‘Love me, love my bike’ was the peremptory injunction on a T shirt of a passing pedestrian at this year’s Womad music festival. As slogans go, it was perhaps slightly lacking in subtlety but it rang a bell with me since I have recently been musing on the eternal debate between two and four wheels.
My mental meanderings started when I decided to sell my old motorbike a few weeks ago. It was a bit of a wrench to end our 25 year relationship for we had covered many thousands of miles together, none happier than when, on an alpine tour with my wife-to-be, we switched off the engine at the top of the St Gotthard Pass that links Switzerland and Italy and freewheeled down mile after mile of stunningly scenic, hairpin bends; the only noise the sound of the wind in our hair and a faint buzz from the disk brakes as we slowed down for each elegant curve. It was two-wheeled heaven.
Though not exactly heavenly, Cambridge is a city where two wheels are very much the norm because there is simply not enough room in its crowded streets for cars. Everyone seems to have decided that the bicycle is a sensible way to get around, everyone except the planners at the Cambridgeshire postal service that is who, according to the local postman, are proposing to replace his much-loved two-wheeled workhorse with a petrol-powered van that would take a much larger load of letters and parcels to cover a greater area…and save some money in the process.
We could have spent many happy minutes dissecting the absurdities of this proposal but the average pace at which postal delivery has to proceed nowadays has been raised from a pedestrian 2.4 mph to a skittish 4 mph, so our postie could not allow himself to dally further and left us with the wry parting shot that his union was intending to protest against the plans: they were calling for a walk out!
The image of postal workers staging a walk out to save their bicycles led me to search out my old copy of The Third Policeman, a surreal comic novel by the Irish writer Brian O’Nolan who, for good reasons of his own, chose to write under a number of pseudonyms including Flann O’Brian and Myles na gCopaleen.
One of the many wonderful ideas in this bizarre tale concerns the Atomic Theory of Sergeant Pluck, one of three policemen of the novel’s title who appears to spend most of his time searching for stolen lamps, pumps and bicycles. Look away now if you’re planning to read the book in the near future because I am about to reveal that it is, astonishingly, Sergeant Pluck himself who is responsible for the crime wave!
His reasons, however, are entirely honourable and follow from his careful observation of small changes in the behaviour both of man and machine over a long period of time. Have you never noticed how, during the course of a cold winter’s evening, a bicycle parked in your hallway will be found to have stealthily moved towards the warmth of the living room fire? No? How about your local postman then? Does he stand still while he is revealing the latest inanities of the Cambridgeshire postal service or does he unobtrusively lean against your fence or quietly prop himself up against the curb?
And why do man and bike behave in this way? Because, as O’Nolan explains with wonderful Irish logic, in the course of their long lives together, the man and his bicycle have exchanged so many molecules – the essence of the bike moving into the man through the saddle and of the man into the bike through the same route - so that each eventually has begun to take on the characteristics of the other.
‘You would be surprised at the number of people in these parts who are nearly half people and half bicycles’ concludes the resourceful Sergeant Pluck, for whom the obvious way to minimize this insidious process and save his colleagues from terminal bicycle-isation is to force his Force to use different bicycles or, at least, to reduce the time they spend on their own machines by hiding them under bushes or even locking them up in the station cells!
Personally I suspect that I have a long way to go before I need to take such precautionary steps because I spend more time in my car than in the saddle. However I did manage a spin the other day round my local seaside resort, Weston super Mare. Actually it wasn’t a spin; it was more of a bumble. That’s what I like so much about bike speed: it’s perfectly in tune with the pace of street life and it’s instantly variable. You can zoom through the boring bits and, as soon as you sense something interesting, you can slow down to investigate, to take part. Then, when you’ve smelt the flowers, you just hop on a pedal and you’re rolling along on to the next thing that grabs your interest.
We’re shortly due to head off for a mini tour of that most cycle-friendly of countries: the Netherlands. We’ll be part of a small group so I don’t expect to be able to indulge my weakness for loitering. Will it be motorway madness or rural rambles? Watch out for my T shirt at the next Womad festival: ‘Love me, but keep a close eye on the bike’.
