The good news is that my stolen Dublin Bike (An Irishman’s Diary, August 7th) has been found, and in one piece. Having disappeared from a pole in Clanbrassil Street Upper on the evening of Wednesday, August 6th, it turned up again the following Tuesday night, returned to a bike station on Parnell Square North.
In the meantime, as requested when reporting the theft, I had posted the key to JC Decaux, the service providers. Then I received an email, possibly from a bot that had not been copied in on our conversation, informing me that due to exceeding the maximum loan period for my latest rental by several days I would shortly be charged €150.
There then followed a non-bot email reporting the happy news that, the stolen bike having turned up safely, there would be no “additional charges”. After that, the bot emailer was back on to confirm that the €150 had been “successfully” extracted from my account.
At this point, I sought clarification from the non-bot emailer as to the meaning of the term “additional charges”. Whereupon, in a shock development, a fully sentient human being rang me to confirm there were no charges due and the €150, deducted in error, would be refunded.
‘A breakthrough in the case of my stolen Dublin Bike and the subsequent €150 fine’
A daisy with a doctorate? Frank McNally on the enrolment of ragwort in the rewilded lawns of Trinity College
Ballet Go Backwards – Frank McNally on Patrick Kavanagh’s short-lived career as a dance librettist
A rose by any other name: Fionnuala Ward on a garden visitor with a life of its own
I am no wiser, meanwhile, as to where the bicycle spent its long, lost weekend or in what circumstances it was returned. We can at least rule out mindless vandals from our list of suspects for the larceny, since the bike was neither damaged nor dumped in a canal.
Was it borrowed for a week by a conscientious thief with a personal transport crisis who returned it when no longer needed? Or was it abandoned somewhere by a careless joyrider and then brought to the nearest station by a concerned citizen? I don’t know.
As a committed Flannorak, barring further intelligence on the matter, I choose to believe that Sergeant Pluck and his colleagues were involved somewhere. Fans of The Third Policeman will recall Pluck’s masterly detective work in the case a bicycle stolen from one Michael Gilhaney: a typical crime – indeed the only type of crime known – in the district.
It later emerges that the sergeant was able to find the bike so easily because he had hidden it himself as part of his community work, to reduce the insidious effects of molecular interchange in a parish full of iron bicycles and rough roads.
Gilhaney, a man of 60 who had been cycling regularly for 35 years, was already “half-way to being a bicycle”, Sergeant Pluck explained to the novel’s narrator. Hence his strange behaviour in the police station, where “instead of standing at the counter as he would in a public house, he went to the wall, put his arms akimbo and leaned against it, balancing his weight on the point of one elbow.”
Pending an improvement of road quality and/or in bike suspension systems, the sergeant’s intervention was to pre-empt further erosion of Gilhaney’s personality: “If it wasn’t that his bicycle is stolen every Monday he would be sure to be more than half-way [to being a bicycle] now.”
I hope my Dublin Bike will not be stolen every week. But if molecular interchange is as big a threat as Sergeant Pluck feared, the combination of Dublin’s unforgiving road surfaces and JC Decaux’s unforgiving bike frames must be having an effect on me by now. Come to think of it, even in public houses, I do have a habit of leaning against walls with one arm.
***
An indirect result of the theft has been to make me visit the Dublin Bikes app more often than I did before, checking details of – for example – “My Journeys”.
So I have been puzzled to see that on my return to the saddle this week after the enforced sabbatical, I incurred a charge of €1.50 for a “112 min[ute]” trip from the station outside Sir Patrick Dun’s Hospital on Grand Canal Street Lower to the one at Fallon & Byrne’s food shop in Exchequer Street.
Now I did indeed make a journey between those two stations. But I made it directly, stopping only at a few red lights (I swear) along the way. The trip could hardly have taken 12 minutes, never mind 112, and should therefore have fallen into the free-for-the-first-half-hour category. As, I now see from the app, did my previous 10 journeys, the theft incident excluded.
The €1.50 is a minor issue, of course: a mere 1 per cent of what I would have been liable for on the previous rental had the bike not been found.
Even so, I’m intrigued as to how it arose, whether there was a rogue bot involved, and how often such things may happen.
Or is it possible that I passed through some kind of time warp, like The Third Policeman’s vision of eternity, on the short trip between Grand Canal Street and town? Maybe Sergeant Pluck can fill me in.
