I had a little cycling holiday this weekend on the Isle of Wight. We got really lucky with the weather while most of the country got soaked our rain was confined to the night which meant that on Sunday we sat in the balmy sunshine outside a pub by the Solent watching the big black rain clouds giving the south coast a watering while getting a bit of a tan!

The rest of the holiday involved cycling around not very taxing cycle paths wearing a fez, drinking in pubs, having a BBQ in a gale, going to an Eco fair and an art gallery with two people playing guitars in a cupboard; artists hey. At the Eco Fair there was a stand about squirrels, a subject close to my heart. The Isle of Wight has about three thousand red squirrels and no greys. It was manned by a very bored looking lady, she perked up when we asked her what the best way to kill a grey was. “Shoot it, trap it, put it in a sack, smash it on a head with a rock” (the last one is against the law) she had a real passion for Grey killing. She should have come on the road trip. She gave us a sticker. I wonder if she’d like a copy of my wall chart.

The cycling didn’t go without incident. Even though we only biked about 10 miles in two days on the island and hardly even attempted a hill I still managed to injure myself. In fact I have two quite large bruises. One from on my shin from a collision with my pedal and the other one, well in the words of Oliver Reed, it’s on my cock. To be more precise on my cock and balls; I have blue balls!

The accident itself was fairly innocuous. I tried to go down a steep bank, which was peppered with rabbit holes in what I thought was mock extreme off road when I realised it was a bit more extreme than I was comfortable with and hit the brakes, shot forward and landed groin first on the cross bar. It hurt but, my voice didn’t go all squeaky, I didn’t fall on the floor clutching the jewels, I wasn’t sick in a hedge, no I’m a trooper, so I just winced and carried on. It did make cycling a bit uncomfortable, which wasn’t helped by the fact that my bike was completely shit.

The saddle, the one thing I really needed to work, wasn’t bolted on tightly enough so you couldn’t sit on it without the back slipping down levering the front pointy bit into the damaged areas. Needless to say I didn’t sit down on it. This was all fine on the leisurely little rides on the island, but when I got back to the mainland to discover that Southampton train station had flooded and that I would have to cycle six miles to Eastleigh, not so fine. And when I got back to London and the back tyre exploded on Upper Street and I had to push the piece of crap the last mile, by this point I was feeling a whole lot less smug about the tan.

As an aside did you know that Anthony Mingella the Oscar winning director was from the Isle of Wight? He even mentioned the Isle of Wight in his Oscar speech and they love him for it. His family is in the ice cream trade, they have a shop in Ryde, and you can buy Mingella ice cream all over the island. Now this gave me an idea. How can the Isle of Wight and the Mingella family continue to trade on the Hollywood connection now that their most famous son has sadly passed away?

I’ll tell you how, inter his body in state, just like Lenin, Moa and Evita, embalm his body and put it on public display for respectful pilgrims to revere, but with a twist. Embalm the body with Mingella ice cream. The benefits are obvious the publicity generated will attract numerous tourists at the same time as promoting the ice cream brand. Nice idea hey!

From The Comments:

Row The Boat has made the suggestion that perhaps I should embalm my balls in Mingella Ice Cream, plum flavour. I’m not sure that this would be much of a tourist draw, but with the right marketing and product placement perhaps a ball soothing lotion could be a lucrative sideline.