One look told me that mending the chain was going to take more time and patience than I had. Well time was no problem, I had plenty of that but patience was not a virtue I embraced too readily.
The ride had calmed me; speed, being able to feel it through my body, through the bike, had always smoothed all my sharp angles down to wind sculpted curves. On a bike I could feel happy to be alive, to be breathing in the world as I moved through it.
Standing still had always made me edgy since childhood, my mother had called me ‘her little shark’ , if I stopped moving I seemed to die a small death. School had been great chunks of stillness forced down my protesting throat.
The sun had almost sunk below the horizon. I wheeled the bike towards what looked like a pub further up the road. As I got nearer , I recognised the two people from the churchyard sitting outside at a wooden table, two pints of beer in front of them.
I wondered how they had managed to get ahead of me, no-one had passed me on the road.