eddy, the fighter pilot
The ancestors of the Martial Eagles
At the crack of dawn eddy and I made our way to the Cradle Loop. eddy was my Alumega Belgian racing bike. A champion.
As we left Fourways the rubbish bins stood overflowing next to the houses. The cadres hadn’t bothered to pick them up for a couple of weeks. That is the problem with the current regime. Doesn’t give a toss about service delivery. We vote next week and the proletarians are not going to change squat. Rather run the infrastructure into the ground, steal the coffers dry and buy German luxury cars.
The sides of the roads also were a mess of dug-up water pipes. The guy on the corner of our road has had his pavement dug up more than fifty times. He sold his house and left, making a R1 million loss.
We cleared the city and made our way to Bidon. The city frustrations eased up. It was packed. All the last-minute training for next week’s cycle race.
I just found my own pace and slowly passed the cyclists on the road. All except those damn squeaky triathletes. They just noisily blasted right past me at speed.
“eddy, do you have a birthday?”
“No, Mastelek. We ancients don’t count the seasons.”
“Heck, Megs is having a birthday so I send a box along with the stuff from Lisi. I like my presents before the day. That way I wake up knowing I have something and not need to wonder if I’ll get anything.”
“Mastelek, that is just mathematical. You just want to be deterministic.”
“Aren’t you one for big words today, eddy!”
We reached the Church and Mike’s Van. The young lass with the transparent cycling shirt was there again. Damn, what a coincidence. She was the spitting image of Jessica Rabbit & my tongue hit the floor like in the cartoons.
I sat and had my flat white and watched all the cyclists I had passed roll in. That spurred me on to get up & mount up again.
As we went past the caves we were flying as we had a breeze from behind. eddy was talking in his bird language to the ancients around the caves. His clan. He was an ancient humanoid soul that had one day appropriated my bicycle frame. We now cycle together & have long conversations.
“eddy,” I asked, “all those years ago did you have larger eagles than the ones we have now?”
“Yes, Mastelek. They were more than twice the size of the current Martial Eagle.”
“Wow, I read a story on the BBC that they snacked on the ancients.”
“Yes, we hunted the Hartebeest but those eagles would also snack on those & try their luck on us.”
“Wow, how did you guys avoid them?”
“Well, you could see their shadows & we had a better chance than the Hartebeest as we stood upright. We scanned the skies & not the grass. Often when we looked up we could see the glint of their eye lenses off the sun, much like the optics of a sniper’s scope.”
“Jirre, eddy. What did you do when they attacked?”
“Dive for cover in trees & rocks, but if that wasn’t available & you were caught in the open then you run in their direction to increase their dive angle. Then as they come down you wait to see their claws opening & then you run sharp left or right. They can’t correct their flight path that fast!”
“Bliksem, eddy. You were quite the fighter pilot!”
We had Stampede Hill left to climb. I attacked it. As a cranked past the cyclists many thirty years younger than me I saw them look at me in dejection. They were hitting the wall. That would have been me a few months ago on the same hill. Now it was different. I was the conqueror. Julius Caesar again.
We rolled into Bidon & as I loaded up I told eddy we were not going for chicken pies. We were going the other direction to Avianto. I wanted to see if she is still at the sign, in her wedding dress & holding a bunch of roses.
“Ok, Mastelek.”
As we approached Avianto, Eva Cassidy started singing Time after Time.
We didn’t see her. She is probably at the Four Corners. We’ll pop in again. Maybe she doesn’t recognise the car but only when I cycle past on eddy.
At home I started writing on my new blog home. I was suspended on Substack. Have no idea why & they don’t provide any reasons. Maybe it was that someone at KSB became pissed off? Maybe it was something else. But social media platforms are like that. They cut you off at the knees with no explanation & there is no support or engagement. Ironic that. They don’t practice what they preach on social engagement. It happened to Jenny. Business account used across multiple countries.
Anyhow, I’m now here, paying for a basic service. Hope they not as woke as Meta, X or Substack. I have hundreds of SD-WAN articles that I need to migrate back to LinkedIn. Eish!