Busy Parents

  Text C: Moving on upwards   This text is taken from a longer narrative. At this point in the story, the narrator is taking part in a bicycle ride uphill for his fiftieth birthday celebration.   Their car rounds the bend ahead, Sonny’s phone screen winking at me from the window.   Time for another gulp of water. My bottle crackles as I squeeze it and a thick stream   shoots into my mouth. Too much. The excess liquid splatters fatly on the greedy asphalt,   and I realise it may be the one crucial drop I will be crying out for on my final kilometres   to the summit. 5 This novel adventure was a gift to myself. I’d reached the big 5-0. More a milestone   than a birthday. Inviting the family around for cake and crisps wasn’t going to be enough.   No, what I needed was a challenge to prove that what my teenage son, Sonny, called   my ‘sinking into old age’ did not have to match a decline in physical fitness. My friend   Rob, agreed to c...

Text A:   The whirlwind engineering history of the bicycle This text is about how the bicycle has been through many engineering changes over the years.  Stridewalkers, Boneshakers, Penny-farthings: the bicycle has undergone some curious transformations. Fetch your helmet – here’s a whistle-stop tour of the bike’s 200-year history.  Step forward German inventor Karl Drais, who in 1817 patented the design for his ‘Laufmaschine’ (running machine). Riders carefully straddled a wooden frame and – without pedals and chain propulsion – pushed their feet along the ground to get the wheels moving. Hence the distinctly sci-fi sounding nickname, Stridewalker.   Pedals were introduced later, developed in 1863 by Pierre Michaux. The bicycle was called the Velocipede and had wheels designed to enable a person to ride along rail tracks. Hmm. Unsurprisingly, on the cobbled streets of that time, the wooden-rimmed wheels earned Michaux’s bicycle the nickname, ‘Boneshaker’.  ...

  Text C: The wild tigers of Ranthambore The narrator, Val, is a photographer, author and documentary filmmaker. He has spent over 45 years living, working and campaigning at the tiger reserve in Ranthambore National Park, near the town of Sawai Madhopur (SM). In this extract from his book, Val remembers first travelling to the area by train from his city home as a young man in 1976. Exiting the deserted station, I woke up the driver of a solitary horse-drawn carriage. In those days Sawai Madhopur (SM) boasted few motorised vehicles. The town wasn’t prosperous. Numerous taxi-jeeps and buses taking chattering tourists into the park were still figments of shiny future ambition. Garish hotel chains were yet to sprout, mushrooming along newly surfaced roads to the park. This was a sleepy town, sprawled untidily around the railway track, the only reason for its existence. Since then, local painters have decorated the station walls. Now murals of our tigers and other wildlife eng...