Rain is plip-plopping off all the eaves in North Devon. Hellybutt watches the undersized street outside. Cars go by. Different colours and sizes. One car beeps, this small back-road is being used as a bypass for some bad town planning. He wonders who the head council man is and by God look at the harrowing situation he has unwittingly created, there’ll be blood on his hands before long. Wow - the bicycles still weren’t ready and the village was getting smaller everyday.
Then the phone rings and Jimmy Bodean is the barer of proactive news down the line. He says he just received a phone call from an Eye-talian leather dealer. Bodean tries to emulate a kind of accent, but it’s no good. Yeah yeah yeah. What did he say? Hellybutt wants to cut to the chase. And so it turns out that Andrea, from just outside Venice, has got some real good looking leather saddles and bicycle bags, that could possible find there way to the currently static caravan.
So everybody cheered the very next day when the rain stopped, the bicycles came out of the workshop and the Eye-talian was true to his word. Those seats looked better than the geriatric cycles they was put on top of. And somewhere off the western coast of France a seabird circled hungrily above the churning sea.
