Boneshaker Magazine / Issue #10

Bicycle, a two-wheeled vehicle.

g eal Cyclin R : r e k a h Bones

Its forerunner was the dandy-horse or hobbyhorse, invented by a German civil servant, Baron digital. To Drais, in Mannheim in 1818; the rider propelled himself course, it’s f o l, a re forward byis pushing against the feel isn’tone foot and then the other ept th eshaker, to n o Excground.

B l a re Kirkpatrick Macmillan, a young blacksmith from na r hands o annier, go ourofpthe et youfixed y gDumfries, in it cranks tonthe axle of the rear wheel dandy- , e id too it a d h tuff mell them slong e d soperated ik b horse, with hisefeet by means of two levers; t it anand a re g r th e o putting his feet on theeground. akwithout ck thAem thishenabled himetom ride ere. W rints. Ch p rt a le c bicy German mechanic fitted pedals to the front wheel ofathe vehicle, ke especially ur e rs ta yothan tlarger le to and a Frenchmanemade the front wheel the rear wheel d n A ’s our out h re. , there eyso-called in order to increase the speed.

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Milestones are a cyclist’s friend. There by the roadside, paint flaking, perhaps coiling with ivy, they remind you how far you’ve come, tell you how far you have to go, reassure you that you’re on the right track.

The word ‘milestone’ has also come to mean any significant point in life, a moment whose passing signifies change and growth.

People often talk of birthdays as milestones – waymarks on the journey through life, whose unknowable ultimate destination we all share.

Boneshaker’s reached issue 10 - a milestone in all these senses. We’ve come a long way since the wide-eyed first forays of issue 1.

We’ve certainly got a long way to go yet. To

have reached our tenth issue with all our positivity and pure-heartedness intact (we remain just about the only bicycle magazine that’s entirely ad-free) really does feel like a significant point; and a bit like a birthday.

But it’s not just our birthday: Boneshaker would not – could not – exist without the wonderful people who share their stories and their pictures, and who keep the dream alive by reading it. So slip a couple of beers into your pannier alongside this here issue, roll out to your favourite spot and join us in celebrating. Happy birthday to us; happy birthday to you.

Mike White Editor

Contents

Breakaway Stages 4 Major Taylor 14 From little acorns 16 My Beautiful Bike 20 Pharma Karma 22 Towards St. Clair 26 Into the night 28 The Bee's Knees 32 Potbelly 36 Recycle-a-Bicycle 40 Bound 42 Every Bike in Bristol 44 Everything is Cycling 46 Counting, and what counts 52 Cycling, Cubo-futurism and The 4th Dimension 54 Black Ribbon 56

contributors

words... mike white, eliza southwood, bobby ashman, camilla allen, boris bernois, neil ferguson, julian emre sayarer, jana kinsman, jet mcdonald, nick hand, john migden, david serrano, rob wall, nick souček drawings... sara thielker, mikko, eliza southwood, jesús escudero, naomi wilkinson, chrysa koukoura, chris price, eleanor crow, jana kinsman, nick souček photos... spoke n chain, theo moye, andy moore, david mccaig, anthony herbin, harry sewell, will rice, moises arellano, nick hand, john migden, chris price, david serrano, nick souček

backpats and handclaps

luke francis, anny mortada, rachel coe, skye meredith, johnathan & james at veleco, hamilton wheelers, the peggy guggenheim collection, bristol cycle festival

copyrights & disclaimers Boneshaker is a quarterly publication. The articles published reflect the opinions of their respective authors and are not necessarily those of the publishers and editorial team. ©2012 Boneshaker. At present, we are committed to remaining free from advertisements & advertorial. rinted by by Taylor Bros Bristol on FSC ® certified paper P made from sustainable sources, using vegetable based inks.

13-25 Wilder Street, Bristol BS2 8PY / www.taylorbros.uk.com Conceived by james lucas & john coe Compiled, edited and brought to life by jimmy ell, mike white, john coe & sadie campbell Designed and published by john coe / www.coecreative.com Cover image by david lemm / www.alittleisland.net Inside cover* by michael paulus / www.michaelpaulus.com *'bike central - exploded view', from the eBay offices in Portland, OR

Tunnel Sprint riders by gavin strange / www.jam-factory.com / www.hamiltonwheelers.cc

Words Mike White Don Quixote Photography Theo Moye

Every journey is a story, every story a journey. Boneshaker explores the dramatic parallels between cycling and theatre

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“I LOOKED AROUND AT ALL THESE GUYS DRESSED UP IN HELMETS AND ARMOUR SADDLING UP FOR THE RIDE, ALL LOOKING AROUND EACH OTHER, CHECKING OUT WHAT THE OTHER GUY’S GOT. IN A WAY, CYCLISTS ARE YOUR MODERN EQUIVALENT OF A MEDIEVAL KNIGHT...”

Cycling and theatre don’t often get mentioned in the same sentence. But there’s a shared grace, balance and physical dedication inherent in both. Like cycling, theatre has the immediacy of ‘real’ experience, life’s drama unfolding in the flesh, rather than filtered through the neutering glass of windscreens or plasma screens. Perhaps it’s not surprising then that the more we look, the more we find an increasingly literal convergence of pedals and performance.

Take Kilter, a troupe based in Bath, UK who make theatre in ‘surprising and unusual places’. They draw inspiration from their performance locations – allowing the stories to emerge from the places they pass – to explore environmental themes, heritage and social justice, and they (often literally) bring their audience on the journey with them. With both cast and audience on bicycles, their show 'Back on Track' unfolded along a former railway line which is now a cycle path, to offer a provocative, playful glimpse into the post-oil future of transport. Cycling is often taken as a political stance, an activity that has certain attitudes built into it – either the streetreclaiming rebellion of Critical Mass, or the quieter, Gandhiesque example-setting of the tireless all-weather commuter; in Kilter’s hands, the same stances emerge in theatre.

Another team overlapping cycling with thespian creation are Theatre Delicatessen, whose two-man play ‘Pedal Pusher’ somehow managed to bring the raw desperation of international bike racing to the stage with the help of only two plastic chairs. Just as the Tour de France plays out its very human drama stage after stage every year, ‘Pedal Pusher’ was edge-of-the-saddle stuff, retelling the true story of Lance Armstrong, Marco Pantani and Jan Ullrich as they battled for the hallowed maillot jaune. The play drew on interviews, archive footage and news reports to carry its audience ever onwards through the gruelling mountains, the breathless sprints, the crashes and the self-destructive extremes of pro-racing.

The Olympics, despite its unsavoury sponsors and the unseemly corporate boondoggle that it became, did at least 8

manage to dream up some flights of pleasing bicycle fancy – from the flying bike-doves of the opening ceremony to the lesser-known but equally impressive ‘Godiva Awakes’, a proje–ct from site-specific theatre makers Imagineer Productions. Lady Godiva, so legend has it, was an 11th century noblewoman who rode naked through the streets of Coventry in order to save the city’s desperate citizens from the oppressive taxes imposed on them by her husband, the Earl of Mercia. For ‘Godiva Awakes’, she returned as a giant puppet figure, swapping four hooves for several hundred bicycle wheels. The 6-metre tall Godiva, built by a team of mechanics, artists, theatre makers, puppeteers and engineers and run entirely on sustainable energy produced by human power, journeyed the 100 or so miles from Coventry to London pedalled by 100 riders on a horse-headed, multi-seater cycling machine. The project exemplified the utopian dream of individuals uniting to do great things, of many hands (and legs) combining to make the impossible possible.

The notion of journeying for the journey’s sake – of fashioning yourself as the star and narrator of your own story – will be familiar to many a long-distance cyclist. Cycling is its own reward; people head out and ride simply because it pleases them to do so. Here we find another series of links between cycling and theatre, all beautifully demonstrated

by Burn the Curtain’s itinerant show ‘The Adventures of Don Quixote by Bicycle’. Burn the Curtain’s Joe Hancock explains: “Don Quixote’s a story that actually reflects bicycle culture rather well, in that you never need a reason to go for a bike ride, in the same way that Don Quixote doesn’t actually have a really good reason to dress himself up as a knight and go out questing.” Don Quixote, for those that don’t know, is the main protagonist in a novel written by the 17th century Spanish author Miguel de Cervantes.

The story charts the adventures of one Alonso Quijano, a nobleman who reads too many books about questing knights-errant and decides to ride out and revive the whole chivalry scene, assuming the made-up moniker ‘Don Quixote’.

© Andy Moore

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BURN THE CURTAIN HAD ALWAYS TRIED TO DO SHOWS THAT WERE JOURNEYS. THEN THEY STARTED THINKING ‘HOW CAN WE GET OUR AUDIENCE TO DO A REAL JOURNEY, AND ACTUALLY END UP SOMEWHERE QUITE DIFFERENT TO WHERE THEY’VE STARTED?’

Beginning to see the links with cycling? Back to Joe: “I was at a cycling event yesterday and I looked around at all these guys dressed up in helmets and armour saddling up for the ride, all looking around each other, checking out what the other guy’s got. In a way, cyclists are your modern equivalent of a medieval knight. We all go out there and push ourselves that bit harder, to prove something to ourselves or to each other. They’re trying to prove the same kind of thing that Don Quixote was. Similarly, the cyclist’s destination or reward is just as nebulous as Don Quixote’s windmills; it’s always just over the horizon somewhere and that’s the thing – you’re not doing it to achieve a certain number of miles or achieve a certain destination, it’s much more about the journey.”

Burn the Curtain had always tried to do shows that were journeys. “Then we started thinking ‘how can we get our audience to do a real journey, and actually end up somewhere quite different to where they’ve started?’”, says Joe. “In the past we’d done walking performances – promenade theatre – but while you do usually get to go around a nice bit of parkland or a grand stately home, you’re still basically in the same place.”

Riding bikes seemed an ideal solution, allowing cast and audience to travel significant distances quickly and quietly, but still remain as a group sharing the same space. The logistics took some organising: “every performance needs more than ten bicycles, and that doesn’t include all the bikes that are built into other things. The windmill is built out of six or so bicycles, for example – and there are tall bikes, a couple of large tricycles and the penny farthing that Don Quixote rides.”

On all the best bike rides the surroundings are as important as the destination – and so it is with 'Don Quixote'. “We simply couldn’t move large bits of set along with us, so we had to use the backdrops nature provided – fortunately, cycling brings its own scenery.”

'Don Quixote' managed, in the way that people working with bicycles so often do, to bring benefits to the local community too. “The welding was done by an open access centre for bicycle makers, Bikespace Plymouth (www.thebikespace.org) and we worked there with young people who are 'NEETS' – not in education, employment or training, who helped us design, build and paint the bikes.

The bikes then got handed over to one of our designers Ruth Webb, who turned them into animals. The Bicycle School of Art, whose excellent blog on bike decoration had inspired us in the first place, [bicycleartschool.blogspot.co.uk – more about them later] then advised us on designing animal heads, and helped the audience convert their bikes into horses to ride along with us.”

A group bike ride, like a really involving piece of theatre, builds a bond between those involved. Again, Burn the Curtain’s 'Don Quixote' took this idea and ran with it. “All our shows are a conversation between the audience and the performers, and we found that a bike ride brought this out beautifully, once we’d figured out how to do it. Once you’ve stopped an audience of 30+riders you have to circle around them so they can see and hear you – but just being out on a group bike ride, the sense of togetherness was already there. You can draw people around you on bikes; work up a camaraderie from nothing.

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“THEY WOULD CYCLE AROUND, TELLING STORIES AND SELLING SWEETS, FINISHING EACH INSTALMENT WITH A CLIFFHANGER, SO THE KIDS WOULD COME BACK NEXT TIME...”

Burn the Curtain have taken 'Don Quixote' out for several shows already and are now keen to venture further afield – Bristol, Brighton, London and on into Europe. “We’d be really keen to hear from anyone who’s got a local stretch of two to three miles of bike track that they think might make a good La Mancha”, says Joe. And so the story grows... indeed, the 'Don Quixote' project has already helped inspire another great cycling theatre idea, called ‘What Giants?’. It comes with quite a bit of backstory.

Several centuries, in fact. Where to begin? Well, the show involves the ancient Japanese art of kamishibai, or ‘paper theatre’, which has its origins way back in the 9th or 10th century. ‘What Giants?’’ origins are a little more recent than that, explains bicycle polymath Kevin Dennis, co-founder of bicycle-performance collective Spoke’n’Chain. “It all started when Burn the Curtain tracked us down through our Bicycle Art School project and asked us to spend a weekend with them on a devising workshop for ‘Don Quixote on Bicycles’.

We went down there with lots of our bicycle decorating ideas and had a great weekend, did workshops around the 'Don Quixote' show, and came back really inspired about storytelling. Here was a guy who filled his head with stories from books and then went out and saw the windmills as giants and the pubs as castles... and the day we arrived back home we found an email from the Bristol Biennial [a community festival celebrating the city’s arts and creativity] asking us whether we’d like to do something with bikes and get involved - and saying that the theme was storytelling.

So we thought ‘bicycles+storytelling’, looked it up on the internet and discovered kamishibai.”

Kamishibai, although ancient, had a golden period from the 1900s to the 1950s, when the etoki (picture-tellers) would roam the countryside with a kind of storytelling theatre on the back of a bicycle. The theatre was essentially a box into which storyboards were inserted, with images on the front and text on the back, so that the storyteller could tell the story to the (mostly illiterate) villagers they met on their travels. “They would cycle around, telling stories and selling 12

sweets – and finishing each instalment with a cliffhanger, so the kids would come back next time. Some say it’s the origin of manga, because there were little studios of artists who would do the drawings for the cycling etoki to collect each week. The illustrators were heavily influenced by early black and white cinema too, and may even have provided a precursor to the whole superhero thing,” says Kevin. “They had a character called Ogon Bat [‘Golden Bat’, created in 1930] who was this weird superhero with a skull’s head and a cape... so we thought ‘yeah! We’ve got to do something with this.’”

And so they did, appropriating the format and developing a peripatetic project that created spontaneous performances inspired by artwork submitted by artists in the form of a ‘comic-strip’ storyboard.

The show was always different, always live, a real antidote to the samey morass of modern television. Ironically, when TV first arrived in Japan in the 1950s, they called it ‘electric kamishibai’.

But back to the story. 'Spoke'n'Chain had worked in a couple of shows with Irish theatre makers Macnas, who use giant-sized puppets in their work and often feature stories about prodigiously-sized mythic figures such as the Berkshire Giant. Spoke'n'Chain had chosen the name ‘What Giants?’ for their own show from a quote from Cervantes’ original novel, where Don Quixote points at a load of windmills and says something like ‘let’s fight those giants!’ and Sancho Panza says ‘What giants?’

“Then this giant theme reemerged with the Berkshire show,” says Kevin, so animated by his own project that his words begin pouring out all at once, “and we continued to help Burn the Curtain with their production and we’d been thinking about hitting the road for a while, doing a big long cycle ride, and we went and looked at a EuroVelo cycling map and discovered that there’s all these routes throughout Europe, and I just said off the top of my head ‘could we just cycle round them? Doing storytelling and little theatre

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“WE’VE READ ALL THESE BOOKS AND NOW WE’RE SETTING OUT ON A JOURNEY OF AND IN OUR OWN IMAGINATIONS, AN ADVENTURE WE’LL MAKE UP AS WE GO ALONG.”

shows as we go?’ So we started to think about it, and decided we could. Now our plan is to ride from Bristol to Bordeaux, then onto Augsburg in Germany, then maybe along to Vienna and Berlin, up EuroVelo Route 6, which goes from Nantes to the Black Sea, following the Loire and then the Danube, past Budapest. There’s a sense of the new frontier about these emerging Eurovelo routes too – the way when the railways arrived across America, inns and shops and settlements sprung up along the tracks. We’ve seen it happen here in the UK to an extent – there’s a place called Yarde Orchard in Devon that’s sprung up along the Tarka Trail cycle route. You’re cycling along it, you come out of the woods and there’s a tiny little hamlet and down to the right there’s a little stage with some seats around it, and a yurt and cafe – all for the cyclists riding through. You can stay there overnight and they do little music events, theatre shows. It makes you hopeful that maybe more of these things will begin to develop along cycle routes, right across Europe – a new infrastructure for a new frontier.”

Spoke’n’Chain will spend the winter planning the trip, and link up with all the cooperative bike workshops they pass along the way. “We’ve discovered there’s already a network of them in France (www.heureux-cyclage.org) and then we’ll do bicycle theatre events, leading people on a ride, with a picnic and the kamishibai to tell some stories. We've got a Yuba cargo bike onto which we can mount a sound-system and a projector, run on a solar panel and bike-powered generator.”

The need within developed countries to return to a simpler, human- or sustainably-powered existence is becoming increasingly urgent. Cycling meets this need perfectly, and Spoke’n’Chain’s plan to combine that with theatre and share the simple, spontaneous beauty of it with the world is inspiring. Just as the motorcar has stifled human interaction and denied at least three generations the freedom to fully experience the miles they travel, the age of televisions, DVDs and games consoles has made entertainment an insular, homogenised commodity.

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“We feel strongly that there’s a need for more immediate, direct, person-to-person forms of entertainment, that are

real and different every time,” says Kevin. “We wanted to do something simple, something mobile, something linked in with cycling. We’ve always dreamed of forming a full circus that would tour by bicycle, but could imagine how that might become too big and unwieldy, so discovering this little storytelling bicycle idea was just great. Because that’s all it is, just a bicycle with a box on it. Drawings, stories – it’s all so simple. You can just cycle from one town to the next, collecting and exchanging stories. The act of cycling, the journey we’re on, will become part of the story too – we’re going to put a dragon’s head on the kamishibai bicycle, so the bike itself becomes part of the theatre of it all.”

Another key element of the ‘What Giants?’ project is also one of cycling’s most enjoyable aspects: serendipity. “Because the cycle paths remain open to the world, each show will be different to the last. And we’ve got this idea of ‘European whispers’, changing the stories as we travel, so that we take the pictures made in a workshop in one town and see what story the people in the next town dream up to go along with them, and so on. We’ll collect all the different regional giant stories we find as we travel, and make up our own as we go along too. The idea of live, living stories that change and evolve and get swapped and exchanged is really exciting.” And so the whole Quixotic thing emerges again, as Spoke’n’Chain themselves become a story like Don Quixote.

“We’ve read all these books and now we’re setting out on a journey of and in our own imaginations, an adventure we’ll make up as we go along.” Like cycling, it’s human-scaled, connected with the world and the people around, simple, joyous and endless in its scope.

FURTHER READING

www.kiltertheatre.org www.theatredelicatessen.co.uk www.imagineerproductions.co.uk www.burnthecurtain.co.uk spokenchain.blogspot.co.uk whatgiants.blogspot.com www.macnas.com

A

couple of years ago, I was scouting on the internet for some images of vintage cyclists for a new illustration series I wanted to do. I draw pictures of cyclists from every era but am most inspired by the classic rider. I love the faded colours, the badger hairstyles and the old-school bikes. My portfolio is like a roll-call of the cycling greats – Merckx, Hinault, Moser, Indurain and LeMond.

So when I came across a sepia photograph of Marshall Taylor it was like striking illustration gold. True, it was a lot older than the usual time period I’m interested in – the 1980s and 90s, but was interesting nonetheless. I have to admit that initially I only had eyes for the visual potential of the image – focussing on the old bike with the curved down handlebars, the tone of Marshall Taylor’s black skin (yes – nice bit of contrast) and the attractive woollen suit he was wearing. I feel sheepish to admit it now, but at first I thought he was some Victorian guy

posing for a studio photograph and the bike was just an incidental prop. I tried to find out more about him.

Soon a comprehensive picture was beginning to emerge as I discovered more and more about Marshall ‘Major’ Taylor.

I became fascinated. Born in 1878 in Indianapolis as one of eight children, he was taken under the wing of a white family when he made friends with their son, and was taken on as the young boy’s companion. Both of them were mad about cycling, and Marshall was given a bicycle of his own. He and his friend spent their days learning and practicing tricks on their bikes.

Eventually this lead to a job at a bicyle shop in Indianapolis, where he was employed to attract customers by performing tricks outside the store. He was given a soldier’s uniform with brass buttons, earning him the nickname ‘Major’ Taylor.

Words & illustration by Eliza Southwood

17 Bicycle racing at the turn of the last century in America was major-league entertainment. Cycling was hugely popular as a spectator sport. Marshall Taylor’s first taste of bicycle racing happened almost accidentally. He had cycled down to watch a ten-mile road race, which usually attracted the best amateur riders of Indiana, when his employer at the bike shop, Mr Hay, spotted him in the crowd and insisted that he take a place on the starting line. Taylor remembers the incident in his autobiography: ‘Although the band was playing a lively tune and the crowd was cheering wildly, I was crying. When Mr. Hay saw that he started to lift me from my wheel, but stopped and whispered in my ear, “I know you can’t go the full distance, but just ride up the road a little way, it will please the crowd, and you can come back as soon as you are tired.”’

finish in a one-mile race. Becker, who had come third after Taylor, pulled him off his bicycle and strangled him until the police intervened. Taylor was unconscious for 15 minutes, but Becker was not arrested, claiming that Taylor had tried to force him off the track.

However it seems that Major Taylor had the unshakeable selfbelief of the elite athlete that transcends all issues of race and society. He was confident in his abilities, was very religious (to the extent that he refused to race on Sundays) and generally clean-living. He refused to drink alcohol – he was once persuaded to taste a tiny sip of champagne in France after winning a race, but thought it was disgusting. His selfconfidence in an area of sport entirely dominated by whites

"IT SEEMS THAT MAJOR TAYLOR HAD THE UNSHAKEABLE SELF-BELIEF OF THE ELITE ATHLETE THAT TRANSCENDS ALL ISSUES OF RACE AND SOCIETY." As it turned out, the Major won the gold medal, aged only 13, and would go on to compete for and win many more races over his lifetime. He had the talent and good fortune to catch the eye of bicycle maker and trainer Birdie Munger, who would go on to sponsor him, providing him with the bicycles and training expertise he required.

But of course it was not all plain sailing. African-Americans were regularly being lynched in the South at the time, and the racism Major Taylor would suffer during his career wore him down, although he tried to rise above it. This was 1890s America, and the persecution of blacks was commonplace. It still seems unbelievable now that segregation was entrenched in the South right up until the 1960s.

Major Taylor refused to be drawn into the petty arguments and insults (usually coming from defeated rivals) though they became a feature of his life on the bicycle circuit. He was often persecuted by the white riders – saying that one of the reasons he rode so fast was because he was literally escaping a beating from the others.

On many occasions they would form coalitions in order to squeeze him off the track and make him lose the race.

For instance, at a seventy-five mile road race, aged 16, Taylor recalls, 'I trailed along in the rear for several miles, and was resting up in good shape before they were aware that I was in the race. They made things disagreeable for me by calling me vile names, and trying to put me down, and they even threatened to do me bodily harm if I did not turn back.

I decided that if my time had come I might just as well die trying to keep ahead of the bunch of riders, so I jumped through the first opening and went out front; never to be overtaken… I opened up the distance between my wheel and the balance of the field to make doubly sure that none of them caught up to me and got a chance to do me bodily injury.'

On another occasion, he was choked into unconsciousness by William Becker, a white rider from Minneapolis, after a close

led to his reputation as an ‘uppity Negro’ in the States but he simply knew he was the best athlete of his day. In the year 1900, Marshall Taylor was the world’s highest paid sportsman, and held the world champion and American sprint champion titles. He broke a series of world records, and was the second African-American to be crowned champion in any organised sport, after the boxer George Dixon. He went on several international tours to Europe and Australia, beating every national champion and building up his reputation as the best bicycle rider in the world.

It’s an impressive legacy, but Major Taylor should be remembered at the very least for his spirit of forgiveness towards the riders who abused him. 'I hold no animosity toward any man’, he wrote, ‘…this includes those who so bitterly opposed me and did everything possible to injure me and prevent my success. Many of them have died and when I am called home I shall rest easy, knowing that I always played the game fairly and tried my hardest, although I was not always given a square deal or anything like it.'

Sadly, Major Taylor ended his days unknown and in poverty, unable to find a way of making a living after he retired from cycling. There were no lucrative TV deals in those days, no sports commentator or pundit opportunities. His attempt to study engineering in 1910 had been rejected – most likely because of his skin colour, although the college claimed it was his lack of high school certificate. His wife eventually left him, and he died in Chicago from various health problems, his body lying unclaimed until it was buried in a pauper’s grave.

He was later honoured with a memorial in 1948. But recognition has been slow. There are a few books about him, and a TV film was made in 1991, ‘Tracks of Glory’. It is astonishing that he is not better known, being one of the greatest American athletes of all time. I’m still drawing pictures of Major Taylor, but it adds another dimension to my work knowing what a truly great man he was.

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from little acorns In the heart of London,

down a narrow side road close to Borough tube stop lies Oak Cycles, a new breed of bespoke bicycle company.

Interview between Bobby Ashman and Ryan McCaig Photos by David McCaig 18

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T

he only clue that I’m at the right place is that the number above the door matches that on the website. A heavy metal grate covers the shop window, no lights are on and there’s definitely no sign that this is the thriving little business that I’m looking for. On closer inspection I notice a few bicycle related stickers, so I reach up and give the bell a ring anyway.

Seconds later, around the corner pops Ryan, the man behind Oak Cycles. He’s dressed in his black work gear and racing cap and shows me through a sliding wooden door into his workshop.

Over the next hour or so, he unfolds the story of what it’s like to be a bespoke bicycle maker in London. It’s not an easy business to get into, it transpires. “If you want to get in cold turkey, it’s going to hurt,” he says. “It’s everything you don’t expect it to be. It’s really hands on, your shoulders are going to hurt at the end of the day and your right arm will become twice the size of your left arm because of all the filing. It’s a manual labour job. The big tools just waste your money, they take so long to set up, and if you haven’t been in the business a long time you have no idea how to fix them, or where to source replacement parts. So it’s all hand files. It’s all done by hand-eye coordination.The first couple of years, you’ll just be building up muscle memory.”

He was drawn into frame-building through simple personal need, and a strong DIY ethic. “I’m quite tall – there aren’t many frames that fit my body type. So one day I decided to make my own. I had close to no experience really, just figured it out as I went along. I didn’t really know much about anything, didn’t even know who [celebrated American frame-builder] Richard Sachs was. I really had no idea what I was getting myself into.

“But a tour is a great test, so I cycled that first frame from London to Cairo over six months. I had that bike going 83km an hour on the road between Jerusalem and the Dead Sea. It’s a big, flat, freshly paved road and I was

able to take my hands off at that speed, so I was pretty confident my bike was straight. Good enough for a first attempt. I went across the Syrian and Sinai deserts, with ten to twenty litres of water as well as all my camping gear, food and clothes. That bike saw a lot of abuse but I’ve still got it to this day and it still rides great.” You’re probably wondering how a complete novice just gets up one day and builds a bike. As is so often the case with Ryan, the answer’s refreshingly matter-of-fact – a bit of good luck and a lot of hard work.

“At the time I was living on a street with five houses of bike couriers and one of the houses had a communal workshop. So I got an oxy-propane kit, some hand files, a hacksaw and I bought the Paterek manual [a now-legendary framebuilding guide by Tim Paterek]. I read that through a couple of times and just followed his process really slowly. I had a big piece of marble that I used as my datum/flat plate, and I just did it one tube at a time. That’s the best way to start out, one tube at a time.

As you’re brazing the tubes will move, and as an amateur you won’t understand how much heat will cause a tube of a certain diameter and certain thickness to move. So by constant feeling and measuring on a flat table you get a better idea of what the heat is doing, so when you do get to use a jig, you have a better idea of the process so the tubes don’t ping out all over the place.”

After the success of the Egypt tour, Ryan’s confidence was high. “I came back – and made another bike. A few friends wanted bikes so I made them bikes too. I worked on the second bike I built as a courier for the better part of a year and then part-time for a few years after that.

As I worked part-time, I invested all the money I made back into my workshop, buying more tools, buying more books. Couriers have a tendency to crash into things so I fixed a lot of bikes, using that as another way to learn the frame-building trade. By fixing bikes I could see where people went wrong and I was able to inspect their work and see where I could put it right. So I saw loads of big names, lots of English builders, loads of Italian builders.

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20 That was the best way to learn for me, just doing repair work.

It’s hard work and you don’t really make much money from it, but it’s a good way to learn.”

Recognising there was a real demand for his skills, Ryan decide to teach himself everything he could about bike building, in a typically DIY manner. “I was like, ‘what I’ll do is I’ll do my own apprenticeship. I’m going to make ten frames for ten friends for cost. From there I will decide how it’s going to go’. In my spare time I put the hours in, and did it. Every bike took me about a hundred hours, so a thousand hours in total.” He acquired more tools, got his own workshop, and kept building. “People saw the bikes I made for my friends and wanted them. I only finished that apprenticeship maybe three months ago and have just sold my first frame for retail.”

The hardest part for me has been dealing with my expectations. I probably build a frame a thousand times in my head before I build it once.

As with any decent framebuilder, tailoring the bike to its rider is key. “I put all my focus and emphasis in getting a bike made for the individual. I put a lot of time and focus into hearing what you want, how you want to ride the bike, what you want to do with it and how you want it to fit. I really focus on fit. I get people in here on a cycle trainer and have a long conversation with them. I don’t see a cycle fit as telling someone to do this, this, and this. I see it as a conversation and a progression. Everyone is different, and you need to realise that people’s cycle fit will change, with injuries, with their fitness and flexibility. Then I just customize geometry, spec, size, and try to get the exact bike the person wants and I aim to improve on their expectations. That’s my focus – getting every bike perfect for its rider.”

Ryan’s other focus is on “function over form”, he says, “bikes that are functional; that are stiff and fast, that you can ride really far, and can carry huge amounts of weight. I look up to people like [pioneering Italian builder Dario] Pegoretti – he was making the last of the steel frames that were raced competitively 20

in the Tour. They are just awesome bikes, stiff and fast; not super light, but light enough. Those are the kind of bikes I want to make but at the end of the day I’ll make what people want. I’ll make the best bike for the individual.”

Despite the global economic crisis, the recent bicycle boom is cause for optimism, Ryan says. “The bike industry has had a bit of a reawakening. When I started working as a courier five years ago, it was just me and a few die hard commuters riding in the rain and now it’s like a peloton of people riding home. I used to work on the motorbike circuit on my pedal bike, and the scooter circuit, probably one of the biggest courier circuits in the world and I was faster than all the scooters. Hell, I was faster than a lot of motorbikes. When the controllers figured out that pedal bikes were faster than the motorbikes it was like ‘Holy shit!’ It’s just faster to get around town.

“So there’s a revival and a new interest in bikes, and that started showing four or five years ago. People bought their sweet urban fixies, and over time they’ve got more into it and moved past that ‘cool thing’ and just got really excited about bikes and want the best bikes they can get. And if people have the money they want the best handmade British bike they can get. The market has just got more educated on what makes a good bike. There’s a lot of buzz right now for handmade bikes from small independent places. That buzz has got people looking me up and knocking on my door.” As with so many craftsmen, he is his own worst critic. “The hardest part for me has been dealing with my expectations. I probably build a frame a thousand times in my head before I build it once. In your head you have a perfect idea of what it’s going to be but it always comes out different.”

He cites a documentary made about Richard Sachs. Its title? ‘Imperfection is Perfection’. “And that’s exactly it. As soon as you put your hand to the material it becomes imperfect because you are imperfect. So you’re always dealing with your own desire to make the bike perfect and then realising that the bike will never be 100% perfect. But it’s going to be pretty close.” From that first Cairo-bound DIY-frame, built on a whim because nothing would fit, Ryan’s turned bike-building into his livelihood. It’s still hard work.

His wrangles with his own perfectionism will probably last as long as his career. But he’s got no regrets. “If you want to get into frame building this will be your life. In a cold, damp workshop, for 12 hours a day. It’s really hard, but when it goes right it’s so rewarding.

I’d never go back.”

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Illustration

JesĂşs Escudero Cuadrado www.jesusescudero.com

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Bikes have to be a bit like babies... They inspire great devotion from their owners/parents, but to many, their particular charms and appeal may be less apparent. I think my bike is pretty wonderful: I know the ways in which it surpasses the bikes of my friends and family yet I am wise enough not to judge it against considerably grander bicycles and know that I am quite totally biased in its favour.

My bike is a 1970s Raleigh Cameo. There are quite a lot of them around. It has dynamos – the dynamos do not work.

It is burgundy - the paint is a bit worn. It has the original mudguards – when I cycle over cobbles, the mudguards and the rest of the frame sound like a bin full of cans being dragged along behind on a string.

A recent conversation about my bike went as follows: Someone: ‘that is a nice bike’ Me: ‘thank you’ Someone: ‘bet it’s quite heavy’ Me: ‘yes’ Someone: ‘probably not British’ Me: ‘it’s a Raleigh’ Someone: ‘oh’ It wasn’t thrilling – probably makes for even less thrilling reading.

But one time my heart was in my mouth when I was complimented on my bike. That was a little different.

Heart-in-mouth is not something normally associated with compliments but hair-raising it was, nonetheless.

The moment in question came while I was cycling south through London's Camden Town, navigating the one-way system towards Mornington Crescent: I cycled.

Maybe I whistled.

I got in the right lane.

All the time minding my own business.

And then a double-decker bus pulled up next to me...

This bus slowed down and kept level with me. I ignored it, wary of being heckled by an angry driver – mindful of playing out a bike vs bus Duel (see Stephen Spielberg’s 1971 film for the true sense of drama the moment conjured).

But then curiosity got the better of me and I looked left, into the driver’s cab.

The driver had opened the window and was leaning out to talk to me. He looked quite chilled so I decided I wasn’t about to get an (unjustified) earful.

Bus driver: ‘nice bike’ Me: *pause, swallow* ‘...thank you?’

Bus driver: ‘vintage Raleigh’ Me: ‘yarp’ Bus driver: ‘better be careful of that’ Me: ‘sure?’

Bus driver: ‘I would always make sure it’s very well locked up.

They’re very popular. Wouldn’t want it nicked. Do you have a proper lock?’

Me :*gulp* ‘...yes’ Bus driver: ‘good’ And then he was off – ferrying his passengers into the city – leaving a puff of exhaust in his wake.

For the record, I have an alright lock. The Cameo has survived another couple of years on London’s roads after this incident. It may be a little bit filthy (I think of it as a protective coat that keeps the avaricious eyes of potential theives from it) but it is a near-constant companion. It can ferry me comfortably(ish) over this town’s pot-holed roads and I often think how lucky I am to have found it.

This is because I have a personal appreciation of my bike.

It has its own special glow in my eyes and I am glad for the most part when it inspires an occasional compliment from friends and family. Otherwise it can go unnoticed – a ladies’ bike in a town full of lovely ladies’ bikes. The only other person to see the true wonder of it is an anonymous bus driver with bikes in his heart.

P.S. My most major episode of bicycle geek-dom came when I followed through on the compulsion to muralise a room in my house – a room that is home to my own and my housemates’ collective six-plus bikes. So I painted ‘We Love Bicycles’ in it. Only I really painted ‘welove bicycles’. My grasp of letter-spacing when planning it out was not too hot. I have had to take that on the chin for a few years. ‘Welove’. It’s not a proper word. I am not a proper muralist. But I do think that bikes are pretty great.'

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Words Mike White / Boris Bernois Photography Anthony Herbin

WHEN BICYCLES AND GOOD PEOPLE COME TOGETHER, GREAT THINGS CAN HAPPEN Way back in Boneshaker issue 1 we ran an article on the Bristol Bike Project, a volunteerrun cooperative founded in 2009 that took an unused empty space, a load of donated bicycles that would otherwise have gone into landfill, and worked with various groups – refugees and asylum seekers, recovering substance abusers, disaffected young people – to help those people repair and thereby earn their own bike, gaining confidence and valuable skills along the way. A self-starting, self-sustaining and entirely positive little place, it thrives to this day, having won a major ethical award and managed to secure its future despite numerous obstacles.

Earlier this year, just as we were preparing this very issue we heard from some guys in Toulon, a port town on the south coast of France – and their story had a similar resonance: people wanting to make things better, and then putting their hearts into a project to bring about that change.

Using bicycles, of course.

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A SIMPLE IDEA, A BIT OF SELF-BELIEF AND A LOT OF HARD-GRAFT - PLUS A LOAD OF BIKES - HAVE MADE A BETTER PLACE TO BE

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“It all started with the bike lanes”, says founder Boris Bernois, in his charming French lilt. “We were a few friends mainly interested in increasing the number of bike lanes in Toulon, in order to increase the number of cyclists. So two years ago we created an organisation called ‘Toulon à Vélo’ (‘Toulon by bike’) to promote the daily use of bike in a city where it almost never rains (it’s true!...)

Soon we learned about other cities in France (and beyond) that had social workshops and bike co-ops, and realised that perhaps this would be a better way to increase the number of cyclists. So we started to look for a place to start our own.”

The pharmacy was filthy and covered in graffiti when Boris and gang found it, but they cleaned it up, painted it and got it organised “to make space for all the abandoned and donated bikes and the tools that we already had piling up in our basements.” More and more bikes have flooded in since, and PharmaCycles now has almost 400 members. To be member of the organisation and access to the workshop, people pay a nominal sum (at least €5 per year), and they can then buy a second hand bike, use the tools and learn how to fix it. “We now employ two ‘Animateurs Cycles’ and attract bike lovers of all persuasions”, says Boris. “We recycle and

“An old, closed pharmacy caught our attention.

We visited it and found it perfect for our needs.”

The name was then quickly decided upon: ‘PharmaCycles’. Since then, things have moved fast, thanks to the hard graft of Boris and his friends, plus a team of volunteers, a little corporate support, and, crucially, the inspiration of l'Heureux Cyclage, a nationwide network of participatory, supportive bike workshops who help people across France to promote cycling by providing mechanical training and resurrecting abandoned bikes.

reuse everything we can. Children’s bikes are given to charities like Secours Populaire or Emmaus; adult bikes are sold for between €10 and €100 so that everyone can afford them. Thanks to everyone’s hard work, we now see more and more people riding bikes in Toulon, and it is such a pleasure to see them. We have achieved our aim. Next step, maybe one day: our own bike school...”

A simple idea, a bit of self-belief and a lot of hard-graft – plus a load of bikes – have made Toulon a better place to be. When bicycles and good people come together, great things can happen. toulonavelo.free.fr

Poem Neil Ferguson www.neilgferguson.com Me in my robin egg blue Italian cycle shoes with Velcro straps, you your sensible Lycra shorts and pretty black-on-white top from Jigsaw, your hair up. Even without my Bianchi track mitts, my knuckles bare on the horizontal bar, this among all our moments is a nonpareil: our dappled descent after the climb from St Chamarand through the little wood we love. We’re somewhere

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Illustration Naomi Wilkinson www.naomiwilkinson.co.uk

between our point of departure and our destination.

Our children and their pals are in the house we’ve just left, asleep or playing Racing Demon to the Libertines, Blur, Eminem, Tupac, washing-up in the sink, mugs of non-Nestlé chocolate, slices of toasted torte with butter and Marmite.

You could tell them but they don’t yet know how to care that eventually we will die and they will be alone.

The sun’s lucid Morse code message on the retina flickers in hallucinogenic concert with the tic-tic-tic of the sealed bearings in the cones of our wheel hubs and the harmonious syncopation of alloy spokes, the combined effect upon us both of which is a release of endocrines into the bloodstream surging through the aorta to the tips of our fingers.

Our toes, snug in Campag clips, tingle together.

Today the lark is ascending. The raptor that swoops low over the stubble, stalking the shadows of the hay rolls, is on this occasion unsuccessful. A dame in a blue frock returns our wave, shouts something we can’t catch.

At the level-crossing warning incautious motorists Un train peut en cacher un autre, I recall John telling me as we waited for a train to pass, of the headline in Le Monde during the Balkan Crisis: Une guerre peut en cacher une autre.

Yesterday the descent to Groléjac with no brakes in the 1984 VW saloon, not quite a near-death experience but still, like the state of the world, a close run thing: Blair’s War, Nablus and Gaza, climate change.

If the BBC World Service signal isn’t picked up, who will know about Darfur? John has a tumour on his brain.

Our neighbour, Jean Tocoben, put a gun to his head, missed, then hanged himself in one of his barns.

But today in St Chamarand the ninety-five year old cyclist who doesn’t look a day older than seventy, which isn’t so very far down the road from here, who played saxophone in a dance band in Paris throughout the Nazi Occupation, delights us.

Shaking his hand, I say: Ç’a été un plairsir vous parler, Monsieur, to which he replies: Pour moi également.

Today, freewheeling side-by-side towards St Clair in the lee of catastrophe and the imminent death of a much loved one, while our children and their pals doze and fret about their tans and exam results, our skin is brindled with the rapid alternation of shadow and light. Between the now and now that make up the sum of our life together is this unexpected momentary weightlessness in robin egg blue cycle shoes with Velcro straps.

For John Watkinson (1941-2004) 29

WORDS JULIAN EMRE SAYARER WWW.THISISNOTFORCHARITY.COM

PICTURE HARRY SEWELL WWW.HARRYSEWELL.CO.UK

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INTO THE NIGHT T W E N T Y Y E A R S AG O T H E Y N E E D E D A L E G E N D… N E E D E D A M Y T H … S O M E T H I N G TO H E L P G E T I T O F F T H E G R O U N D. T H E Y S A I D T H AT LO N D O N ’ S CO U R I E R S HAD STARTED IT, DRINKING AFTER WO R K O N A F R I DAY N I G H T, DA R I N G O N E A N OT H E R TO R I D E U N T I L T H E Y H I T T H E WAT E R , U N T I L T H E Y R E AC H E D T H E S E A .

T H E Y H A D C YC L E D A L L T H R O U G H T H E N I G H T, A N D THEN, WITH THE SUN RISING T H E Y H A D CO M E TO T H E WAT E R AT D U N W I C H , 1 1 0 M I L E S AWAY O N T H E S U F F O L K COA S T, A P L AC E T H AT T E N C E N T U R I E S AG O H A D B E E N A B O O M I N G H U B O F T H E WO O L I N D U S T RY.

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jars with candles inside of them, glowing yellow, glowing white within the night to mark the turnings you should take, the flame guttering as the wind pushes over the rim of the glass, blowing a sound into the silence. It pushes you on… invisible hand style… the wind is always favourable it seems, coming up from the south and blowing you on along the road. In cycling they say that there is no such thing as tailwinds… only headwinds and good days. Riding to Dunwich happens mostly on good days.

We ride… we all ride… all together, you’re never alone on that road, a whole legion of strangers that you’ve got all the right things in common with. You hear their snippets of conversation as the bats flutter frantically above the road, their serrated wings cutting at the moonlight as you hear the conversation. The bicycle… it sure brings out the best in people… “the thing to do is toast the mustard seeds in a dry pan for a few minutes before you get started” … “it’s really interesting the way the road slopes like that”. Cyclists, people riding bicycles… whatever you want to call them… they sure pay attention to the little things, the tiny bits of nonsense that make a life worth living.

L

ike I said… they needed a legend, needed a myth… it’s not true. The guys responsible for the Dunwich Dynamo are not couriers, they never were… I’m proud to count a few of them as friends. They’re a group of guys with their hair starting to thin out on top, with no claim to rock and roll beyond knowing what’s good for the human spirit. They’re the sort of people who seek no credit for their idea, no credit beyond the desire that people enjoy themselves. It was twenty years ago that they created that courier myth… and although it still endures, there’s no need for it any longer… the Dynamo has a legend of its own now.

It needs no embellishment.

As the dusk lands you leave London Fields, begin to pick your way out of the city. Don’t go too soon, it’s easier to follow others through those turnings in the night. You ride out, out through the north eastern sticks of the city, out through the trees of Epping Forest… all two thousand of you with the evening just falling and all the night ahead. At that point it’s just a ride, it’s still only a ride, pedalling through the coming grey, the stop-start traffic and receding concrete.

It’s the night, it’s the night that does it… the road comes alive… a dragon, a dragon takes up the road, and if there’s any one thing that any person riding Dunwich will always remember it’s the trail of lights, that flashing red that winds away in front of you, blinking and flickering and glowing as the darkness comes down. They light lanterns… those friends who started it all two decades ago... they go out in front, leave London hours before the rest of us, tiny jam

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The road comes to you, takes you under the crumbling, crestfallen towers of old churches, takes you down through the hills and into the village of Sible Hedingham. Each year the village hall stays open all through the night, the villagers serving up soup and flapjacks… flapjacks… damn, but after Dunwich you don’t want to see another flapjack for a long time. The hall is packed, lycra and waterproofs from wall to wall, some of it crawling inside a sleeping bag, others hunched over a styrofoam cup of soup… you get in the queue, wait your turn, wait your turn… get to the front, the flavours are red or yellow… they call it minestrone or vegetable but the reality is that it just tastes bad, pick your favourite colour and enjoy the warmth on its way down the throat.

After the hall it changes… the sleep comes… comes to take you away, off of the road and into some space above the tarmac… the stars float by above you, tearing the sky apart as they trail like tiny comets back down the road.

The other riders they pass you by, packs of them, the road crews… real chain gangs, skintighter than tight… they ride in enfilade, jaws rolling above the handlebars and you hear them coming, the deep rims that dust themselves free of the night like a broom upon a stone step. You hear the hum, the purr of the tyres, and looking down there move your feetyourfeetyourfeet… the wheel ahead and the road rolling under it as the night looms ever onwards in front of you.

It takes all kinds… Dunwich draws us all in, every type of rider… each year there’s a man with a large Labrador and an even larger basket… the Labrador curls in the basket and the man drives him through the night, the dog turning round on itself every now and then, sometimes sitting up to yap at the passing bats. You see a girl, a pair of denim shorts and riding a pink Pashley with a wicker basket… her boyfriend puts his hand to her back and pushes her into the incline that’s hanging over us. Let me tell you… if you meet a girl on the

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I COULD LOOK AT SILHOUETTES ALL NIGHT LONG, AND AS THE DAWN STARTS TO BREAK AND THE SKY CHEERS FROM BLACK TO BLUE IT GETS BETTER STILL

Dynamo, or if you ever find one that’ll ride it with you… keep hold of her... she’s special.

It’s the sleep, the sleep is what does it… you don’t get tired in the legs so much as in the head, you start swimming… the lids get heavier and the vision melts. Some of us break from the road, crawl onto a soft lawn of Suffolk and sleep under a tree. I stay awake for the silhouettes… always the silhouettes… I’m a real sucker for the silhouettes, the white moonlight that cuts black shapes from the high stalks of dandelions, cow parsley and bramble thicket… I could look at silhouettes all night long, and as the dawn starts to break and the sky cheers from black to blue it gets better still. You pass out of the final woods, the guard of honour formed by the trees, cracking their branches together like quarter staffs above your head. The countryside opens, opens wide… lets out a yawn and then… and then… there it is, glowing at the end of the road, a giant, warbling ball of red, crimson, warbling and turning like a baby’s mouth screaming at being woken for the new day. The sun screams down the road, flashes by the trail of flickering red so that the chill of the darkness passes and there comes the warmth of the day to takes its place.

Hours of half-light pass slowly, the lanes of Suffolk begin to twist, a central reservation of dusty gravel, kicked up by the tyres ahead so that your eyes sting once with fatigue and twice with the mist of debris that you move through. The day rises, grows bright, and there you see the sun shining through

the flowers that line the walls of those roads, high banks of mud cut directly from the hills… cut directly from the hills and lined perfectly with poppies and poppies and poppies, the sun coming through those petals as the flickering lights of the cyclists are switched off and instead we follow that trail of poppies to the sea. The heather of the heath is last of all, that pale purple, the same colour as those burst veins in the legs of the middle-aged cyclist, snaking like Alpine switchbacks about the calf and down into the ankle. You move over the heath, the wind dropping for the coming day, a warm smile resting somewhere just behind your lips.

In time it comes. You reach Dunwich a whole lot faster if you set out simply to ride through the night. You just keep riding, that’s all you have to do, forget about the 110 miles and just ride in the company of friends, or in the company of yourself. The beach comes, shingle pulled from the seabed and thrown back down, crashing over on itself as the sun glints off of rims and reflectors and spokes all thrown down on the beach… a sea of bicycles washed ashore from some better place, the tired limbs of all those cyclists stretched out and resting upon the stones. You take off your clothes, step down to the waters, stones pressing on your soles. You jump in… you have to… you have to jump otherwise you’ll never go past the waist. Cold is a state of mind… it’s not cold, it’s euphoria… and beneath those waves, somewhere just above the shingle with your head beneath the waters… right there all life is waiting for you.

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Words and illustration 35 Jana Kinsman / bikeabee.com Photography Will Rice / Moises Arellano

Bike-a-Bee, a bicycle-powered beekeeping project based in community gardens around Chicago, Illinois began as a little idea I had back in Eugene, Oregon. I was spending the summer of 2011 travelling and living in various places around the USA, particularly in the Pacific Northwest, and took a beekeeping class with the Chicago Honey Co-op, a cooperatively-owned beekeeping business formed in 2004 that keeps around 60 hives. At that time, I was becoming interested in sustainable, urban agriculture, and honeybees had caught my attention a few years previously when I was in college and Colony Collapse Disorder (a phenomenon in which worker bees from a hive mysteriously disappear) had started to occur in North America. On completion of the class, I was hooked on the idea of beekeeping, but knew that I was going to be transient and unable to start my own hives until that coming spring.

Fast forward a few months, and after living on Orcas Island in Washington, duck-sitting in Seattle, travelling to Michigan, Ohio and Indiana and sleeping on various friends’ couches in Chicago, I realised that my wanderlust wasn't going to die down, and so in order to get some more hands-on experience, I planned a trip to Eugene in the state of Oregon to begin an apprenticeship with a beekeeper named Philip at an apiary called Blessed Bee. I took my bike with me – a sturdy, modified-for-touring Peugeot PX10 from the mid ‘70s – on the train to Portland and rode the 150 or so miles down to Eugene via the Willamette Valley.

Philip had been keeping bees for most of his life and had a number of hives near his house, most of which were rescued colonies taken from various residential and business locations where they were considered to be a nuisance. After a day of processing honey, we’d bring the sticky equipment out to this ‘home yard’ where the bees would lick it clean for the next day’s use. On a typical day, we’d get into his truck and visit various bee-yards that he tended around the city. They were in all sorts of places – an elementary school, a blueberry patch and another in a young family’s

backyard. We’d bring along a rubbermaid bin and some ‘supers of wet frames’ (frames of honeycomb that have been emptied of their honey). It was September at that point, and so we were mostly pulling frames of capped honey, or honey that’s ripe and ready for jarring. We would visit four or five bee-yards per day, drinking various local brews and listening to National Public Radio daytime shows streaming from the truck.

Over time, I began to think about making something like this work in Chicago; beekeeping in various places around the city rather than having one specific location. I joked to Philip that I’d do the same thing he was doing, but on my bike with a bike trailer! As my new-found yearning for a sense of home grew stronger, I decided I would make it happen. Having previously felt a disheartening lack of purpose, travelling non-stop whilst living out of a giant messenger bag, I suddenly had a very tangible idea and a mission on which to embark. And so, after my three weeks in Eugene were up, I travelled back home and lived with my sister in the suburbs of Chicago. I began researching community gardens, asking around to see if anyone would be interested in hosting a beehive. I explained that it would help pollinate their plants and enrich the garden environment. Almost everyone said yes – testimony to the seemingly innate awareness of the importance of bees that many of us feel.

Community gardens exist so that the vegetables, plants, insects and animals around them can be in a public space in order that neighborhood kids and anyone living nearby can come visit and see the process of how their food could be grown.

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" JUST GETTING TO SPEND A DAY DOING THE WORK I LOVE – THE DIRTY, STICKY KIND – MAKES IT WELL WORTH IT. THERE'S NOTHING LIKE VISITING A BEEHIVE, YOU NEVER KNOW WHAT TO EXPECT, EACH HIVE IS A SURPRISE."

We shouldn't ignore the pollinator or bee aspect of this.

The beehives serve as an educational tool to tie in curiosity about honey and honey bees with learning more about urban agriculture.

In October I started volunteering with the Chicago Honey Co-op, selling their goods at market whilst at the same time picking their brains and sharing beekeeping stories.

We became friends and to this day they remain my greatest mentors. They helped me put together a list of things that I would need to get my project off the ground, and that formed the base for the Kickstarter – a crowd-funding website for creative projects – that I was drafting up. I moved back into the city and whilst out to lunch with a friend, we discussed my idea and the name was formed – Bike-a-Bee! In January of 2012 I launched my Kickstarter and immediately received a lot of press. It appeared to be the right idea at the right time – everyone was ready to make honeybees more public in the city, especially in community gardens. It was very exciting, and I was immensely happy with how it went. The Kickstarter was funded in a matter of two weeks with $1500 to spare! I ordered all of the beekeeping equipment and a week later it showed up at my door – all of it, stacked 6ft tall on a shipping pallet which I broke down and hauled piece by piece up to my 3rd floor apartment. I ordered my bees from Indiana, my bike trailer from Bikes at Work in Ames, Iowa, and a bunch of jars for the finished honey.

Now the real work began. I had parties to help me assemble the flat-packed hive boxes and frames and then another get-together to help with painting them to protect them from the elements. Once they were built, I enlisted the help of my friend Brandon Gobel who runs Chicago Cargo. He has a Bullitt cargo bike and helps businesses with deliveries all around the city. His bike, plus a trailer, PLUS my bike and trailer allowed us to deliver 20 cinder blocks, 20 bricks, four empty beehives, and eventually four boxes of live bees to four different gardens. (The four other beehives started out in the hands of an Indiana bee farm and were delivered to their gardens using a borrowed car). Brandon was very excited by it all and I did what I could to pay him back by buying us beer and pizza after a long hot day of schlepping things across town.

Since the initial set-up, visiting the hives to check up on the bees has been exclusively done by bike. I load up my bike trailer with extra hive boxes for hive expansion, put my bee smoker into my custom-made rack-mounted smoker holster, and load up my tools and veil into my panniers. Thursdays are my beekeeping days; every week my apprentice Jillian and I meet at my apartment at 8:30am to head out and check 36

up on the bees. She rides her bike too. It’s a full day’s work; sweaty, satisfying work. Lighting fires in the smoker, scraping, wedging, prying and pulling to extract frames for inspection, lifting supers full of honey and the occasional sting, not to mention riding a loaded bike around in 95° Fahrenheit plus temperatures – perfect beekeeping weather! But there’s nothing quite like visiting a beehive, never knowing what to expect. Each hive is a surprise. The smells of the hives too – lifting up a super and inhaling that slightly fermented, sweet-as-honey smell is something so special.

In the coming months, as the bees slow down for the fall and winter, I can look back with great joy at a successful summer. Bike a Bee’s been a success in several ways. I have ten hives happy and buzzing, tons of new friends and community connections, and I’ve begun school and community outreach.

Getting to teach kids and teenagers about the importance of honey bees and pollination has been rewarding personally and totally fun. Next year and over the winter I hope to do a lot more of that. I also hope to expand the number of hives I keep to around 20. That feels pretty manageable for one person with helpers. At first I thought ten was going to be unmanageable, but as I worked on them week after week I felt more confident. And, with more and more people looking to help and learn about beekeeping, extra hands will never be out of reach.

Choosing to conduct my beekeeping all by bicycle is less for moral and more for practical reasons. Cycling really is in my blood; my dad rode a bunch in college and taught me how to completely overhaul vintage steel bikes. I’ve never owned a car and when I worked in the suburbs I rode 40 miles each day to and from work. Cycling feels as natural to me as breathing, so it just made sense to me to do all of the beekeeping by bike. Whenever I do need help Brandon is right there with his Bullitt to strap it down! So far I haven’t felt like anything is impossible. Hard and challenging, yes, but there’s a certain freedom in knowing you can haul anything with your bike and two legs.

Further Reading www.bikeabee.com www.chicagohoneycoop.com www.chicagocargo.us

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Words Jet McDonald / www.jetmcdonald.com Illustration Chrysa Koukoura / www.chrysakoukoura.com

POTBELLY A big cheese in a sock, a bowling ball in a sausage skin, a melon in a hair net. There it is, slumped over the Lycra waistband with the one good eye of its belly button.

I'm skinny. I cycle everywhere and have eaten more than my fair share of marshmallows without a ‘piling on the pounds shocker’ so it was perplexing to find this new addition to the family, this furtive pregnancy.

A passenger lost in the rhythm of the journey is always surprised when he reaches the station. And so it is with ‘Middle Age’. You can carry on cycling. You can carry on blazing your way up hills but the destination will always arrive, redistributing your body fat like a cook ladling out soup in a prison canteen.

One of the ironies of modern road racing is that those most drawn to it have the biggest pot bellies. I'm not talking Bradley Wiggins here but your everyday Trevor, forty-something zipwire cyclists. The greatest irony is that their Lycra jumpsuit only heightens the blip of time they are seeking to outrace. Everyday they zoom past, head down, shades on, uncommunicative, defiant, belly out.

So why are there so many men racing round in Lycra looking like knots in a pipe cleaner?

Well I would argue its physical manifestation is just a distraction from the philosophical cogs within. When I cut an imaginary slice through a pot belly, an MRI of a hump, I see not blood and guts but sprockets and spindles, tick-ticking like a well-greased chainset.

To understand this you must know something of the biology of aging, the metaphysics of the Irish surrealist Flann O' Brien and finally that tentative thing we call ‘gut instinct’. So pull on your spandex, lace up your booties, put on your gloves, grip the handlebars, lean over your tiny tummy and let’s eat road.

The pot belly is a feature not just of getting older but distinctly of men and middle age. Whereas adolescent women start redistributing their fat to the shapely breast, thigh and backside, men accumulate it to a greater extent inside the belly and under the abdominal skin.

This is far more efficient for locomotion. Carrying 38

around the fat stores in the centre of the body rather than the extremities allows the limbs to transport the centre of gravity that much quicker, thus allowing man to hunt and gather in peloton packs.

This fat is accumulated in a little curtain that hangs down from the stomach called the “omentum”. The omentum is the safety curtain before the main act. From our twenties into our forties our muscles begin to shrink, the same muscles that burn off all those marshmallows.

Fat accumulates in the belly as the muscles shrink, hence the disproportionate tyre around our hips. We need to eat that bit less and exercise that bit more to shrug off the weight that our middle-aged self no longer burns.

Middle-aged man looks at belly. Belly button returns gaze. Middle aged man buys bike. A fast one? Surely.

Fast bikes must burn fat faster than slower ones. A light one? Of course. One day man will be lighter than air.

Restoration to full reproductive potential? Absolutely.

Whippets in yellow jerseys with silver trophies and ejaculating magnums of champagne delivered by young ladies in tight t-shirts are the true self within the outer pumpkin.

Meanwhile, reality sets in for trench warfare with fantasy. Lycra advances. Belly button plants flag into higher ground.

A clothing company has found that twelve-year-old boys do up their trousers at hip level, teenagers drop their belts gunslinger stylee and older men follow a slow climb of belt to the highest point aged fifty-seven. In other words just as the belly is seeking earthly solace its harness is seeking heavenly flight. And so middle-aged men continue to be swallowed by spacesuits of Lycra stamped with corporate logos. Team Siemens. Team Garmin.

Team Sky. Hunter-gatherer packs will persist. This is the message. And they will bring back the cash.

So runs the dull thread of evolutionary biology. But I know there is something more defiant happening in the pot belly. Something more ‘kerpow!’ Not in the padding of the Lycra road warrior. But in the belly of the plain old man beneath.

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“SUIT YOURSELF.” HE POPPED ONE INTO HIS GOB. AND THEN HE PATTED HIS TINY TUMMY AND RODE OFF INTO THE MIDDLE DISTANCE. FOOLISHLY, FATLY, HAPPILY.

Flann O’Brien isn't the most famous Irish writer. But he has to be one of the oddest. James Joyce is obscure but Flann O’Brien is just bonkers. In the same way that peripheral vision hints at what we don't yet see, so Flann O’Brien offers glimpses of ourselves at the margins of sanity.

Summarising O’Brien's novel ‘The Third Policeman’ would be like trying to stack playing cards; suffice to say that it contains a lot of bicycles. The narrator finds himself in a bucolic unreality, much like rural Ireland, held captive by two portly policeman. The policemen are preoccupied by the habits of the bicycles in their parish.

“You would be flabbergasted at the number of bicycles that are half-human almost half-man, half-partaking of humanity.” While the inverse also holds true and a rider takes on the bikeness of his steed. “He will walk smartly always and never sit down and he will lean against the wall with his elbow out and stay like that all night instead of going to bed.” Such a state of affairs is caused by “the interchanging of atoms of each of them.”

Not only this but the bikes of the village have human appetites. “No one ever caught them with a mouthful of steak. All I know is that the food disappears....It is not the first time I have noticed crumbs at the front wheels of some of these gentlemen.” What we never find out is whether a cyclist develops the gluttony of a bicycle, hungers for silicon lube and sealed bearings. We are however told hold how to spot a man’s bikeness.

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“How could you know if a man has a lot of bicycle in his veins?”

“If his number is over Fifty [percent] you can tell it unmistakeable from his walk... If he walks too slowly or he stops in the middle of the road he will fall down in a heap and will have to be lifted and set in motion again by some extraneous party.”

I would argue that you can now spot a man gone half bicycle by his pot belly. Once he has reached fifty percent of his lifespan, the cyclist will have intermingled sufficiently with his steed to have developed a machine in his gut region, a housing so gracefully arched as to allow free movement of an inner chainwheel.

Middle-aged man, dribbling over bike catalogues with their buffets of Shimano group sets and Campagnolo shifters, cannot help but consume all this mechanical gear, internalise it into the vertical hump of the pot belly.

Surely this trumps the dull plod of evolutionary biology.

Yadda yadda yadda... the belly is a famine pot, a larder for hunter gatherers, a tub of fat to share with child and mother. None of this is true. The pot belly is the foundry of a lifetime’s love affair with the bicycle, smitten into a drive chain. Partners, I beg you to put an ear to the belly of your male spouse. You will hear not the ticking of

41 new life but of old life ticking into newness.

But what is it doing in there, this second flywheel?

Where is it taking us in its tiny tum?

Unbeknown to us, the pot belly is a machine for creating ‘Omnium’. In ‘The Third Policeman’ we are told by one of the cops that Omnium is “the essential inherent interior essence which is hidden inside the root of the kernel of everything and it is always the same.” Omnium is the basic matter underpinning all substance in the universe, a dark matter, not just of the soul, but, I would argue, of the gut.

What Flann O’Brien cannot have known was that what he called Omnium in 1939 would become an Olympic cycling sport called the ‘Omnium’ in London 2012.

The Omnium has to be one of the strangest sports to make it past the Olympic committee. Billed as the ‘Heptathlon of cycling’ it is in fact six events rolled into one: the flying lap, the points race, the elimination race (also known as ‘The Devil’), the individual pursuit, the scratch race and the time trial. O’Brien would have recognised both its eccentricity and its artifice, much like one of the sham experiments created by his mad scientist and savant ‘de Selby’ in ‘The Third Policeman’.

Slap bang in the middle of the Olympic Omnium is ‘The Devil’. Ostensibly a track elimination event in which cyclists are removed at every lap, its nickname makes direct reference to the cruel circularity of hell.

And without spoiling it too much this is where the narrator of ‘The Third Policeman’ finds himself, trapped in a circular journey where the punishments of eternity and the hangman’s gallows are always round the corner.

Somewhere in the worldwide cycling federation there is a drunk Irishman naming international cycling events after sham scientific idioms. And what else is an Olympic velodrome if not a Hadron collider accelerating cyclists round and round and round in the hope of creating an invisible national pride, a particle and principle of unfathomable worth. Bikes are usually for going places but in an Olympic velodrome everybody is going nowhere in the pursuit of being someone, turning base metal into immortal gold.

Flann O'Brien plays with the idea of eternity in ‘The Third Policeman’ and at the heart of this playfulness is Omnium. “If you had a sack of it or even the half-full of a matchbox of it, you could do anything and even do what could not be described by that name.” The policemen lead the hapless hero to an underground chamber where manipulations of clockwork and

wires and levers are responsible for the maintenance of Omnium and infinity. In the deep corridors of this world the days do not pass at all. “When you leave here you will be the same age as you were coming in... the beard does not grow, and if you are fed you do not get hungry and if you are hungry you do not get hungrier.” A world where a hungry pot-bellied middle-aged cyclist does not age at all. A foundry in fact where it is possible to conjure perfect bicycles from nowhere and gold from nothing. “To my astonishment he went over to one of the bigger ovens, manipulated some knobs, pulled open the massive metal door and lifted out a brand new bicycle... and the block of gold, which was encased in a well made timber box, was lifted down and placed on the floor.”

This is what I would argue is happening in the male pot belly. A clockwork machine is evolving, a machine made from shiny new bike parts expressly for the purpose of creating Omnium, a mechanism for warding off mortality.

And this can only be a good thing. A cynic might argue that immortality is a self-deluding fairytale but this doesn't stop a middle-aged man from questing towards it. And this quest has a certain flawed grandeur, like that of Don Quixote, a seventeenth century fictional character and proto-potbellied supercyclist. Don Quixote is an old man riding on a nag into the desert proclaiming himself to be a knight in shining armour.

If a cop from ‘The Third Policeman’ had chanced upon Don Quixote in medieval Spain he would have surely nicked him for having a “number over fifty”, so intermingled is he with the atoms of unreality. Don Quixote is a happy fantasist, casting pub landlords as Lords, attacking windmills instead of armies, imagining wheels within wheels. We suspect that deep down he knows the lie but why should we deny him this?

We might never outride time zooming around on our superfast bikes but we can still enjoy the journey. And cycling is always about engineering escape rather than predicting arrival. In the same way that life is not about its length but what we do within it.

I described all of this, the pot belly, the omentum, the Omnium within the Omnium, the clockwork eternity inside the male paunch, to a friend outside the local bakery.

“What do you reckon?”

“Not much,” he said as he tucked into a bag of jam doughnuts. “Fancy one?”

“Trying to cut down.”

“Suit yourself.” He popped one into his gob. And then he patted his tiny tummy and rode off into the middle distance. Foolishly, fatly, happily.

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Recycle-a-Bicycle New York City

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My name is Pasqualina Azzarello, and I’m the Executive Director of Recycle-a-Bicycle here in Brooklyn, New York. Recycle-a-Bicycle has really come a long way since its inception seventeen years ago as a youth programme of Transportation Alternatives, which is the primary advocacy organisation in New York City for cyclists and pedestrians.

In the last seventeen years we’ve grown to include two retail stores in Brooklyn and Manhattan, a job training centre in Queens and nine school-based programmes across all five boroughs.

In addition to our locations we also have a Kids Ride Club, a programme that leaves the physical locations of Recyclea-Bicycle. In this past year we have had more than one hundred kids collectively pedal 24,000 miles throughout New York City and beyond.

And 95% of these kids live in low income neighbourhoods. About half way through the season we had a bunch of parents wanting to join in the ride and find out why their kids are so happy when they come home on Sunday afternoons.

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City has changed, how our country and the world have changed in terms of all of the things that they have begun to pay attention to, they're very much in line with Recycle-a-Bicycle’s mission.

Looking at the value of paying closer attention to our environment, or job training or youth development or being physically active, I started to think about how Recycle-a-Bicycle could become a resource for other organisations.

Every year Recycle-a-Bicycle brings a delegation of our youth interns down to Washington DC for the National Bike Summit to get a little glimpse into how process and policy works. They are just as much a voice at the table as anybody else. It’s an incredible thing to watch the personal tranformation that takes place within them.

I think it really means a lot to people of all ages to walk into a space and feel that, first and foremost, there is room for who they are We also do a number of community events. We have what we call Bike Bonanzas: Recycle-a-Bicycle provides 25 refurbished bicycles and we run volunteer events to refurbish kids' bikes.

We bring them to public spaces, usually parks, throughout the city and we host a Kids' Bike Swop. Kids grow so quickly, and this way parents don’t have to buy bikes every year. They donate their bicycle that no longer fits their child, and we have mechanics on hand to refurbish the bikes that are coming in during the day. Then they can upgrade to a bicycle that fits them. It’s actually very sweet to see the little kid who donates the bike get to meet the younger child who now gets to ride their bike.

I think it really means a lot to people of all ages to walk into a space and feel that, first and foremost, there is room for who they are. You know people have so many reasons for riding bicycles and I think it's really important to recognise that in the work that we do.

For some people it’s transportation, for some people it’s because they think it’s the right thing to do, but regardless of people’s reasons, if you are riding a bike, you are riding a bike.

I became the director three years ago, and looking around at how New York

A couple of years ago I realised just how interested the advocates who go to DC every year were in meeting our youth interns. It’s important for the advocacy movement to be inclusive. Any policies that involve cyclists involve all cyclists, so we need to utilise our role within the community to bring more people into that conversation.

And so, we thought, why don’t we create an event? We live in New York, we have a lot of resources. Let’s create an event that becomes the touchstone national event for youth, bikes, education and advocacy. And sure enough, we drew a circle in the sand, and we were as surprised as anybody at just how strong the interest was and how much people wanted to be a part of it.

It’s very inspiring to be here, and to have my office and meetings here, and to be inspired by this very direct transformation that takes place with the bicycles, with the people here and their students. So you know from where we sit, we know that if streets are safer, more young people will ride and more people will ride of all ages and that’s really what we want to see happen.

Nick Hand interviewed Pasqualina as part of a ride from New York City up the Hudson Valley to Hudson Falls.

You can see some of Nick's photofilms at departmentofsmallworks.co.uk.

His book, Conversations on the Coast, documenting the people he met whilst riding around the coast of Britain and Ireland, is available from our shop at boneshakermag.com

www.recycleabicycle.org 43

John Migden is a UK-based photographer, writer, teacher and cyclist. The project Bound was part of an MA Photography Show for the University for the Creative Arts. www.johnmigdenphotography.com

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Through cycling we can find where our thresholds are and once there, strive to move on, to cross the boundary that holds us back from discovering or even creating new parts of ourselves. By questioning what we are capable of, we extend the lines of our limitations and in doing so, transcend for a moment both what we are bound by and what we are bound for: moving in a void.

The drive to expand our physical and mental capabilities must be one of the prerequisites for being human. The process of evolution itself speaks for our development and by looking at the ways in which we live, communicate, inhabit and seek out new things, we can see a constant shift in our position in the world. But this is not the only way we develop. We test ourselves not only collectively but also as individuals. We search for borders within ourselves and move to cross inner thresholds. Over the many years that cycling has been part of our world, the question of what makes it so important to us has, I think, always had something to do with this.

I approached the project Bound first and foremost as a cyclist. My life, like so many who spend most of their time straddling a saddle, is punctuated by a myriad of sensations and experiences created as a result of riding my bike.

My investment in cycling is fathoms deep and I know very well how it enriches and informs other aspects of my life.

As a photographer I wanted to use this project as a way of exploring and documenting the effort of crossing boundaries and thresholds. The photographs themselves are sequenced and show varying degrees of movement and effort during a threshold training session. As movement increases, the body and machine assimilate, and together form a skeleton of bone and metal. A black background decontextualises the subject, intimating that where we move from and to is far less relevant than the effort itself.

The images are also born out of a frustration with how sports, and particularly cycling photography are perceived. In response to this I wanted to merge the aesthetic of fine art with the physicality of riding and produce a piece where art and cycling meet; representing in a gallery space the intensity and spirit of the sport.

Essentially, it is a set of simple images that on one level aim to show both the beauty and effort of cycling, whilst perhaps on a slightly deeper level they speak and ask questions about what holds us back and what pulls us forward.

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Returning to my bike after an afternoon wander, I find a little card tag hanging from the handlebars. It says ‘Tell me your bike story’ and there’s a link to a website.

That website and the story collection that goes along with it are, it transpires, the creations of a slender, shy-seeming chap called Chris Price.

“Every bike is in a relationship,” he says over a cold pint beside Bristol docks. “There’s always a story of how bike and owner came to be together, what holds them together, the miles they’ve covered.” Chris moved to Bristol – Boneshaker’s hometown, and the UK’s first official ‘Cycling City’ – a little over a year ago, and was inspired by the people’s passion for their bikes. As a graphic design student, he sought a pictorial way to tell this story, and began photographing bikes, then doing simple line drawings of them, “to gather all the shapes, characteristics and variety of bikes Bristol showcases on a daily basis. With each drawing I am trying to tell the story of the bike with only one line.” He gathers the photos as he loops 46

around the city on his 1970s orange Peugeot. Through the handlebar tags he encourages each bike’s owner to share their own bike stories – their past bike-loves, their perfect bike, the good times and bad times they’ve seen from the saddle.

He uses the collected images and shared stories to create charmingly folksy art works, zines and prints.

One of these prints throws light on the depth of Chris’ own personal relationship with cycling. Called ‘Cyclung’, it’s a touching, childlike drawing of two lungs composed of bike parts. Chris has Cystic Fibrosis. Whilst most of us consider cycling’s beneficial effects on lung function as happy bonus, for Chris bicycles are essential to his continued enjoyment of life. The stories he’s collecting and carefully drawing show, one by one, that bikes are important in hundreds of other ways too.

Though each tale is unremarkable – simple sentiments expressed off the cuff, relayed unedited with iffy grammar and haphazard spelling intact – it’s the charm of Chris’s original idea that sings. Anyone who has let cycling permeate their life will know the nuanced and enduring bond between bike and rider. Every bike tells a story. But to think “I’ll collect those stories and share them with the world”, that’s what sets Chris apart. He’s a do-er, an enthusiast – and the world can never have too many enthusiasts.

www.everybikeinbristol.com

A CUPCAKE ON WHEELS Jayde Perkin

Once upon a time, many years ago (about twenty-one years to be precise) a heavily pregnant woman won a bike in a competition she’d forgotten she’d entered.

This woman is my mother. Not long after the arrival of this unexpected pink and mauve Raleigh Monterey, something else heavy and chunky entered their livestheir third child/ light of their lives. This is me.

I had a few bikes when I was little – maybe a Barbie one, which is strange as I never really liked girly things. I have vague recollections of a red one too, but that might have been my little brother’s.

I do remember having a black bike with bright yellow wheels though; it was called FALCON or DESTROYER or EAGLE-TESTICLES or something like that. We went on a few family bike rides, but usually just with my dad. I can count on one hand how many times my mum joined us on her bike. So the days turned into weeks, the weeks into months and the months into years of that poor bike rusting away in our spider-ridden shed. Then, when I was 18 I got a job selling ice creams on the beach – a half hour to walk from my house.

“Anyone who has let cycling permeate their life will know the nuanced and enduring bond between bike and rider.”

I’m usually running late/a little worse for wear in the mornings, so I dug out the unloved Raleigh, and from then on it became my best friend... I still had issues with the colour though – most of my childhood involved me getting muddy knees and wrestling with boys, and certainly didn’t involve much pink.

This bike was like a cupcake on wheels. But I took ownership of the bike and brought it to Uni with me, and when I got into the swing of things I began using it every day. The colour was still a bit of an issue, so I took it apart, give it a well-deserved cleaning, sand down and repaint. Now it’s a dark green with sunflowers. The sunflowers are a bit shabby up close but I get lots of compliments, such as: “I love the flowers. but your chain needs a serious oiling.”

So that’s it, it’s older than me, it makes funny noises and is far too heavy. But I love it.”

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In the morning, on the mountains, many hours before the race passes by, the crowd starts to gather.

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Earlier, the landscape had been transformed. Cows stand around close by, gazing upon the metamorphosis of their environment with a sort of ambivalent amusement.

Enormous iron and plastic structures have suddenly appeared on their prairies. Gigantic inflatable Coke bottles rise up against the horizon.

The race organisers are painting the finishing line on the road, tuning the chronometer up and putting up the

podium. Others place metal fences on the roadsides in the last few kilometres before the finishing line. Hostesses in high-heels and mini-skirts skitter about, handing out sweets and small gifts to the crowd. It’s the summer, but it’s cold up here on the mountain pass.

Like a circus big top, it all seems to have appeared from nowhere and will be removed in a matter of hours only to appear in exactly the same way elsewhere.

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he crowd comes from the valley, from nearby towns. Some of them cycle themselves; they go out on weekends with their bike and their club, and now they put their strength to the test by climbing the mountain pass that the riders they admire so much will also climb later on. Others walk and stop, congregating where the road bends, from which they can see their town deep down in the valley.

They bring flags and they chat about the climb being too hard for a certain cyclist, and about another who might make a big difference today on the general classification. They like cycle races – they watch them on TV– and today they will take advantage of this great opportunity: the race will pass near their town, and they have come to watch.

Groups of old ladies and granddads with their grandsons get settled with their portable fridges, folding chairs and bags of food. They make themselves comfortable in the ditches and make their sandwiches.

They offer the photographer something to eat when they see him walking up and down the roads. Excitement comes short in the valley. The race passing by so near becomes a real event. Feast day.

Excitement comes short in the valley.

The race passing by so near becomes a real event. Feast day.

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ime goes by and the loudspeakers are now heard in the distance. Cows move away from the racket and get lost in the prairie, bored once again. The crowd gets nervous, someone with a radio stuck to their ear confirms that yes, they are coming. The spectators create a human tunnel along the sides of these narrow roads. The pavement becomes swallowed up by excited feet and people, anticipating that the riders approach, begin to cheer and clap.

And at the bottom, down in the valley, it is true that one can spot a helmet and handlebars fast approaching. But the race started a long time before. A long way from here.

Everything is cycling.

David Serrano is a photographer based in Spain. davidserranophotos.com

my shoulder hurts. So much as I’d love to, I know I shouldn’t get back in the saddle quite yet. Missing two months of riding in January and February was a shame. It’d be a lot worse to set myself back so that I miss the early morning rides as the sun comes up in spring, or the after-work blasts with mates around dusty trails. So I’ll be patient.

I rode 11,897 miles by bicycle last year. I know that because I am an obsessive mile counter.

On January 1st each year I tot up the miles on each bike’s computer from the last twelve months to see how I’ve done. It began about ten years ago, when I set myself a target of 5,000 miles. I just made it. And only on one bike back then: an eight-speed Trek Bruiser with triple-clamp forks. Not terribly practical for the aspiring mile-muncher, but good for the thighs. I’ve gone a little further every year since.

Last year was the first time I’d reached 10,000 and I was pretty surprised by how far beyond that I managed to go. To New Zealand, a Kiwi friend pointed out.

But this year isn’t going to be a record breaker for me. Why so defeatist? Because on Jan 6th a pedestrian dashed out in front of me and I slammed into her, went over the bars, and landed on my left shoulder in the road. I knew it was pretty bad straight away because I couldn’t move or speak, although I was weirdly calm as a lay looking up at the people crowding round me. I remember wondering whether the traffic light really was green for me. (Turns out it was.) And hoping the lady I hit was OK. (She was, I think. At least she left hospital before I did, on foot, and still refusing to look me in the eye despite that fact that we’d shared the ambulance and done the rounds of triage, A&E and x-ray more or less together.)

And being thankful that I had my helmet on, even though I’d just popped home from work at lunchtime and was only riding the two miles back into the centre of town. (The helmet’s toast. My skull’s fine. It’s personal choice, but I’ll carry on wearing one.)

So it turned out I’d joined the host of cyclists who’ve broken a collar bone by falling off their bike. The doctor thinks I probably cracked at least a couple of ribs too, but didn’t bother x-raying them because he said there’s nothing that can be done in any case. Having broken a rib before, I reckon he’s right on both counts.

That was six weeks and two days ago. I haven’t been on a bike since. I guess that’s the longest I’ve gone without cycling since my dad let go of the saddle in our back garden in 1982 and I wobbled off without stabilisers for the first time. I’ve probably got another couple of weeks to go. I still can’t sleep on my left side because

But actually it hasn’t been as frustrating as I feared. Maybe the time of year has a lot to do with it, but for someone who would always say ‘a cyclist’ before anything else when asked to describe himself, I’ve found it surprisingly easy to be a pedestrian. After the accident, people tried to make me feel better by pointing out that you notice stuff when you’re walking that you don’t see when you’re riding by on a bike.

And that’s both true and good. Walking brings direct contact with the earth and a slower slip of passing things, two treats much overlooked in modern life. But the main benefit of my enforced winter on foot has been subtler than that. It’s been remembering that riding isn’t just about munching miles. When I next clip in and roll away from the front door it’ll be simply because I want to. Because I want to feel the flow while bashing along wooded trails, or the breeze on my face as I roll along country lanes on the road bike, or even that feeling of me-against-the-elements when I’m out on the crappiest, wettest, windiest day Britain can throw at me. Because I enjoy it and it’s good for the soul.

Of course, getting over my obsession with racking up the distance isn’t the same as getting over my obsession with cycling. In the weeks without riding I filled the void by painting a portrait of my bikes, organising this year’s Bristol Cycle Festival, cleaning and fettling the hard tail, the full-susser and the road bike, and planning a load of rides to fill the months ahead. So I’m still as one-dimensional as ever, but I’d like to think that one dimension is a little more rounded than it used to be.

If you ride a lot the chances are you’ll have a nasty stack at some point. It’ll hurt and you’ll probably be angry, irrespective of whose fault it is. And most of all you’ll be frustrated because you can’t do what you love doing: spinning your legs and rolling along under your own steam. But hang in there.

Paint a picture. Spread the maps on the floor and set your mind to some big days out. Use your time as a pedestrian to remember why you love being a cyclist.

––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– Words Rob Wall bespokebikeportraits.blogspot.co.uk Illustration Eleanor Crow eleanorcrow.com 55

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espite its sinuous curves and instinctive grace, cycling is a very Cubist endeavour.

Cubists liked to observe a subject from several different points in space and time simultaneously, moving their painterly gaze around an object to capture it from several successive angles, which became translated into a single image.

The notion of ‘mobile perspective' is key here – the way those cunning Cubists tried to represent the various surfaces of their subject matter in a single picture plane, as if the subject – a dancer in a cafe, a woman on a horse, a cyclist on the track – had all their surfaces visible at the same time. For most cyclists, the notion of mobile perspective will probably sound familiar. The way the world shifts quickly enough for perspectives and the surfaces of things to be in continual flux, but not so fast that the mind’s eye cannot appreciate this multiplicity.

In their scholarly tome Du "Cubisme" (pretty much the first the first book-length account of the aims and methods of Cubism) the French Cubist Jean Metzinger (and his contemporary Albert Gleizes) explicitly related our sense of time to mobile perspective, linking it in turn to the notion of ‘duration’ as proposed by the philosopher and fellow Frenchman Henri Bergson, according to which life is subjectively experienced as a continuum, with the past flowing into the present and the present merging into the future. Again, a notion familiar to anyone who’s taken in life’s inexorable passing from the saddle of a bike. The planning of a long ride, the riding of those map-marked miles, the anticipation of a day’s hard-won destination...here, amid the bicycle’s companionable creaks and the soft purr of tyres on tarmac, does every cyclist really feel Bergson’s ‘duration’; the past flowing into the present and the present merging into the future.

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" M ETZINGER WAS UNSATISFIED WITH CONVENTIONAL PERSPECTIVE, THE IDEA OF SEEING THINGS FROM ONE FIXED POINT..."

Metzinger was unsatisfied with conventional perspective, the idea of seeing things from one fixed point, which never quite tells the whole story of how it actually feels to experience something. And so, through him (many claim) the idea that a subject could be seen in movement and from many different angles was born. As anyone who watched the cycling bits of the Olympics will agree, seeing the world in movement and from many different angles really adds to one’s appreciation of life. Much like cycling itself.

No wonder then that Metzinger turned his brush to bikes – as seen here in his “At the Cycle-Race Track” (1912), A hundred years on, the painting (on show at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice) retains its fresh, dynamic strangeness.

In it, Metzinger turned the avantgarde pictorial language of Cubism to the dynamic, perspective-shifting world of cycle-racing, attempting to depict speed and to define in paint the fourth dimension – alluded to in the number ‘4’ in the stadium

grandstand. Who is the rider? What is the race? It doesn’t really matter – but for the record, we’re looking (using several different perspectives and in a non-time-fixed kind of way) at the final yards of the infamous Paris-Roubaix race (aka The Hell of the North, a very tough and cobbly ride it is too), and the 1912 winner, Charles Crupelandt. He won again in 1914, just before northern France really did become something like hell. The last cobbled stretch of the race is named Espace Charles Crupelandt in his honour.

All images © Jean Metzinger, by SIAE 2012, with thanks to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice. www.guggenheim-venice.it

M A I N At the Cycle-Race Track (Au Vélodrome) 1912 , Oil, sand and collage on canvas T O P L E F T Study for At the Cycle-Race Track, 1912, Graphite and charcoal on beige paper TOP R I GHT Cyclist (Le Bicycliste) 1912, Oil on board with sand I N S E T Jean Metzinger portrait, Archives Božena Nikiel, Paris

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In front of and behind me the road stretches straight into the horizon. On either side, low-lying brush disappears into the distance.

I'm heading east on the Eyre Highway across the Nullarbor Plain in Southern Australia accompanied only by my bicycle.

Black Ribbon by nick souÄ?ek

outback, in a very literal sense, a long way from anywhere. 59 Whilst the terrain does not greatly vary, however, particularly given the unbroken straightness of road I’m on, my passage feels far from monotonous. In all honesty I’m enjoying every sweat-drenched moment of it, not least because of the affective experience of space and time unfurling (and at the same time unchanging) in front of me.

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oaded with camping equipment, several weeks’ worth of food and two days’ worth of water (14 litres), 300km lie between me and the last town and it’s 900km until I reach the next one. Whilst it’s not yet noon, the temperature on my cycle computer already reads 37 degrees Celsius. Over the coming weeks I’ll be replenishing my water supply at road-houses, which are really not more than petrol stations, dotted every hundred kilometres or so. In terms of settlement, there isn’t much else. Along the way I’m sharing the road with the scattered road trains (multi-trailer trucks), occasional caravans, and the lesser-seen aeroplane; occasionally I’ll find myself rolling over runway markings on the road that designate airstrips used by the Australian flying doctors. My only other company as I pedal on through this stark wilderness, other than myself – with whom, I should add, I'm happy to spend time – is a library of music and audiobooks. A small solar charger hangs out of my handlebar bag and keeps the music and stories ticking over.

The section of road I’m currently on is entirely straight for 146.6km. The only curve to it follows the curvature of the earth. As I continue toward the skyline my surroundings barely change. It’s almost as though I’m static. Only the configuration of the scrub, the periodic hapless kangaroos on the roadside, the white dashes marking the road’s middle slipping beneath me in unvarying uniformity, and the trembling over-sized numbers on my speedometer indicate movement. I’m pushing into the expanse of the Australian

Cycling involves moving through and across space. It’s a spatial practice. Encountering the seeming endlessness of the Nullarbor is to experience the scale of its geography in an unnervingly honest way. Not only is cycling through such a large and open expanse different to driving (the more popular means of crossing from Western to South Australia) but the passage of time and space is more visceral, and feels significant in a different way. The extent of the space, spilling over the Earth in every direction, in dictating endlessness, also echoes timelessness. The road, in this sense, offers a thin line of familiarity, and certainty, from which to push through this raw, atemporal land. Over the coming weeks I will spend all of my time within fifty metres of this road. It is my lifeline through the desert. Not only will it be my means of navigation – which involves simply adhering to this ribbon for one and a half thousand kilometres – but along its edge I will, as I go, find water, showers and sporadic supplementary food.

In practice the road is simultaneously a safe and a dangerous place. In the first instance, it is an avenue of certainty.

The way is known. The black ribbon represents a lay-line of civilisation, of humankind’s mark on the desert, that stretches across the endless space and in so doing, ties connections between places. In this way the road is not a marker in the same sense as Hansel and Gretel’s trail of pebbles. Rather, like a string stretched across a balloon, Eyre Highway offers a thin tunnel of access where it cuts into the earth. On one hand, the thread of road is not dominant, but is swallowed up by the landscape. On the other, the asphalt dictates where I go, and shapes what I see. In this sense it is both my keeper and guardian.

The road, of course, is also a dangerous place, and the Eyre Highway is by no means an exception. The limitations of my mode of transport keep me tied to this path, and so tied to the shadows of often both surprisingly long and wide fast-moving vehicles. Some of these vehicles are so long that they cannot deviate more than one metre from their line in several hundred metres, and they take longer than that to stop. Others are so wide that they trundle along, albeit not quite with the same speed, escorted front and rear by police and ‘pilots’ (vans that drive a kilometre ahead or behind with flashing lights and bearing a sign reading simply ‘OVERSIZE’). The caravans at least don’t take up so much space, and their vehicles are infinitely more manoeuvrable.

At the same time, their drivers are likely much less 59

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The black ribbon represents a lay-line of civilisation, of humankind’s mark on the desert, that stretches across the endless space and in doing so, ties connections between places.

Maine, USA, I met a guy named Levi who had cycled with a couple of friends from the eastern shores of Russia, through Russia, right across to the west coast of Europe. Between these two stories I learned that such journeys are not the preserve of ‘other people’. Rather, long-distance cycling is democratically open to all. The only prerequisite being that one has to want to do it.

experienced in that context. Whilst I can anticipate the risks involved in sharing the road with trucks and caravans, the real risk lies in them not anticipating me. Reliant on the road, I am obliged to this precariousness. The road represents both my security, and my greatest anxiety.

Why Australia? Why the Nullarbor? Why cycle? Simply put, I grew up in Perth, Western Australia. When I was eleven I moved abroad with my close family, and whilst I still visit family in Australia I’ve not actually lived there as an adult.

By cycling, my hope is to overlap the two worlds of Australia and the UK, and in doing so, re-encounter my former home of Western Australia; not just its geographical expanse, but also the people that have made their lives there. It is because of this that I have found myself somewhere along the 3200 kilometre, largely coastal, route from Perth to Adelaide.

The idea of long-distance cycling did not entirely come out of the blue. A couple of years ago friends of mine cycled from Bristol, in Southwest England, to India over the course of a year (see Boneshaker #2). Visiting their blog regularly, what really struck me was that, with a certain amount of determination and time, fairly normal people could comfortably cycle huge distances. Later that year, whilst in 60

There are, of course, physical and psychological challenges associated with long-distance cycling. At the same time, these are by no means insurmountable. Whilst cycling every day demands effort, it is not hard work. Whilst at times it meant fairly unimaginative meals, I comfortably maintained my vegetarian diet. And without necessarily condoning such practices, I’ll happily admit that I’ve continued to enjoy both drinking and smoking as I make my way across – often to the surprise of the health-conscious, and very omnivorous, Australians. I feel I should concede that I did spend one third of my nine-week journey not cycling but volunteering at various organic farms along the way – a unique way to meet a variety of amazing people. I learned that long-distance cycling is not necessarily about refraining from other pleasures. Rather than at their expense, cycling should be seen as ‘in addition’ to other things. The addition of cycling, open to all people, only helps to further open up possibilities.

Most of the people I’d meet travelling the Eyre Highway had made a conscious decision to drive rather than fly between Australia’s cities, despite the high cost of petrol in Australia.

Of course, different people had different reasons; many of the people I spent time with had sought the isolation of the Nullarbor. At the same time they were keen to share food and wine, and exchange ideas, stories and company. I often felt a shared solidarity in solitude. Even in some very remote parts of Australia there was always company if I wanted it.

There was a sense of camaraderie, of people coming together, even if fleetingly, to help each other out in a potentially

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hostile place. Constantly encountering the generosity of others is infectious and it galvanised both my own positive attitude towards other people, and my resolve to contribute as fully as possible wherever I could.

Not everyone I met was so straightforwardly supportive. Witnessing me on my bicycle would sometimes evoke a peculiar kind of generosity that sometimes felt as though I were a spectacle – something to be admired but not aspired to. Because they are unable to see themselves undertaking something similar, some people would struggle to work out how anyone else would rationally consider it. The long-distance cyclist is seen not as a person but as a de-contextualised event – in their minds, said cyclist will be forever pushing across the outback.

These same people, however, would tire themselves by sitting in a car staring at the horizon and road, stopping in rest stops and campsites along the way to refuel and share stories, but unable to imagine alternate ways of travelling. Hopefully they took something away from our encounter – maybe even a glimpse towards alternate possibilities by example.

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The long-distance 62 cyclist is seen not as a person but as a de-contextualised event – in their minds, said cyclist will be forever pushing across the outback.

At the risk of stating the obvious, there is a lot of time to think and reflect out here. With fondness I recall one of my favourite days, during which I found comradeship and solidarity with an Irishman named Simon. He was in the midst of a race around the world and I was fortunate that morning to bump into him – I was just getting ready to leave from a road house and he’d already been cycling for hours. This might have been a very difficult and trying day of cycling simply for the strong headwind from which on a relatively straight road there is no recess.

Instead, for both of us it was both a challenging and joyous day during which we took huge comfort in a shared undertaking. When the wind was particularly unyielding we took turns up front. Much of the time, however, we cycled side-by-side and shared stories, experiences, hopes and dreams, not just about cycling but about the life, and partners, we’d left at home.

At the end of the day, as I set up camp, I was sad to say goodbye as he set off again into the darkness. Whilst he was in a race, I was not. www.mis-comp.com

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