Entry the Seventh , 20th of May, 1873
The bells of Bodmin struck six as I coaxed the Steam Unicycle into motion, their peals sounding like benedictions, though perhaps also a little like warnings. The morning was clear, the air sharpened by the scent of moorland heather and distant peat fires. I confess, I felt optimistic.
Yet optimism is so often the prelude to vexation. The road across Bodmin Moor, though broad in prospect, is riddled with stones and deceptive hollows. My wheel bounded like a hare, while the boiler rattled in protest. Sheep scattered before me as if I were some advancing iron shepherd. At one point, a startled ram lowered its head as though to challenge my one-wheeled contraption; happily, it thought better of the duel, and I avoided what might have been the world’s first recorded collision between steam and ovine.
Mid-morning brought an encounter with a tinker, leading a cart of pots and kettles. His face bore the soot of a man who lives by fire and metal, and so we fell into immediate fraternity. He inspected the unicycle with a practised eye and declared: “A kettle, indeed, but with pretensions.” I laughed, but he continued, more kindly: “Still, it moves, and that is more than most men’s dreams accomplish.” He gave me a rivet of his own making, which he asked me to pocket as a talisman.
The day’s true calamity occurred near Launceston. A loose strap permitted my coal-shovel to fall from my shoulders across the path of the wheel, entangling itself in the spokes of my auxiliary gearing. The result was a most unceremonious tumble – I was flung into a patch of nettles. I emerged stung, scratched, and, I daresay, resembling a man at odds with the natural order. A kindly milkmaid, witnessing my plight, applied a poultice of dock leaves, while remarking that “perhaps God intended us for two feet, not one wheel.” I thanked her, though inwardly resolved that divinity surely approves of experiment, else why place iron and steam within our grasp?
By evening I had limped as far as Launceston proper, where the unicycle rests in a coach-house, its boiler drained and its dignity somewhat bruised. My dignity has suffered likewise. Yet as I set pen to paper, I find myself smiling: for each fall teaches me more of balance than any successful mile.
Thus ends the seventh day. A week completed; a nation yet to cross. I wonder, even now, whether the journey is less towards John o’Groats than towards some reconciliation between folly and vision.
