MS-WU-MSS008-3-49

[0264] fastened my crutches to the cross-bar, one on either side, I
propped the foot of my stiff leg (I forget which, now they're
both stiff) on the projecting front axle, and I pedalled with
the other. [0265] It was a chainless bicycle, with a free-wheel, if
such a bicycle exists. [0266] Dear bicycle, I shall not call you
bike, you were green, like so many bicycles of your generation,
I don't know why. [0267] It is a pleasure to meet it again. [0268] To describe
it in detail would be a pleasure.

[0269] It had a little ^{[place = supralinear] red} horn instead
of the bell fashionable in your days. [0270] To blow this horn was
for me a real pleasure, almost a vice. [0271] I will go further and
declare that if I were obliged to record, in a roll of honour,
those activities which in the course of my interminable existence
have given me only a mild pain in the balls, the act of blowing
of a rubber horn would figure there among the first.

[0272] And when I
had to part from my bicycle I took off the horn and kept it
about me. [0273] I believe I still have it, somewhere, and if I use
it no more, it is because it has gone dumb. [0274] Even motor-cars
have no horns today, as I understand the thing, or rarely. [0275] When
I see one, through the lowered window of a stationary car, I often
stop and blow it. [0276] This should all be re-written in the pluperfect.

[0277] What a rest to speak of bicycles and horns. [0278] Unfortunately it is
not of them I have to speak, but of her who brought me into the
world, through the hole in her arse if my memory is correct.
[0279] First taste of the shit. [0280] So I shall only add that every hundred
yards or so I stopped to rest my legs, the good one as well as
the bad, and not only my legs, not only my legs. [0281] I didn't
properly speaking get ^{[place = supralinear] down} off the bicycle, I remained astride it,