Julie Jay: Taking cycling tips from me is like getting parenting tips from King Charles

Julie Jay: My history with bikes has been chequered at best

I’m getting my Stephen Roche on as Ted is learning how to cycle.

My own history with bikes has been chequered at best. I once managed to dislocate my shoulder while walking alongside a bike I was pushing, and my one attempt at using Dublinbikes was equally traumatic.

Not the most confident cyclist, I had procured a bike from our capital’s rental scheme because everyone else was doing it, and I am a sheep. The cycling was fairly hairy — Dublin is certainly no Amsterdam — and I arrived at my destination windswept, sweating, and walking like Billy The Kid.

The cycle home was similarly grim and culminated in me coming off my bike at St James’s Hospital when my wheel got stuck in the Luas track. A young gentleman loitering on the corner came to my assistance bemoaning that he was “peeling women off these tracks all day”, and on I soldiered, pushing my bike in the rain and bleeding from the knee. I went from bike station to bike station but every rack was, like the inns of Bethlehem, full to the brim. Eventually, I just dumped it by the side of the road and chalked it down to experience.

Given this tumultuous history with bikes, Ted taking cycling tips from me is like getting tax lessons from Boris Becker or parenting tips from King Charles. Still, we plough on. 

Being a mammy is all about spoofing and hoping one of your spoofs pays off.

I advise Ted to sit on the trike and he does so with gusto. Next, the pedals. These prove trickier but we get a bit of contact on at least two occasions, after which Ted puts his feet to the ground and happily cycles, minus the pedal factor.

We round up our week taking the bike out for one last hoorah. The difficulty with Ted’s bike is that it is minus a handy handlebar for Mammy to steer, so we are very much moving at Ted’s glacial pace.

At one point, I give him an encouraging nudge, and he immediately shakes a finger at me.

“No, Mammy,” he scolds. “Be slow.”

There is wisdom in taking things slow, Fred would say, and he’s right. “What’s my rush?” I think, and so we crawl along, his feet not quite mastering the pedals, taking our time because the one thing about not having a high professional profile is you have a lot of hours to kill.

As we turn by the medical centre (oh, the irony), Ted takes a three-pointer a little too hastily and ends up coming off, his knee getting grazed in the process.

I manage to convince Ted to turn the bike in the direction of home.

But suddenly I’m faced with a logistics problem when he raises his two little arms toward me and says: “Mammy lift Ted up. And, Mammy, lift up bike.”

I look at Ted, look at the bike, and look at the nappy bag, and it is then the heavens open. Standing in the pouring rain I am somewhat moved by the pathetic fallacy of it all and bend down to lift up my munchkin.

“We might come back for the bike,” I gently suggest, but Ted is not for turning.

“No, Mammy, my bike,” Ted insists, and so I bend down, pick up the bike, and proceed to get the kind of workout I used to pay €20 a pop for back in the day, a class which was usually taught by some guy called Dean who would shout things like: “Are you a gladiator or are you a quitter?” (I am most definitely a quitter).

We pass quite a few people — one of whom I shifted circa 2005 — and not one person offers to assist as I drag this bleeding bike home.

I make a mental note that I will forever go to extraneous lengths to help a fellow human carrying a crying child and anything in the other hand — even if that anything is something like a sundried tomato or a monkey, both of which freak me out.

Eventually, we reach home and I coax my little man inside, where we get cleaned up and cosy. Ted sits on my lap and we have a lovely cuddle.

“I’m so proud of you,” I say. “I love you so much, and you did so great today.”

The beauty of being a parent is that we get to say the things we wish we could say to ourselves, but can‘t.

Ted pulls me in and we hug one another, cheek to cheek. I pull back and do my best monkey impersonation (they might freak me out, but if the apes ever take over the Earth my convincing jungle cries will surely win them over).

Sticking with the cycling theme, I round up the conversation with that line from the now-disgraced Lance Armstrong.

“How do you like those apples?” I say, and Ted stares at me blankly.

In the kitchen, I cut Ted up an apple (the only way to make my Armstrong line make sense) and think back to my one special outing on Dublin bike. To my horror, I remember that I never cancelled my account, and much like that nutmeg grater or gym membership with Gladiator Dean, it will go down as one of my worse financial decisions. 

That, and not sending that nice prince who slid into my DMs my PPS number and personal pin code to claim a mystery cash prize. You live, you learn.