People who go on and on about bacon are ruining it for the rest of us. Seriously. Go back to talking about zombies and epic fails.
So here it is, merry 200th day of One A Day 2011! I expect everybody’s having fun, although since I’m so far behind on my one a day subscriptions there’s every possibility no one’s having fun and I’m left alone in this mess, plowing on, one to two thousand words every day on whatever’s currently on my mind. Let’s have a look and see if that’s the case.
Hmm. Well, of the blogs I followed at the start of the year – and though I forget how many there were, I’m fairly sure there were more than are currently being updated – as of yesterday only one is up to date with another valiantly trundling along ten or so posts behind.
It’s hardly surprising. Maintaining a daily blog and keeping it meaningful both to yourself and to anyone reading is a difficult task. I’d say all of us were flagging by the end of January, and the realisation there were still eleven months to go was a harsh one. Still, here we are at post two hundred, well over half way through the challenge yet still with far to go. I’m feeling fit to go on, and – in true Campfire style – go on I shall.
On occasion I’ve asked people on Twitter for suggestions as to what to write about. It’s rare I’ve followed their suggestions – the old adage about gift horses swims worryingly to mind – because most of the time they recommend things I’m unable to write about or things that don’t fit my writing style.
As today is the bicentennial of my first One A Day post I opened my blog once more to topics recommended by from my Twitter followers. Do you know what I got in return?
1) Cyclists, do they have no fear or are they just belligerent arseholes?
2) 600 words on the joy of a bacon sandwich.
That. That’s what I got in return.
First of all, I don’t have any issue with cyclists at all; – in fact I’m rather jealous of them. I wish I had the guts to ride a bicycle in traffic, or on the road, or at all; the last time I road a bike I kept to the pavement for fear of one of those cars-appearing-from-nowhere that were a staple of all the old public information films I watched as a kid. Contrary to popular belief bicycles, aren’t death traps: they’re death magnets. They draw careless drivers in the same way dead children draw flies. I had quite enough trouble just cycling along the pavement, scraping elbows and skinning knees without adding traffic and drunk drivers into the equation.
Bicycles have terribly inadequate safety measures as well – to whit: bells. What the fuck use are bells? “Tinkle-tinkle – I’m riding my bike, I’m out in traffic! Tinkle-tinkle - look out – cyclist coming through!”
Bells are fine when you’re cycling across the village green disturbing Constable Tosspot at the church fete – Tinkle-tinkle - if you don’t move the cake stand I’ll go A over T and end up with Battenburg all over my face. They’re fine if you’re living in an eighties sitcom, where a cosy rural setting and gentle laugh track keeps your mind off Thatchersaurus stomping from valley to valley eating miners. They’re fine if you’re going to pratfall off your saddle and land in Mrs. Wainthrop’s petunias, but out in the roar of traffic, between engine-growl and the latest Lady Gaga hit belting over out boy-racer bassbins your twenty decibel tinkle-tinkle means less than a chipmunk on a freeway.
And maybe cyclists, being fragile and squishy, shouldn’t play chicken on the open road. Maybe they should stick to cycle paths and look both ways when moving into traffic. Be more careful Mr. Cyclist, with your Flight of the Navigator cycling helmet and your ass up in the air.
If I had the courage to ride a bike on the road like that you’d better believe I’d ride like an idiot. I’ve seen Tron; I know how you’re supposed to ride a bike. None of that tinkle-tinkle rubbish; crank up Wendy Carlos on your iPod, pedal like a maniac and hope you’re not de-rezzed.
It’s like being the Tiannaman Tank Man: you have several hundred tonnes of armour in front of you and if one of those vehicles rolls in the wrong direction you’re a pancake. So what are you going to do, hot shot? Are you going to back down or stand the fuck up?
That’s how I imagine every cyclist thinks when they swerve in front of a car while the driver hammers the horn. That’s not a car horn, it’s a fanfare: a thousand squealing trumpets telling the world how amazing you are. You thread between bumpers and show everyone your ass. See how tight it is? Don’t you wish you had an ass as tight as mine? Maybe you would if you rode a bike to work every day instead of sitting in your box-on-wheels. I mock you with my swerving, with my tinkle-tinkle; I mock you, your car and your flabby, saggy ass.
I’d cycle myself if I could afford a bike – not into traffic, mind you, but laps around reservoirs and out on country lanes. I spent a good few months using an exercise bike as part of my fitness regimen, and while I was never fond of dieting or lifting weights, I enjoyed cycling and it made my ass glorious.
So do cyclists really have no fear or are they just belligerent assholes? I’m inclined to believe both of these statements are true – and good for them.
Now, bacon. Six hundred words about a bacon sandwich. These words and the words preceding that last comma count towards the total, as do these words, the words that come after it.
And these words.
Also, these words.
And so on.
There used to be an airport – Bristol, it was called – that had aeroplanes that flew directly to America and didn’t stop in France, Amsterdam or Ireland, and while it wasn’t exactly situated conveniently for my purposes it was nevertheless my airport of choice. When I returned home (to the country I then still thought of as home) the first thing that tugged my heartstrings and made me ache for grim and glorious Britain were the green fields surrounding the airport: the pastures, hills and moors that stretched like a bedspread and were dotted with cottages that might well have fallen from storybooks left sprawled by slumbering tots. The cottages and the villages that contained them were too quaint to exist anywhere else; the grass was too green, too lush, too verdant. This was Britain, my home, and I had returned to it.
The second thing to make me ache for my home country – and do much worse to my heart besides – was a bacon sandwich.
I landed, claimed my luggage, left the airport and headed straight down the motorway to the South Western traveler’s only place of respite: a place known jovially as Breakfast at Timothy’s.
It was – and still is – a small mobile shack parked just off the hard shoulder, that sold grease and carbohydrates under the guise of breakfast. And every time I would have passed it by I stopped and ordered a bacon bap.
The bread roll was soft; the bacon generous – three rashers at least, cooked not until truly crispy but juicy, and with a hint of maillard brown at the the edge of the fat. Ketchup came from a bottle half-clogged with stiff tomatoey rivulets and the whole caboodle came wrapped in a disposable serviette. I’d endeavour not to eat the ketchup-soggy paper and always failed; my journey had been so long, with scant provisions to tide me over, and when faced with my first meal back in the country of my birth I’d always bite too large, too deep, and end up picking paper from my teeth – had you only eaten a rubbery croissant spread sparsely with jam in the previous ten hours, you’d do the same thing in my position.
Salt-sweet, meltingly yielding yet with the merest suggestion of a crunch, that bacon sandwich was everything I loved about home. Bacon sarnies are somehow wrong in the US – not bad but different. I could never cook bacon to the exact consistency I craved, and always cooked it too far into crispiness. The rolls there – and indeed all American bread I’ve ever had – was too sweet: my wife once retrieved a bread roll from a branch of the Texas Roadhouse and bade me try it.
“It’s the best bread I’ve ever had!” she said.
“It tastes like a donut,” I said, “without the filling.”
“You’re right!” she said. “That must be why I like it so much.”
But donuts aren’t suitable for bacon sandwiches – or if they are, they weren’t suitable on those chill early mornings when I could still fly from Bristol instead of making the long haul to Heathrow. On those mornings, so very long ago, only Breakfast at Timothy’s would do, and so I ate bacon sandwiches and was proud to be British.
Okay, that comes to a little over six hundred words but it’ll do.
And so we draw to the end of the Campfire Burning One A Day Readers Request Spectacular, which was inspired by requests that mightn’t have come from people who actually read this blog, but almost certainly come from people who can read.
I think.
If you do read my blog, thank you for your time, patience and generosity in doing so. The end of the year is still a way away, but be thankful that we’re more more than half-way towards it, and that you and I have, I hope, made it through the worst.
Nail, head etc about the cycling – you need to be brave and not a little arrogant to ride in traffic. I usually see myself as a cautious rider – I actually stop for red lights, for example. Just this afternoon however, I was riding in heavy traffic and found myself threading up the middle of two lanes, not slowly, and racing 2 motor scooters!
Fantastically written piece sir, well done. I feel somewhat humbled that my topic inspired such prose.
I do have to take some issue with you siding with the cyclists as you neglect to make reference to the war of attrition they are having with pedestrians. Yes that’s right, the people who are not using a vehicle. Many is the time when as a pedestrians dares to cross a road, the cyclist will do their utmost to terrorise them with a near miss as the jump red lights and then mount the pavement while swerving out of the way of the pedestrian. Bastards.
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As a new cyclist (just two weeks in), I’m still very wary of the traffic. I tend to stick to back roads, which have their own dangers like potholes and random spillages of gravel and sand, but some of my routes invariably involve a main road or two.
On one of these main roads yesterday, the X1 Yarmouth to Peterborough DeathBus ran me off the road having given me precisely no room whatsoever when overtaking.
Well, I say overtaking. That implies he moved out to the right, which he didn’t do. So I ended up in the verge, fuming.