I noted something on a bike locked outside a psychiatric hospital the other evening. There were two things that struck me about this bike.
- It was not parked in the bicycle shed but locked to a lamp post as close to the entrance as possible on a small green area, showing a healthy disregard for the rules.
- It had on it one of these air horns.
I had one of these as a child on one of my bikes. I think there is an element to the bicycle which is inherently comedic. It’s probably best illustrated by Jacques Tati here. I have a vague memory of doing a good impression of Tati’s drunken postman a Triumph twenty outside a Dublin nightclub in the full view of a gallery of bouncers. I brought the house down as I fell three times in the space of ten meters.
Putting an air horn on a bike is like putting on a red clown nose on a face. You are accentuating what is already comedy. I suppose there is the memory of Harpo Marx that is forever linked with the air horn.
Flann O’Brien wrote “Why would anyone steal a watch when he could steal a bicycle?”. There was a man who saw the funny side of bikes, but there is also something alluring about it, it offers the possibility of adventure, giving oneself over to it, as one would yield to a lover.
Samuel Beckett wrote about the almost irresistible urge to steal a bike in ‘More Pricks than Kicks’ in the story Fingal.
They followed the grass margin of a ploughed field till they came
to where a bicycle was lying, half-hidden in the rank grass.
Belacqua, who could on no account resist a bicycle, thought what
an extraordinary place to come across one.
The story ‘Fingal’ is where this same Belacqua is ‘walking out’ with Winnie to visit an asylum out in Portrane. He steals the bike and never reappears for the rendezvous with Winnie. He’s last reported to be ‘going like flames’ on the stolen bicycle towards pints in a pub in Swords. The protagonist has made his choice. He could not resist.
When I first saw ‘Waiting for Godot’ – I was struck by how much comedy there was in this tragic-comedy in two acts. I think that the followers of Beckett tend to skip past the comedy to get to the highly serious stuff, the awful vista of a man writing a play after the horrific vision of the full extent of the holocaust has been revealed to the world.
Anyway it turns out that cycling may be the link to the name chosen for the man they await.
From a review by Matt Seaton of Tim Hilton’s ‘ One more kilometre and we’re in the showers’,
“One Roger Godeau was a track ace at Paris’s Vélodrome d’hiver after the war – this when the Vél d’hiv was still haunted by the fact that it had been used as a transit camp for 12,000 Jews, shamefully rounded up during the occupation by the French police. From that detention, they were transported to Drancy and thence to Auschwitz. In the late 40s, some of the boys who hung around the stadium for a sight of their cycling heroes told Beckett one day: ” On attend Godeau.”
On a day like today, when the sun blazes down upon us all, if I wasn’t going to be on my own trusted commuter soon, and if I came across a bicycle unlocked, I too would probably ‘on no account resist’ it, because there is not better place to be feeling the sun on the back of your neck with a wide open road winding out in front of the wheel.
