Stories

I’m sitting in a train bound for Interlaken, Switzerland, and I’m fuming. My day started going wrong when I arrived at Basel Airport this morning and it hasn’t let up since. First I opened the box my bike was packed in to find the saddle had been left behind. I wasn’t too fussed, took a bus to Basel train station. There, I thought, I’d put the bike together until only the saddle remained missing. I’d be able then to load all my luggage on the bike and push it to the nearest bike shop.

Ha.

When I had taken the packed bike out again, I couldn’t find the allen key I needed to fit the handlebar (I found it in my pocket later). Now I was getting upset. I had to lug fifteen kilograms of stuff along with me in bags that were designed to be perfect on a bicycle – and are hell to carry. Furthermore I had to drag the boxed bicycle after me, to and fro at the station until I found an information desk, then a block on to a bicycle repair shop. By the time I got there I was hot, sweaty and footsore.

This wasn’t the end of my woes. Not only am I now facing doing the most difficult cycling route I’ve ever attempted with a saddle much less perfect than the one I have at home, I also had to pay a ludicrous amount for it [edit: the bicycle shop did refund me when I took the saddle back three days later]. To add insult to injury my ticket wasn’t deemed good enough by the ticket man, as this train goes via a longer route to Interlaken than the one I was sold a ticket on. Another pound of flesh was extracted from my bleeding and ever diminishing store.

And that got me thinking about stories. I can almost see your puzzled frown. Why would this comedy of errors make me think of stories?

It’s quite simple, really. When you write a tale, you have to have a central conflict which drives the narrative. If a story has no conflict, it cannot exist. Except possibly in an art house film.

I recently struggled with that in a story I was desperate to tell, but my main characters simply got along too well. I became bored writing it, and any reader unfortunate enough to have had to read it would have been, too. I’m really glad to say the novel was in its infancy when I realised my mistake. In fiction, characters can be altered, circumstances can be adjusted. The end result was something I’d happily indulge in as a reader.

Life and fiction are often alike. Without conflict, we can live no story. When I use the word conflict here, I don’t mean screaming and throwing plates or, if you’re the president of some country, throwing bombs. I mean something like resistance. It’s similar to exercise, I suppose. Any gym instructor would agree that unless you strain your muscles in your workout, you’ll never make them stronger.

I find that in cycling these days. Though occasionally it’s very nice to simply mess about and pedal a short distance at a leisurely pace, most of the time I feel dissatisfied if I can’t push myself a little. This became obvious when I recently had to take things easy for a while, nursing a tendon injury. It was so horrible to have to hold back, go slowly and carefully. There’s a grand satisfaction in asking my body for all it’s got, in going as far as I can and sometimes a little bit farther.

Adversity gives us a story to tell. A story to remember. If this morning everything went perfect, what pleasure would there be in telling someone else of it? “I arrived at Basel airport, put my bicycle together, cycled to the hotel I was due to stay in that Monday night and left the bicycle box there, cycled on to the train station, got a train and went to Meiringen.” No matter how much of an adventure that might have been for me, it would be the perfect story to put listeners to sleep.

It’s later now, I’m sitting in my small green tent typing away. My adventure hadn’t ended with the bike saddle. I missed my stop at Meiringen, even though the train paused there for a good ten minutes, and had to scramble off the train at the next station. I nearly went the wrong way when I cycled back to Meiringen, even farther from my destination instead of towards it – a disaster on a bicycle in a mountainous region. Fortunately I spotted a road sign and turned back before I‘d gone more than a hundred metres or so. It was downhill all the way, and I broke my previous highest speed within five minutes. The wind roared in my ears and my helmet was pushed against my head, the heady mountain air cleared my mind and blew my hassles away.

Not enough to make the evening news, but at least more memorable than a mere train journey without mishaps. Even if it is just that much more interesting for me to remember, and no-one else ever hears of my adventures.

Though I would never have deliberately aimed for such a trying day, I embrace situations in which I run the risk of things going wrong in spite of the most careful possible planning. The recollections will stay with me for the rest of my life.

Of my first long trip, I remember little of the distances I covered with nothing remarkable happening. I do remember those instances where I took a wrong turn, the misery of cycling on for what felt like forever, soaking wet and shivering cold. I remember the deep satisfaction of finally arriving at a warm, comfortable guesthouse, of taking a nice hot bath.

A punctured tyre is nothing exciting to tell of, unless you have a thorn stuck so deep in the rubber that you can’t get it out with your fingers. Add to that the lack of a knife or pliers to pry the thing out, and you have a whole new ballgame. Though I’d cycled through a puddle of squishy mud fragranced with cattle dung not many kilometres before, I had no choice but to wipe the tyre as best I could and tug the thorn out… with my teeth.

I’m still alive, so hopefully I didn’t pick up any dread disease.

Adversity, in moderation, is a good thing. I don’t think a life lived avoiding it successfully is one I’d like to live.