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Well then. I was going to post this…

Big Ones

The best and worst thing about taking out your mountain bike on a ride is that you go places nobody else seems to. The good of that is all too clear to you I’m sure, but the bad…oh, the bad.

Spiders, in a word. They’re the bad.

Today I took a ride near Yamanobe. The route there is a long road section, followed by a steady climb that doesn’t ever get too sharp. On the way, I met an old guy who was piling up harvested rice on sticks he’d lined up alongside the road. I slipped in a bit of local dialect which brought a smile from his face and bought me a pair of photos.

I had packed sun-cream. In accordance with my new bid to be more prepared for physical arduousness, I had thought ahead. Never again will I climb a mountain (Fuji) with scant provisions (a spare jumper, and a can of beer with which to celebrate at the top). ‘My it’s hot and sunny today’, I had thought, ‘Better take sun-cream’. It started raining soon after I met the farmer.

So I was hurrying on the down, scrambling as best I could along the trail as the rain turned to torrential rain and even my hopes of keeping my camera dry grew sodden and started to runnel off me. More or less at that point, I hit the first one, bam, a little tiny tightness across my arms and a silent snap. It wasn’t long before I encountered another web…and another, and another and another. Undisturbed, these webs had gotten big, and the spiders- well, I didn’t see those first few ones, I just crashed through the webs.

It was when I took one to the face that I leaped off my bike and danced about swirling my arms and yelling blue murder to nobody and nothing but the trees and the rain. The horror got worse. The web was dangling complete with some kind of debris, or prey, godknows maybe even the spider itself, from my spectacles. It seemed logical at the time to throw them off my face but how I cursed that logic as I hunted for them in the undergrowth for 10 minutes afterwards, all the while with the sensation of something crawling over my legs where really there were just dozens of sticky green seeds stuck to me.

It wasn’t enough to proceed slowly as I still copped a few webs I didn’t see coming. So, man-whimpering all the way (there’s no really getting away from it- a whimper is a whimper no matter what you prefix it with), I walked my bike down, thrashing a stick in front of me like it was Arthur’s sword itself. When the stick broke and I didn’t have another to hand, I picked up my bike and thrashed that at the air and the webs. ‘Take that spider!’

I think we’ll call that Spiders 1 Guy 0.

…that was Saturday.

Today, a chain of events, and all my plans to post unwound and balled up anew.

Somewhere down there is a post about my new Japanese teacher, Aoyagi Sensei. I said she seemed nothing like my two previous teachers and I pined a bit. Last week was Lesson One and it was a small disaster. I walked away feeling de-motivated. Surely that’s not good! Today was going to be the next lesson.

I went jogging before, in the dark, around the path that circumnavigates the park perimeter, marked by a ridge all-a-crinkle with tree roots. I fell over one and just had enough sense to watch my glasses zip off my face before all was black and fuzzy where before at least there was a sharp blackness. Reminiscent of Saturday, I spent 10 minutes or so scrambling in the dirt on all fours, patting the earth. Not again.

All a rush I hurried home to fetch a torch, thinking I should cancel the lesson as I wouldn’t have time now. And then I remembered Rule Three or Four, I can’t remember I didn’t pay attention, that a lesson cannot be cancelled less than 12 hours prior. That’s when I snapped and thought, ‘Bollocks to this, I’m calling time on lessons with Aoyagi Sensei’. And instantly I felt a burden lifted.

I went back with a torch. At the approach to the part of the ridge where I had fallen is a copse of stumpy trees that I picked my way through. As luck would have it, I picked a pair of trees that something else already had, and there was that tightness across my face and the same silent snap and again I was cursing the sky, the trees, nothing in particular but spiders.

Maybe Spiders 2 Guy 0 then.