So that "recovering from May Week" thing didn't work out very well really, what with me heading straight into a lab project immediately after. In all fairness, the bulk of the first few days' work consisted of reading papers while I waited for some fairly critical things to arrive, or time off since there was nothing for me to reasonably do, and an afternoon punting trip. However, these days also involved leaving the flat at 8.30am again, and when this is combined with resetting the sleep clock after May Week, it becomes a very, very tiring time indeed.
Added to this is the problem that my own bike is currently unusable, at least for anyone who doesn't particularly want to kill or die as a result of attaining (and then unexpectedly maintaining, against best efforts) speeds above 3 mph. I'm currently working loosely off this premise to write the screenplay for Speed 4: Vicious Cycle (tagline: 'No bell, no brakes, no chance').
The reason for the problem, as I like to describe it: the brakes fell off.
This may be somewhat inaccurate as only the little V-cable on the front brakes has actually fallen off, but since the front-brake handle hoiks on empty air with this missing... really, the front brakes have effectively fallen off. Plus it's a good lead-in to the side-story of how I replaced this bit with parcel string only to realise, after breaking 2 mph, that the little nicks in the insulation of the back-brake cable had given access to enough atmospheric damage for the cable to become so rusted from the inside that no amount of pulling could compress the brake.
Naturally, I found this out as I was sailing serenely towards the end of the driveway, with an ominous noise of heavy vehicles nearby. If I can just figure out a way to write in an explosion, that scene's going in the script.
While in theory I can still cycle to the lab, I like being alive too much to use that bike, and Han-Ley kind of likes the idea of him having access to his bike some of the time, so it looks like I'll be bussing it to the lab a few times a week until I get a working bike.
Or I could just rig my bike up to explode, convince Sandra Bullock to ride it, and thus extort money from the government for a new one. Although, whether the threat is my blowing up the bike or allowing her to go free and make another film, I haven't yet decided...
---
By the way, if you looked at the title of this post and thought "WTF," look at this title to put it in context.
No comments:
Post a Comment