-year-old fist the only threat my nasal passages has come under is my own digits, and who amongst us can dodge that one.
So now I’m fixated on the idea that I am not hard. This irrits me, even though I have known since the first time I tried to kick a ball and not only missed but looked like a midget can-can dancer in a navy tracksuit, that my body is laughing at me, and plans to recruit others. Again, my spectacular misappropriation of gross motor skills was explained away, principally by me, as the downside of a proportionately spectacular, unmaintained limberness. When I was born I was so floppy they thought my hips were dislocated and were going to mummify the lower part of my body so it didn’t screw right off. It eventuated that they were wrong – I was just a floppy, shrivelled post-foetus with marionette legs.
So anyway, once it became clear to me that I would not be joining the Inner West Sydney under-4s pro-netball team (as an aside, I want to slay netball. Yes “s”, not “p”), I contented myself with Modern Dance for Pre-Speechers and got around in a leotard and sandals for about 6 years, combing my hair with my toes. This was fine until the football be-shorted spectre of Phys Ed loomed over my five-year-old, by now bespectacled noggin, barking out barely intelligible advice like “look before you throw” and “to catch, bring hands together” and “you are a tiny freak”. Why did the Italian teachers not get this pissed at all the ‘tards who couldn’t conjugate “caminare”?
By my second pair of glasses a year later – this time with the come-hither addition of a frosted lens just to keep my squint from allowing me to check out two shorted classmates at once – I had resolved to not only be shit at sport, but to scorn it as a canny shield for my coordinational shortcomings. The being shit worked, the shield less so.
Another fun reason for my ragdoll approach to the kinetic arts was a groovy tendency towards chronic ear infections, resulting in a lot of time spent weaving about the playground clutching at one side of my head whilst trying not to dislodge my frosted lens. It’s damn lucky I could spell “intellectual superiority” or I might have thrown myself into the path of an oncoming classmate who’d just been propelled off the vault during Gross Motor Skills.
The ear infections resulted in two significant drawbacks: one, I realised following minor surgery to insert draining tubes into my ears that my nightgown was way less cool than others readily available on the market; two, when taught to ride a bike I was so off-centre internally that this manifested itself externally by allowing me to lean so far in only one direction that I spent entire afternoons on the deserted school basketball courts going in quite a tight and knee-skimming circle. If I hadn’t been eight, wearing hot pink, and on a tasselled pushbike, I might almost have had cred. As it was, I had negative cred, and I gave up on the cycling for the following 15 years.
