Puncturing my beliefs

As soon as I straddled the usually reliable bicycle, I knew there was something amiss. The seat is never that comfortable but today it was positively attention grabbing. I had just read an article about excessive cycling as a threat to masculinity and this seemed the positive proof. A glance behind confirmed my suspicions. I had a puncture in the back tyre.
A quick whirl of the wheel revealed a tack in the tread. A curse on the local school and its poster campaign against dog fouling, Primary 3 & 4 thumbs are not up to pushing drawing pins into unyielding substrates and I had unwittingly fallen foul, if you will forgive the pun, of a stray drawing pin,
Mending a puncture is to have a Proustian moment, a remembrance of things past, like winding the clock or being able to do mental arithmetic. It took me back to school days when bicycles were just bikes not mountain bikes and had, if you were lucky, a Sturmey-Archer 3 speed gear.
It was with some trepidation, I approached the prospect of removing the rear wheel of a bike equipped with a fifteen speed derailleur “French “ gear with multiple cogs and shifts. I recalled the time when I broke the chain and, having managed to insert a new link, was faced with the prospect of re-aligning the chain and the gear wheels, especially when the aforesaid bicycle is turned upside down sitting on its seat and handlebars. A task that involved staring at the picture in the manual and then imagining it upside down and back to front.
Getting the tyre off was the first task. As far as I recalled, this used to involve a pal and two spoons filched from the kitchen drawer, the bent handles of which had to be explained afterwards to an irate parent of the female persuasion. There were no pals or spoons available so a couple of flat keys and a lot of cursing sufficed. Then the ritual of pumping up of the punctured tube, the immersion in a basin of water to find the tell-tale bubbles, the little yellow crayon to mark the hole, a sandpaper strip to roughen the surface, the rubber solution, peeling the backing of the patch, sticking it on and then, grating the French chalk over the patch to stop it adhering to the tyre, then the struggle to replace the tyre and the satisfying “plop” as it fits back onto the wheel.
There is something very satisfying about mending a puncture. In an age when cars are computerised mysteries and all electrical appliances are cheaper to bin than to repair, mending a puncture takes you back to youth, to “the blue remembered hills…. where I went and cannot come again” .
Once, in discussion about age, we concluded that once you were unable to do a cartwheel or climb a tree, you were old or, at least, no longer young. It is a couple of years since I, for a dare, performed a sort of cartwheel and as long since I climbed a tree but, yesterday, I mended a puncture.