..a glass of water. But after a few kilometres of uphill a rest was definitely called for so we glided in with all the grace of our combined one hundred and thirty-two years could muster. Which was limited.
So there we sat outside on the sunny veranda, two OMILs (Old Men In Lycra), Doug with his latte and vanilla slice and I with a black coffee and a hungry expression chatting about the ephemera of life. A venerable utility pulled up below us on the slope and a slightly less venerable gentleman got out and then almost immediately shouted in horror as his car started to roll down the slope towards a parked BMW. With a convincing appearance of speed Doug and I skated down the steps on our low traction riding shoes and, with a mighty effort, managed to restrain the run-away Datsun without giving ourselves a hernia. It was touch and go for a moment but eventually, after much thanks and self-congratulation handbrakes were secured, cars confirmed undamaged, thanks given all round and life went back to normal.
Whereupon I asked the question ‘What if we hadn’t decided to stop for a coffee?’ Would the Ute still have run down the hill but, this time unrestrained, hit the BMW? Was the driver destined to forget the handbrake whether we were on the veranda deck or not, or had our being there somehow influenced events so that only if we were there would the handbrake be forgotten. We pooled our collective intelligence for a moment and said almost as one, ‘Don’t know’. We could have said ‘Dunno’ but didn’t. Anyway because of our presence the world was less complicated, nobody rang insurance assessors, wondered how they would do without transport in the school holidays or gave work to a telephone operator in the Philippines - who now has no job because call volumes weren’t great enough on that day: the universe went on less troubled towards an inevitable heat death sometime in the far, far, far distant future.
Subscribers to the theory multiple universes will say that that in their model both events happened, each leading to different galactic states some of which diverge for ever and others that converge back together, perhaps under the gravitational weight of history or amateur speculation. Some things make a difference and others don’t – at the time you probably don’t know unless, like John Wilkes Booth’s shooting of President Lincoln, it is of blatantly obvious significance. But the existence and potential nature of John Wilkes Booth was based on the coming together of two particular gametes from British Shakespearean actor Junius Brutus Booth and his mistress Mary Ann Holmes sometime in Maryland around August 1837 - just one of many thousands of alternatives that may have been different had Mary Ann been standing on her head, facing east or thinking of England.
But all this is remarkably human-centric hypothesis, a metaphorical extension or interpretation of quantum mechanics that asserts the objective reality of the universal wavefunction and denies the actuality of wavefunction collapse. Does it apply at the aggregated level of human beings? Who am I to know? Given that it should apply to all energetic matter, not just homo sapiens, the cascading number of possible universes would tend towards infinity.
Given that the fact that the existence of neutron stars is denied by the fact that if a cupful of a neutron star weighs around 200,000,000,000,000 kilos then I would have dropped it on my foot then somebody surely would have obviously noticed a very large number of alternative realities that weren’t Canberra.
But my own collapsing wavefront, the desire to cycle faster and my slightly excessive weight has led me to the work of Dr Michael Mosley and the so called Fast Diet. The Fast Diet means that for two days of the week, preferably non-consecutive, I eat no more than 580 calories. Which is not much and the omnipresent hunger is interesting but more a psychological than a physical issue. Now I am normally scornful of both diets and dieting but am prepared to give this one a go – despite its current popularity and hype. Normally when something appears on an America Breakfast TV one normally runs for cover and not just because of the unintended irony. It is meant to be good for other elements of health such as elevated cholesterol but, as my doctor assures me that this and other tests show that I am excellent health, this is not why I am doing this.
It has the endorsement of some other cycling friends who were as sceptical as I about these matters but who have looked at the scientific evidence and the positive results that it has had for them and given it the thumbs up. What’s not to like about a regime that starves you two days a week and gives you free rein every other day? We shall see, and I’ll keep you posted.
My intention is to lose about seven kilos which should see me around the 68 - 70 kilogram mark. For those still in Imperial measurement this is around eleven stone and is apparently close to my ideal weight
The logic goes like this: my bike complete with tools, spare tubes and water bottle weighs approximately 11 kilograms. The bike with a fully clad me on top weighs 87 kilograms all of which have to be moved uphill against the force of gravity and there is a lot of uphill where I live. I could spend thousands of dollars on lighter equipment auto-claved in carbon fibre by toothless Inuit–Yupik in distant Alaska and end up being much poorer but not significantly lighter ………… or I can reduce my own mass at pretty much zero cost. How much easier to go up hills should that be?