My long shot story.

Back in my hippy days, I would spend from spring to autumn travelling Britain on an old grocery delivery bicycle - small front wheel, metal basket containing a big tin box for everything that needed to be kept dry, bed-roll behind the saddle, tent along the crossbar, leather panniers for my posts & pans. I did it for 12 consecutive years, 30 miles per day, always a hot dinner cooked on a campfire, sometimes following the free festival scene, sometimes just taking a direction because I'd never been there before, then holing up for the winter on farms where I could get casual work picking brussels sprouts and tidying orchards. I shared many adventures with that bike and I loved it.

One winter I left my bike outside a house where there was a party going on. There may have been some confusion over the bachelor status of the girl I was with that night, but whatever the reason I came out in the morning and my bike had disappeared. I searched everywhere, reported its loss to the police, but when it still hadn't turned up after a couple of weeks I bought an old car and my life changed. For one thing, I needed to decide where I was going before I left!

Fast forward 6 years and the company I was working for had a temporary shortage of work. We were paid our basic wages without bonus to be on standby awaiting a new contract and I decided to use the opportunity to visit some of my old haunts. I returned to the town where I'd last seen my bike, met up with a friend and set off in my VW camper for a game of snooker. Coming up the narrow alley towards us was a man pushing a bike - my bike! I wound down the window and grabbed the handlebars, and wouldn't let go till he explained himself.

It turned out that the man worked for a gardening shop on the High Street not far from that fateful party. When the staff arrived for work on the Monday morning, they'd found my bike leaning against the back door of their shop and assumed someone would soon reclaim it. After a few days it was moved into a storeroom. After a few years, the shop was sold and the new owner decided my bike would make a great display outside his shop with a container of flowers in the basket. That very day he told his employee to take the bike to a local repair shop to be spruced up. In 6 years, that short walk to the bicycle repair shop was the only time that the bike had been out of the storeroom, and I met it in that alley on my only return to that town before or since ....

.... a one minute in six years window of opportunity.

I would love to say that I dumped my VW camper, jumped on my bike and rode off into the sunset, but my lifestyle had irreversibly changed. After proving to the shop owner that it was indeed my bike (by getting a photocopy of the lost and found description from the police station), I sold him the bike for a tenner and consoled myself that in the event of the fall of civilisation, I would be perfectly entitled (under the Universe's Laws of Justifiable Behaviour) to return, steal my my bike back off him, and resume my travels. Haven't needed to .... so far.