Fucking students
A student I was, at a rather fancy university to boot, and as such I had a bike, just like all the other spotty little future prime ministers. I was rather pleased with my choice of mount. It cost me a pittance and was so shit and so blatantly trumpeted its shitness to all who beheld it that I believed it to be un-nickable, which is the vital quality a student bike needs. Who but me would be seen dead riding such a thing? Certainly none of these fuckers with their ambitions to high office. It might have been a racer once but someone had cackhandedly daubed the frame all over with blue house-paint and fitted a set of handlebars that made it look like a girl's bike. Despite its place near the bottom of any bike-rustlers hitlist I religiously secured it with a combination lock that having set me back £11.99 was worth more than my valiant steed.

After a term of chilly rides to lectures on which the bike and I came to understand each others' foibles (squeaky ineffectual brakes, wobbly hungover ineptitude) there came a January morning when the damn bastard lock would not open. I struggled to maintain my laid-back demeanour, hard won though eight weeks' careful shrugging and moping. Stupid cock fuck arse bastard thing didn't it realise I was late already? I knew the code with the intimate familiarity that comes of long use. I could even hum it, it had a tune - three-six-NINE-seven. But my self-belief was severely shaken by the reality of the cold metal in my hands. My numb fingers fumbled for agonizing minutes with its fiddly, unforgiving wheels, trying variations on the theme... four-six-nine-eight?... Utterly useless of course because I KNEW perfectly well what the code was. Four digits of inscrutable cold steel stood between me and mobility.

At that point I did what any student would do. Murmured "fuck it" and wandered off to be late for lectures. For several days afterwards a tense stand-off existed between me and that lock... often as I walked past it I would have an urge to try one last time but I was damned if I would sacrifice my studied nonchalance to fumble again with that self-satisfied assemblage of cogs. Time passed and I adjusted to life on foot: getting up a few minutes earlier, shambling in a few minutes more sullenly late.

Spring came and the birds began to sing in the trees above the bikeshed, drowned out of course by the daily tides of students braying about Proust and Special Relativity and generally trying to sound clever. With a pang of guilt and nostalgia I noticed my neglected bike languishing beneath a pile of similarly rusting wrecks whose owners were clearly as uncaring and/or hopeless as I was. I wrestled it upright and had one last go at the lock that had so long defeated me. Choosing numbers at random I tugged gently and... there was an uncanny lack of resistance. I recoiled in shock. Each hand held one half of the lock and for several seconds they retained the sickening sensation of unexpected pliance, a bit like reaching down for a bit of self love only for the old fella to come off in your hand. Or something.

Slowly I tried to piece together what had happened. How had my subconscious guided me to the right code out of the 10000 possibilities? Was it a good day to do the lottery? On reflection it seemed more likely that I had been a tit and changed the code last autumn whilst simultaneously blanking out all recollection of the event. We'd had a lot of lectures on computer security around that time and I must have felt compelled to change my "password" for something more secure. Try as I might I could not coax from my brain any hint of a memory... it was as if my having coughed up the code it was too embarrassed to provide further details of its own fallibility.

That night with the wind in my ears I sailed across town to a house-party, bikeborn once again. None of my mates seemed to have turned up but I settled down to some purposeful substance consumption and at one point I believe I may even have talked to a girl. Much later in the wee small hours I meandered happily home again on foot, the substances of course helping me to forget that I was once again the owner of a functioning bike.

Morning came and with it the unwelcome task of hauling myself to lectures. To my credit I spent less than half an hour prodding listlessly amongst the racks of bikes before I recalled that I had walked home the previous night. "Ah well," I laughed lightly to myself, "I'll just have to pop back and get it when I have a spare hour some time." Two weekends later I set off on my rescue mission... with a growing realisation that my memories of the party were really rather vague. Could I recall its location? Could I tits. Could I remember the names of anyone I had met there? Well no, not now you come to mention it.

So long, soldier.

TLDR: Idiot is idiot and finds a needlessly complicated way to lose a valued possession
(stairmaster, Fri 22 Mar 2013, 20:37, 2 replies)

Nicely written.
A+++++++ would read again. Well done Sir.
(_(_(_(_(_(_(_(_(_ =o.o=, Sat 23 Mar 2013, 19:41, closed)

Mum?
(stairmaster, Sun 24 Mar 2013, 20:13, closed)