I realise I didn’t quite finish the bike story. The info about the boys I got from the woman in “Granta Coins and Antiquities”, who saw the whole thing from across the road. And it doesn’t have an unhappy ending: I’d paid a £25 deposit, but Geoff of “Geoff’s Bikes” returned it even though the bike was gone–he figured that he’d eventually get a call from someone who’d found it dumped in their garden. This was rather decent of Geoff, I think.
The thing is, I’d resolved to dislike Geoff after the pedal crank of the first bike he rented me fell off and it took 45 minutes to walk back to the shop to get it fixed. And there were a couple of other problems with the bike too, resulting in an often-exciting ride.
I don’t know why, but it often seems to happen that whenever I have someone figured for the hottest fires of hell they do something that puts me in their debt. Annoying.
Misc. travel notes–II:
- In Amsterdam, even the beggars speak English.
- Someone called John Ford, a contemporary of Shakespeare, wrote a play called “’Tis Pitty Shee’s a Whore.”
- I want this play!
- It’s described as “enduring” and “decadent” and is further “virtually the only imaginative treatment of the themes of incest in the English literature of the era.”
- If you buy a stripey top, and you love it very much, you might like to read the instructions before washing it, in order not to shrink it.
- Spain, of all the places I’ve been to, has the best coffee.