So here I am in the Arctic. Without giving too much of the game away – for in the dog-eat-dog world of journalism editors very much prefer their readers to learn about the stories they are preparing by reading the magazine or newspaper itself rather than through the loose talk of writers and photographers beforehand – let’s just say that a rather heavy swell was rolling on the high seas yesterday, a leftover of the recent gales which had kept us ashore the past couple of days and by mid-morning, feeling in urgent need of quiet and repose, I betook myself below decks to stretch out on a bench in the galley, close my eyes and think happier thoughts of land-based activities, like bicycling.
As the boat rolled and pitched and yawed around me, my meclizine-fogged brain travelled back in time and, taking its cue from my post the other day about dream bicycles, began exploring the evolution of my own dream bicycle, which took shape last autumn in the form of a classic randonneur.
For me the dream was always going to be a touring bike – not a road racer and certainly not a mountain bike. I never had the least desire to compete with anybody on a bicycle and as for mountain bikes, well, they just didn’t exist back in the Sixties when the foundations of my cycling dreams and aspirations were being laid, and while I am familiar enough with the principle behind them now, the fact is I grew up with the old-fashioned notion that hiking trails were just that – hiking trails and that cycling was something you did on gazetted roads of one sort or another. That hasn’t changed. I doubt it ever will. At fifty-three I expect I am fairly settled in my ways.
A touring bike, on the other hand, represents and always has represented everything that is dear to me about cycling: a sense of independence, escape and the imagined ability to explore the world at leisure. Here you have in one simple package the sweet clean lines of a road bike, coupled with the braze-ons for attaching the mudguards, luggage racks, and dynamos that can make your bicycle a self-contained home on wheels as you trot the globe. What more could you want? In this small, mean over-governed age of ours it gives me a certain ornery satisfaction to know that sitting in my garden shed, propped up against a load of old paint tins, is a vehicle that can take me anywhere in the world I want to go, free, clear and beholden to no one.
In my younger days my ideal tourer was a sturdy pack mule of a bike not unlike my old Thorn eXp expedition bike that I could load up with gear and then ride off to the spice markets in Zanzibar or across the Great Sandy Desert or any of the scores of exotic destinations my boyish imagination could dream up. It is a fairly heavy beast, built for strength and endurance with wheels sized for twenty-six inch tyres so I could readily find spares in any Third World market bazaar and forty-eight spoke hubs and rims which wouldn’t buckle under load on rough roads in Africa or Outback Australia.
Over the years I did a fair bit of that sort of thing. But as I’ve grown older, more steeped in experience and frequent flyer miles, and now with the added attraction of a young family at home, the thought of vanishing for months at a time down the Silk Road or the Pan American Highway for the sheer hell of it no longer has quite the same sort of appeal.
As my world view and ambitions evolved and matured, so did my dream tourer, morphing effortlessly in my imagination to something lighter, faster, more graceful; something that would be ideal, say, for lyrical week-long escapes in the Pennines or the Western Isles or over to the Continent for rides in the Pyrenees or the Alps. In point of fact the dream tourer that ultimately took shape in Enigma’s workshop last year had its origins on the Lôn Las Cymru cycle path in Wales – an achingly beautiful 250-mile route from Chepstow to Holyhead which I rode in the autumn of 2009 and which was without doubt the most enjoyable, most perfect cycling idyll I have ever experienced. I dreamed of a tourer that, like a work of art, could express that lyrical sense of freedom and cycling the old-fashioned narrow lanes through the hedgerows that I found along that path.
Aesthetics and nostalgia started playing a bigger role, as I’ve shifted into middle age, my new ideals being coloured by golden-age-of-cycling photos in which jaunty cyclo-tourists go spinning along palmy corniches on the Riviera or past fields of August sunflowers in the heart of France, projecting either pre-war innocence or post-war optimism, depending on the age of the photo. As with wine and single malt whiskey, as you age and your tastes mature you gain new and deeper appreciations of these finer things – in the case of bicycles it’s hand-crafted steel frames, brazed with silver, in the sweet simple classical geometry.
And yet these aren’t borrowed ideas and imagery either. For it was precisely the ‘retro’ classic tourers you see in the old photos that I aspired to as a child, except they were modern then, or seemed so. I have only to think back to the May 1973 issue of National Geographic and remember how the story inside about those cyclists doing the Alaskan Highway fired my adolescent imagination to recall just what kind of bicycle it was I had in mind. When it came to realising my dream bicycle, what could be more natural than a return to my roots, the foundation of all the cycling dreams and aspirations that followed?
Except this new dream incarnate would be built with strong lightweight 21st century steels and incorporating my pick of the advances in component technology – the ones that I liked and which fitted my own ideals of simplicity, durability, freedom and self-reliance – and sticking with the old tried and true where I felt they didn’t.
Piecing all these things together, jotting down notes, working out details, and forming a vision in my mind of my own platonic ideal of a bicycle, was a labour of love and like any good daydream kept my mind interested and occupied – just as the memory of doing all these things and pedalling away on the result transported me today from the here-and-how of a heavily rolling ship on a nasty swell in an ocean far from home.
