I was never the sort of person you’d call “sporty” – hell; five years ago I was the sort of person who couldn’t make it up a flight of stairs without a rest. I had a disabled badge and the local Chinese take-away was at the top of my phone’s favourites list. So I feel sort of hypocritical getting excited about the Olympics. I feel like everyone who knows me will be looking at me askance.
I got a push-bike off of freecycle, and it sat gathering dust for a year. Then I started riding it to the bakery, because it’s close enough to be a good way to start. Then I started cycling round the Demolition Zone if I was a little early heading to the bakery. Then the absolutely weirdest thing happened. One of my bakery colleagues’ emails mentioned in passing that her kids had gone to bed, and I remembered those summer nights as a child, lying in bed wishing I was still outside on my bike, and I went out on a lovely ride just for the pleasure of it. I found myself eyeing up the bike arrangements of bakery colleagues, and asking advice about helmets and high vis kit.
The next thing you know I’m watching the tour de France, and cycling every day. And I rode up to the shops to buy an Olympics guide, to see when the cycling’s on. And I fought for a place on a project with Kerry Morrison, “Counter Culture Nature”, because it would mean cycling round Liverpool with a tree on the back of my bike, looking for brownfield sites; my time at the bakery has fired a passion for the empty spaces of north Liverpool.
So I have somehow become a cycling fanatic. Someone who doesn’t do sport to lose weight or get fit, but because it makes me happy. Now I share my little lurcher’s pure physical bliss when we fly through Stanley park together.
So when I heard about the bell ringing thing, Martin Creed’s “Work No. 1197: All The Bells In A Country Rung As Quickly And As Loudly As Possible For Three Minutes”, I was determined to bang the gong for the Olympics. I got down my dad’s dinner gong, and built it a cabinet. I put it by the front door.
But when it came time to bang the gong literally, it was really daunting. I felt the hostile gaze of my sleepy neighbours, their unimpressed judgement of this daft, pretentious, fat southerner who doesn’t fit in. I felt like everyone was laughing at me or angry with me. I knew they’d be saying “who the hell does she think she is!” But I carried on banging the Tolmon gong, loud and unequivocal. If people WERE laughing or angry, fine. They probably weren’t. I was proud, not just of the Olympics and All The Bells, but of me.
For sure, a few years ago I would never have banged my gong. I wouldn’t have got on my bike, and I wouldn’t have been part of art projects like this. It was all stuff that was for other people. Art and sport were for people who were good enough, not for jokes like me. But I’ve learned that while I’ll never win an Olympic medal, or the Turner prize, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have the right to be proud, and bang my gong.