My Bicycle and I |

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Broad Minded on Tyres

As we all tend to do about ourselves, I like to think that I...

Our Rites of Passage

There is always a last time for everything. Childhood in particular is full of...

‘Twas Only Pink

Red lights have certainly made the news this week thanks to a dodgy (and...

Blinded By The Light

Seeing the sunrise each morning is one of the great joys of taking dawn...

As we all tend to do about ourselves, I like to think that I am a broad-minded chap. That may or may not be the case with the general run of things but when it comes to road bike tyres that’s God’s own truth; I am broad-minded. Not for me the super skinny racing tyres pumped to some astronomical rock-hard pressure. I like my road bike tyres broad – or relatively so, at any rate. I’ve got 28mm Panaracer Paselas on my lightweight road tourer and daringly (for me) skinny 25mm Continental GP Four Seasons on my Pegoretti – both of which I keep inflated to around 90-95psi. I can never understand this fascination with ever-narrower tyres run at ever-more ludicrous pressures for riding on the roads – 23mm and 120psi-plus seems to be quite the norm amongst roadies of all ages and sizes and abilities according to the...
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Blinded By The Light

May 17, 2012

Seeing the sunrise each morning is one of the great joys of taking dawn rides - but it can also be one of the great dangers as well, as I was reminded the other morning when I found myself pedalling east along Bexhill Road and into a dazzling sun just as it was breaking over the ridgeline behind Hastings. First thought, of course, was the solipsistic one: that with summer drawing ever nearer and the sun rising so much earlier I am going to have to start remembering to bring along my shades. That was a damn bright sun to be squinting into. Second thought though was a bit more chilling: if I was having a hard time seeing anything in all the glare, what about the drivers who were zooming up behind me at thirty-five-plus miles an hour?
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Breaking in a Brooks

May 16, 2012

I knew a guy once who broke in his new Brooks saddle by riding a 145-mile sportive, at night, on a fixed-wheel bicycle - and what's more he was so offhand about it that when he was telling me about the ride the next day he only mentioned casually and in passing that he'd been breaking in a new perch. I am not quite so hardy as all that, but I have to say that I have never found breaking in a Brooks saddle to be all that big a deal. To be sure, I haven't broken in all that many but then again with these doughty leather saddles you don't really need to; if you look after them properly they'll last you the rest of your life.
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In Praise of Schwalbe Marathon Plusses

May 15, 2012

I once had a very enjoyable flat tyre when I was pedalling across the Atherton Tablelands in far northern Queensland. It was late in the afternoon on a lonely road with lush rainforest crowding close on both sides, and the chatter of tropical birds to keep me company. Before I’d even got my pump and new tube out a car came up the road and the driver pulled over to see if I was in any insurmountable difficulties. I told him everything was okay, but in the fine, open-handed outback tradition that makes rural Australia such a joy to cycle through, the man left me with three tins of XXXX beer to see me through the job. It was a lovely gesture, and as a result I had quite a pleasant time of it, sitting there in the tropical sunshine, enjoying a beer or three on that long, slow...
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A Sentimental Journey

May 14, 2012

Following on from my Friday Matinee post a little over a week ago, with its link to a 1946 newsreel-style film about how Raleigh bicycles are made, is this link to an old British Transport film called The Cyclists' Special. Shot in grainy, colour 16mm film it tells the story of a Cycle Touring Club group outing in May of 1955 - by train from Willesden and Watford to Rugby and then a leisurely day-long cycle tour through countryside of Warwickshire, Leicestershire and Northamptonshire Those were the days. I wish I could claim to have discovered this delightful long-lost bit of cinema myself, by scouring through the BFI archives, but I didn't. It was one of my readers, Greenbeetle, who put me wise to it and kindly included the link in a comment on that post. It was such an enjoyable bit of nostalgia that I decided to make it...
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Our Rites of Passage

May 19, 2012

There is always a last time for everything. Childhood in particular is full of such moments, as the Kodak people used to like to remind parents back in the days of film: the last time your kids will ever dangle by their knees from a tree branch, or make a train out of the sofa cushions, or the last time they'll play kick-the-can with the neighbour's kids late into a firefly summer evening. Generally the passing of such things as these go unremarked and unrecorded, noticed only much later, in retrospect. And so it was with our bicycle rides over to the Bearcamp River. I've no recollection whatever of the last time I rode my bike over there as a kid nor do I recall any impending sense that a chapter in my life might be drawing to a close.
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Bouncing Back

May 11, 2012

A few years ago I did something really awful to my back: I ruptured the disc the my L4-5 vertebrae and did it so completely, suddenly and catastrophically that I lost all feeling in my legs, couldn't walk and found myself in A&E at 2:30 in the morning being tested for all sorts of appalling neurological disorders. Later, the cheerful surgeon who introduced himself at my bedside told me with head-shaking amazement that he'd never before seen a scan quite like mine, not in over 5000 operations; mine was, as he put it, 'an absolutely massive rupture.' I emphasize the seriousness of my back troubles not to dramatize an old aches-and-pains story, but to illustrate the fact that getting back on the bike again even with such a dodgy back as mine is very possible.
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A Fondness for Drop Bars

May 7, 2012

I still remember the first time I came into meaningful contact with a bicycle equipped with drop handlebars. I was a kid then, pedalling around the neighbourhood on one of the ridiculous Stingray-styled bikes that were all the rage in America during the late ’60s – the ones with the chromed sissy bars, banana seats, slick tyres and high looping handlebars; part Easy Rider and part I-don’t-know-what. Mine was a loud candy-coloured magenta thing, bought out of the catalogue from Sears & Roebuck and I was quite happy with it. But then a new boy moved onto the block with a Schwinn ten-speed, the sort of bicycle we used to call an ‘English racer’ – whippet lean, with narrow 27″ tyres and those elegantly curved handlebars whose lower position – ‘the drops’ – you could assume when you were racing and whizzing down hills. It was envy at first...
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My Bicycle and I

April 29, 2012

When I think back on all the different modes of transportation that have seduced me over the years, only the bicycle has ever remained true. The thrill of gaining my driver's license barely outlasted my teens and a few college road trips, while the prospect of going to an airport, ticket in hand - once the very summit of glamour - has become like the halo before a migraine. Even the romance of taking the night train or sailing away on a long sea journey has turned out to be like the aroma of fresh ground coffee - somehow the stuff always smells better than it tastes. But forty years down the track, I can still set off for a bike ride with the same jaunty expectancy I used to feel when I was a kid and the world was wide and bright as a shiny new...
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