. . . on a random tandem
I AM ON THEback of a tandem bicycle working my around the lakes of Craigavon in Co Armagh. It's my first time on such a vehicle and it's not long before my control issues start bubbling to the surface. Taking the back seat involves a certain amount of trust in the person on the front seat, which is tricky seeing as we have only just met. I can't see anything in front of me except his back, I can't steer or stop suddenly to admire the view. There is nothing to do except relax, put my feet to the pedals, and listen to this tall, bearded stranger called Ian.
He tells me it was a few weeks ago and he was half-listening to the radio while clearing out his desk at Craigavon Hospital when he decided to make the list. Someone came on Radio 4's Woman's Hourto talk about turning 60 and the list of 60 tasks she had set herself to do within the year. Funnily enough, Ian was turning that same age and retiring from the hospital as a consultant anaesthetist. The list seemed like a fine idea. He went home to tell his wife Isabel. Then he sat down to write.
It was stream of consciousness stuff. He wanted to learn to unicycle and make wooden toys for his grandchildren and to see a Shakespeare play at the Globe and canoe down the river Blackwater in search of kingfishers. A keen choral singer, he set himself the task of singing a "scratch" Messiahin Coleraine and Dublin and learning to recognise all the notes in the clefs. He would take a Pilates class, visit a beekeeper, go whitewater rafting and grow a pumpkin. The list was deliciously random. It turns out that's the kind of guy he is.
A lot of Ian’s list had something to do with food. He included various dining experiences, such as Neven Maguire’s MacNean House restaurant and the Water Mill at Lisnaskea. He wants to do cookery classes and make pannettone, the Italian Christmas cake, and bread from Irish wheat and barley. Each month of the year he also plans to make one recipe by Denis Cotter, who runs the vegetarian restaurant Café Paradiso in Cork. He started with an easy one. Oatmeal with golden whiskey soaked raisins. It was, he says while swerving to avoid a small child, a success.
One of my favourite things on the list is Ian’s planned visit to Broughshane graveyard in Co Antrim where his “great, great, great, great, great grandfather” is buried. On his 100th birthday, this ancestor of Ian’s harnessed a horse to his trap, travelled eight miles into Ballymoney, had his picture taken, and came home. He died a few months later. It’s not off the ground Ian licked his unbridled enthusiasm for the utterly random.
There is also a lot of cycling on the list. Ian plans to cycle the entire Ulster coastline and the NCR route across the province and visit various friends on his bike. In fact, the reason I am here on this back-seat ruining this morning’s blow dry is thanks to number 50 on the list which, nestled between 49 – “find out Dunfanaghy tide times” – and 51 – “walk Brandy Pad, a smugglers’ route traversing the Mournes” – is the most random item of all: “Offer Róisín Ingle a ride on the tandem.”
Take it away Ian: “My proposal is that you become my ‘stoker’ for an afternoon. While the alarm bells jangle as you imagine a sweaty afternoon in the bowels of a coal-powered steamer or a railway engine, I should reassure you that ‘stoker’ is the term for the occupant of the back seat of a tandem, the front seat being occupied by the ‘pilot’.”
It was an email offer I found I couldn’t refuse. Especially after I stopped reading “stoker” as “stalker” and Ian went on to explain the reason for my position on the list. “Don’t be insulted by the low ranking – the order is entirely random,” he wrote. Of course it was.
So here we are. Stoker and pilot on a bicycle made for two. We do 5km around the lakes talking all the way while my children are behind another bike in a trailer. Afterwards, we go back to Ian and Isabel’s house in Portadown. Ian has made buttermilk pancakes from his grandmother’s recipe, which are smothered with home-made damson jam. There is apple cake and freshly ground coffee. When the children escape upstairs, I find them jumping on Ian and Isabel’s bed. “Don’t worry, it’s a strong bed,” says Ian, my newest, most energetic stranger turned friend.
By the time I get home later that day he has sent me a recipe for a vegetarian shepherd’s pie, photographs from our excursion to the lakes, and a copy of his list with added explanatory notes.
Frankly, I am worn out just reading his plans and relieved to see that the very last item on his list is more about being than doing. Number 60 requires just one word: meditate.
I decide there and then that I am making my own list for when I turn 40 next month. Number one: be more like Ian.
In other news . . .The Peas and Pods indoor family market at the Dublin Food Co-op in Newmarket Square is always worth a visit. At tomorrow's event Megan Cook from The Elbow Room will host Toddler Jam, an interactive music and movement workshop. See peasandpods.ie