There's a Biker About

Today I made the cardinal error of walking the dogs with Eloise on her bike... on a timescale.

I thought it would be nice for her to get on her bike and ride it to the brook, and she seemed ever so keen, but it all started to go horribly wrong almost as soon as we'd left the front gate.

At that point she decided she didn't want to ride her bike, she wanted to push it, so we inched our way up the road, stopping at almost every point of even the most marginal interest to marvel, with the dogs pulling me in two different directions at the same time.

When we - finally - did get to the brook, a digger was sat there. We've been keeping an eye on the digger, which is clearing the brook of general detritus, for a couple of weeks. So when we saw the driver there cleaning his lovely machine she/we just had to go and have a chat and let him know abut our cuts and grazes and what colour pants we were wearing and look at our bike that we got for our birthday!! and yes, we were seven!

So what with having to be at the swimming pool by eleven we had to be home by ten-fifteen at the latest and it was now nine-thirty (an hour had passed!) when Eloise decided it was actually time to get on the bike, at which point one of the stabilisers worked its way loose and she fell off.

So it took a little while longer to get to the bridge and begin our paddling. And, of course, she fell in....