THE phone’s buzzing again. An unknown texter would like to know how I will vote. Another sends a video, and another and another.

Did I know there’s a leadership contest going on in Scottish Labour? Yes. Yes, I did.

Moving on.

A road trip to Shipley, Yorkshire, to a bike shop that had until recently only existed in my imagination to drop off the devil frame.

In a galaxy far, far, away, I’d learned to ride a fixed wheel on a borrowed Ellis Briggs 531.

“You’ll learn to pedal,” Andy assured me. In the process, I also learned how to fall off in style, a skill not enough of us bother with. You never quite forget the first time you realise that one foot has remained strapped in just long enough to launch you into a triple somersault with bike. 

A few years later, I’d start the longest relationship of my life. Three decades of black, white and chrome in victory, defeat, the Pyrenees and the Scottish Campsies, but oddly enough never the Yorkshire Dales.

From the failed sprint finish to the joyous day-long ride wandering the sunny, empty, highways and byways of Ayrshire on the day Diana Spencer was being buried.

In a few short months, I’d make pedal prints in the snow on those same roads in a misguided character-building exercise that nearly cost me my extremities.

Four hours of dull driving offered a chance to relive a chunk of it between trying to see the farm tracks we rode earlier in the year and the ongoing argument with the radio.

Journey’s end came with a ring of the doorbell at Ellis Briggs, cycle forks in hand and frame slung over my shoulder. 

The shop itself was how I’d imagined all those years ago. Frames carefully placed everywhere, the workbench, the weird and wonderful tools of the trade.

A place for creation rather than sales. I handed over the steel diamond to Paul. He gave it a once over and almost immediately spotted a small dent in the chain-stay I’d never seen. Who knows how or when it got there? A jammed chain, a racing pile up? Lost in familiarity. 

We’ll lead separate lives for the next few months — a precise date was reassuringly absent — as the chrome and paint are restored to their former glory. Whatever it takes. 

I’ll have to content myself with pretty, lightweight, brittle, carbon fibre for a few months — a paper cup for a tankard.

A little wave of anxiety swept past as I stepped out into the street. The dent. Maybe it should stay? Maybe it’s the little touch of randomness that separates a good frame from the next one on the rack? Will it all be unrecognisable in the end?

It’s a question of trust. I grab a cup of coffee and get on my way. 

On return, I spy a box in the shed. The chain-set, sprockets, brakes, the assorted paraphernalia of a bike without a frame. A sad sight. Beautiful Italian alloy rendered utterly useless without steel to hang on.

Beauty, as they say, is in the eye of the beholder though and most rational human beings wouldn’t gaze at a box of bike bits and be quite so enraptured as I. Beauty can be found anywhere if you look hard enough, from the cells to the stars.

It can even be found in our parliaments. Really. 

If politics is showbusiness for ugly people, then parliament has devolved into politics for showbiz people. One of the most beautiful things I saw — outside the box — this week was former SNP Westminster leader Stephen Flynn do his impression of a transport secretary at committee.

Rather than working from an old Yes Minister script, he demonstrated to Holyrood — and the world — his truly sublime talent for improvisation when asked about ferries. At first, he claimed not to have been briefed on the minor matter of a major leak of highly flammable gas putting passengers at risk on the Glen Sannox ferry. Yawn. Then he got into his stride. 

Demonstrating the mastery of his art — if not his brief — he managed to weave in hints that he may well have been briefed but had not got around to reading it. Brilliant. It was so good that no-one noticed.

When Willie Rennie questioned if he had seen any news that day on the issue, Flynn responded to the sheep-based savaging by going full Stanislavski. Pulling on his method-acting training — somehow without the strategically placed notes around the room Marlon Brando had to rely on — he drew on the memory of Facetiming his kids by way of explanation. 

Bravo, sir, a true tour de farce! Rightly, his performance has garnered more than a little attention in the north of these islands, but in all honestly, I think I preferred his earlier work.

He may have had to adopt a more improvisational style in ministerial office, but as I hope he is now reflecting on, it doesn’t work unless you’ve done your homework — even Brando thought far enough ahead to know he needed notes. 

It’s a world away from the days when he brought the house down in Westminster with well-rehearsed pithy one-liners glancing at notes not out of need, but out of sheer theatricality. Very good it was too, even if the content wasn’t always to my taste.

Buoyed by rave reviews, he chose to give that all up to be the big fish in the puddle of Holyrood and, one day soon, replace John Swinney as first minister.

Swinney is many things, but a dafty he is not. It was no coincidence that he generously handed Flynn one of the most contentious briefs just days after he entered Holyrood. It’s a stitch-up as obvious as when John Major “promoted” Michael Portillo to defence when I was still figuring out a fixed wheel — and carried out by remarkably similar leaders.

Flatter their ego, drown them in work. 

Flynn is no fool though and I sincerely hope he will learn from that experience, for all our sakes. It’s in no-one’s interest to have yet another transport secretary fall asleep at the wheel in Scotland.

It was perfectly predictable that the ongoing issues with Scotland’s ferries would come up in questions from a transport committee to a transport secretary, and while no-one would really expect a minister to carry all the nuts and bolts of the particularities in their head, a simple knowledge of the existence of the matter might have been a start.

Why did he not do his homework over the summer? Family, the World Cup, who knows? But when you exit fully guaranteed luxury permanent opposition for the big leagues of the Scottish cabinet there is no excuse for not reading your brief or getting out and learning it.

There is however an explanation. It’s one that holds as true for Flynn as it does myriad ministers over the years from every political party that held office in Westminster, Holyrood, or anywhere else: Elvisitis.

Being promoted to office makes you feel important. The office, the car, a team of people looking after you all conspire to make you the star of your own drama. Those who succeed bend this to the will of their mandate, not their personal quest for stardom. 

Even those who do not set out that way can often have their head turned. It is part of the process, part of the show, part of the incorporation of the merest hint of radicalism into the world of clickbait on the phone and a nudge in policy until the next rider comes along.

A throwaway politics for a throwaway age has ill-served the people for long enough.

Lightweights all shatter in time but, even with the odd dent, it is steel that will see another spring.