Boneshaker Magazine / Issue #8

issue #8

or

Bones haker: Real Exce

© tim hussin

Cyclin pt this isn’t re g al, of c get yo ur hand ourse, it’s dig s on a it and s ital. To real Bo mell it n eshake a n d r h , here. W to feel ide it in e make your p a o n t n h ier, go especia er grea t bike s lly bicy cle art tuff too out he prints. , re. And Check t t h o let yo em your m ur ears ind on take a journ ey, the new po re’s ou dcast s r eries.

Ever eaten a bear? Raced your bike through a strange Austrian's apartment?

This issue tries both – as well as wild adventuring, philosophical questioning and simple championing of the bicycle as a tool for social change. There’s poetic intimacy and inappropriate underwear, mind–body wrangling and pioneering bravado on a bike held together with string. But the chain that drives all this is the humanity of the riders and the pure, instinctive fun that bicycles bring. Flann O’Brien puts it well in ‘The Third Policeman’: "How can I convey the perfection of my comfort on the bicycle, the completeness of my union with her, the sweet responses she gave me at every particle of her frame?... She moved beneath me with agile sympathy in a swift, airy stride, finding smooth ways among the stony

tracks, swaying and bending skilfully to match my changing attitudes, even accommodating her left pedal patiently to the awkward working of my wooden leg."

Buccaneers though we may be, Team Boneshaker lacks a wooden leg. But the rest of Flann’s flow rings true in our ears.

The other day we headed out on an Audax through freezing fog and ancient villages, and found just that agile sympathy, those smooth ways among stony tracks. Calmed by the pedals’ perfect revolutions, the world draws closer. The body is poised and pulsing, the mind is free to wander where it will, the senses alive to the land as it tumbles by.

Welcome to issue 8.

Mike White co-editor (& flann fan)

Contents

Gino: Saviour of a nation Seo Young-Deok America Recycled My Head Altbau Rad Kriterium My beautiful bike Bike The Grand Tour on a Grand The Crash Where do bicycles go to die?

A new year's resolution Cycling Centuries The rise of the machines With my own two wheels The Descent 'That's a lot of bicycles'

4 8 10 20 23 26 28 30 36 38 40 42 46 48 53 54

contributors

words... mike white, giles belbin, noah hussin, jet mcdonald, burn hard, ida k, allan ishac, michael laskey, kerry o’neill, petor georgallou, andrew tobert, nigel land, rob lewis, ben moss, daniel o’sullivan drawings... stevie gee, daniel seex, jacob stead, rosie gainsborough, joe waldron, max lockwood, jesús escudero, rich orr, karolin schnoor, nick souČek photos... tim hussin, seo young-deok, mike belleme, begsteiger KEG, welponer, burn hard, chriSTOP, eric van den brulle, kerry o’neill, marko vuorinen, hubub films

backpats and handclaps

Audax UK, Rachel Coe, Anny Mortada, Stevie Gee, April Lemly @Chicks on Bikes, Skye Meredith, Sadie Campbell

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. 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 stevie gee & the dusty wolf / steviegee.tumblr.com Inside cover illustrations by alex fowkes / www.alexfowkes.co.uk Beam rider by abi stevens / www.abistevens.com

Words Giles Belbin / www.gilesbelbin.moonfruit.com Illustration Daniel Seex / www.thejoyofseex.co.uk

Louison Bobet leads Gino Bartali on the Croix de Fer

There's a photograph, taken on 16th July 1948 and published the next day in France's Miroir Sprint newspaper, that captures in a single frame the very essence of cycle racing. Louison Bobet of France and Italy's Gino Bartali are pictured battling their way up the notorious Col de la Croix de Fer Bartali and Coppi are commemorated on stamps in Italy during stage 14 of the 1948 Tour de France. They are in the Alps and to say the road is poor is to employ dead-pan understatement. To even call it a road takes a bold leap of imagination. It is nothing of the sort. It's a mud laden, gravel strewn track, hacked into the side of a murderously steep mountain. It is more worthy of mules than of men and magnificent machines.

pedalling against each other but are also riding against the worst that mother nature can throw at them, when it's every man for himself. The pain, the hurt, the agony; all suffered for the ultimate glory of crossing the finish line first. Yes, it's a picture that captures the very essence of cycle racing and the astonishing stories it produces. And the 1948 Tour de France was one story that was certainly worth capturing.

In the photograph Bobet leads: goggles crookedly perched atop his head, spare tyre draped across his shoulders in a figure of eight, white socks miraculously still gleaming, brow creased, eyes closed, hands held high on the handle bars uncomfortably close to the cages that house his metal water bottles. Bartali is just behind, on his face a look of grim determination. He is hunched lower than Bobet, shoulders broad and rounded, with a bar brawler's nose and ears protruding unflatteringly thanks to a tight fitting cap. His eyes are locked in a downward stare, his hands grip the handlebars behind the brake levers. It's a portrait of contradiction, depicting a man of severe and brutish strength, yet one who is calmly and serenely plotting his next move in this toughest of sporting arenas.

Following Bartali is another rider, out of the saddle, rocking to his right. He looks in trouble. He could be dropped any moment by Bobet and Bartali.

Coppi, five years younger than Bartali, was an elegant rider, caressing the pedals as he soared over the mountains of Europe. From the moment Coppi turned professional in 1940 the two riders became inextricably linked. First, Coppi joined Bartali's Legnano team to ride in support of the proven champion, but it soon became apparent that the team was not big enough for the both of them. In that year's Giro d'Italia, in which Coppi was to ride for Bartali, the younger man became the team's leader after Bartali fell and lost time. Coppi would go on to win the race with Bartali's help. Soon after he would leave to join the team with which he would forever be associated – Bianchi.

It's a picture that freezes in time the true story of any cycle race. That moment when riders are not just

In 1948 Gino Bartali was part of a rivalry that had Italy both transfixed and divided. Bartali, born in 1914, recorded his first notable victory at the age of 21 when he took the Italian National Championships in 1935, going on to win the Giro d'Italia in successive years (1936 and 1937) before capturing the Tour de France in 1938 becoming only the second Italian to win the yellow jersey in Paris after Ottavio Bottecchia (1924 and 1925). He was the undisputed darling of Italy... until the arrival of Fausto Coppi.

After World War II, with both riders at the peak of their powers, Italy's love was divided. You were either in Bartali's corner or Coppi's. Not both. Their rivalry prompted much debate around the tables of the cafĂŠs of Italy, making the two men the most famous of Italy's sportsmen. To this day the debate over who was the better rider still rages with undimmed passion.

7

By 1948, Bartali's rivalry with Coppi was at its most intense.

In August that year, as teammates on the Italian national team, they would both climb off their bikes at the World Championships rather than help the other. But a month earlier, in July at the Tour de France, Bartali enjoyed the full support of the Italian team (if only because Coppi was not at the 1948 Tour).

Despite Bartali's undisputed role as the Italian team leader and therefore the team's protected rider, the early days of the Tour did not go completely to plan for the 34 yearold. He managed to win stage one, a 237km trek from Paris to Trouville, and also won stages seven and eight, but poor displays in a couple of other stages meant that going into stage 13, a 274km slog from Cannes to Briancon over three difficult alpine climbs – the Col d'Allos, Col de Vars and Col d'Izoard - he stood over 21 minutes behind the yellow jersey and home favourite Louison Bobet, who was seemingly cruising to his first Tour win. Bartali was now considered completely out of contention. Meanwhile, back in Italy, a dire situation was unfolding.

At the end of World War II, the anti-fascist parties in Italy joined forces to form a government and after a series of purges in which those held to be collaborators of the fascist movement were either killed or made to face other retribution, an amnesty was called, backed by Palmiro Togliatti, the chairman of the Communist Party.

By November 1945 the leader of the Christian Democratic Party, Alcide De Gasperi, had formed a more restrained government with the aim of returning businesses to former owners and appointing state officials to administer the country.

8

Then, in 1946, Italy voted in favour of a republic, forcing the former royal family to flee the country and resulting in the drafting of a new constitution which took effect in January 1948. The new constitution called for two houses to be elected – the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate.

Elections were held in April 1948 and De Gasperi's Christian Democrats swept the board, taking over 48% of the popular vote and well over half of the available seats. Italy had taken its first tentative steps towards stability. But the progress Bartali's homeland had made was threatened a little over two months later, on the very day that their hero, in Cannes enjoying the Tour's third rest day, was preparing to enter the Alps on stage 13.

It was Wednesday 14th July when Domenico Pallante shot the well-liked Togliatti outside parliament.

Togliatti's condition was critical and Italy descended into chaos. Strikes and demonstrations were quickly called and supporters of Togliatti's Communist Party soon occupied key, strategic facilities including tram lines and communication hubs. The atmosphere was anarchic, revolution was in the air and some liked the smell. Civil war seemed a very real possibility.

De Gasperi was desperate. Seeking a diversion for his country he called Bartali in Cannes and told him of the crisis in his homeland. De Gasperi said that the country needed Bartali to win. “It could make a difference,” he said. Bartali, feeling his nation's call, answered that he would do his best.

The next day. Stage 13: Bartali, with Bobet on his wheel launches an almighty attack on the Allos.

He accelerates away from the Frenchman who has

no answer. Bartali, riding for his beloved country, powers on. Over the Allos, the Vars and the Izoard, the Italian glides in glorious isolation, through freezing rain. Stage 13 is a one man show. As he crests the Izoard Bartali is an unfathomable 18 minutes ahead of Bobet. He stops the clock in Briançon in a time of 10 hours, 9 minutes and 28 seconds to win the stage.

Bobet crosses the line in 12th place, over 18 minutes down.

In the General Classification Bartali is now second, just 51 seconds behind Bobet who is still in yellow. Over the border, Italy pauses to take notice. But the young Frenchman was not about to abdicate his throne as the Tour's leader without a serious scrap. The next day Bobet fought back. During the 263km stage from Briancon to Aix-les-Bains, the two riders were locked together in combat.

cycling, the young hero's time comes, after a fierce struggle, losing his crown at home, at the foot of the Col de Porte. His bitter rival, Gino Bartali put him on his knees after seven hours of a fight without mercy, a life and death struggle between two great champions, one in the fullness of his exceptional means, the other in the wonderful rise of his young force. Louison is defeated.

Tonight, all the girls in France are crying”.

Over the Lauteret, the Galibier and the Croix de Fer they matched each other, attack for attack, pedal stroke for pedal stroke; equals as they rose majestically over these mighty peaks, putting the rest of the peloton to the sword. Then, Bobet, the darling of France, cracked.

As they started the Col de Porte, an 8km climb in the Chartreuse Massif, Bobet's will snapped and his legs and lungs failed him. Bartali, the seasoned champion, simply rode away.

De Gasperi had been right. As Bartali had risen over the passes of the Alps, Italy had been glued to its radios, a nation impatiently waiting for dispatches from the race. As Bartali slipped the yellow jersey over his vast shoulders that night in Aix-les-Bains, Italy was in ecstasy. A country, teetering on the brink of revolution, had for one day stood still and listened whilst their hero took a vice-like grip on the world's greatest bike race. Then, as Bartali slipped into yellow, Italy put down its weapons and stepped back from the edge. Instead of marching they stood to applaud their champion. Gino Bartali had completed his greatest exploit. He had rescued Italy.

"A country, teetering on the brink of revolution, had for one day stood still and listened whilst their hero took a vice-like grip on the world's greatest bike race."

Over the the Porte, Cucheron and Granier, Bartali relentlessly maintained his speed, increasing his lead over Bobet in a mighty display of raw power. That night, as night fell in Aix-les-Bains, the yellow jersey was safely hung in the wardrobe of the Italian master. He now had a lead of over eight minutes. Gino Bartali had fought back to gain nearly 30 minutes in two simply astonishing days in the Alps.

The next day the French newspaper Le Dauphiné Libéré carried a report of the stage on its front page.

“Louison Bobet,” it read, “the prince charming of

All the girls in France may well have been crying but the newspaper's front page also carried another story. A story from over the border.

A story from Italy: “Peace in Italy,” ran the headline, “where the C.G.T [union confederation] gives the order to return to work.”

Gino Bartali won seven stages of the 1948 Tour de France. He won the overall race by over 26 minutes.

Louison Bobet finished fourth but would go on to win in 1953, 1954 and 1955, becoming the first rider to win three successive Tours.

Giles Belbin is co-editor of The Cycling Post, a new digital monthly. www.thecyclingpost.co.uk 9

SEO YOUNG-DEOK FOR MOST PEOPLE, CHAINS REPRESENT IMPRISONMENT. BUT FOR THE CYCLIST, THE CHAIN – TRANSFERRING THE PEDALS’ POWER TO THE WHEEL AND THUS TO THE ROAD – IS A MECHANISM FOR FREEDOM. IN KOREAN SCULPTOR SEO YOUNG-DEOK’S WORK, CHAINS REVEAL A BEAUTY HITHERTO UNSEEN. THOUGH HIS PAINSTAKINGLY WROUGHT CREATIONS REFERENCE PAIN, DESPAIR AND REPETITION, THEY ARE ALSO ABOUT THE ‘FIRM, DEEP SILENCE OF BEING’.

THE WORKS – SOME LIFE-SIZE, OTHERS MUCH LARGER – ARE A REACTION TO THE POSITION OF MAN IN A MECHANIZED WORLD, BUT EXUDE A CALMNESS TOO. WE’LL NEVER LOOK AT A BICYCLE CHAIN THE SAME WAY AGAIN...

WWW.YOUNGDEOK.COM

AMERICA

RECYCLED

Words Noah Hussin Photography Tim Hussin Portrait (below) Mike Belleme

W

e are two brothers, Noah and Tim Hussin, riding recycled bicycles across the United States and meeting people. Lots of them. But whether they’re devout Baptists who’ve lived in small southern towns for four generations or disaffected crust punks packed into crumbling squats, there is a common thread that ties them together.

We sense a growing movement in this country that rises above race, region, and subculture. Americans are yearning to rebuild space, community, and local culture. It’s going to take a lot of blood, sweat, and ambitious insanity, and it means different things to different people. Some are rethinking business models toward intimate and local exchange. Others reinvent living spaces to foster more community at home. It’s coming from all different angles and from all sorts of people.

And it’s already started. All across the country, people are finding innovative ways to come together and make revolutionary change on a local level, regain control of their lives, rediscover independence, and recycle the American Dream. We’re finding them and we’re telling their stories.

Bikes seemed like a good start – they’ve yanked us clear out of our comfort zone directly into worlds we never would have collided with otherwise. Actually feeling the natural elements as we traverse the landscape and pumping sweat and blood through our bodies attaches us to our surroundings in a way that would be impossible with climate-controlled automated transportation. And of course, we’re using our own energy instead of fuel extracted and processed in far-flung corners of the world.

Barreling down the highway in a car, you can easily ignore the noise on the other side of the window, only exchanging pleasantries when paying for gasoline or asking for directions.

But bicycles force you to feel every inch of every mile, and each little town you crawl through becomes a conversation waiting to happen. Almost everybody seems thrilled to meet a couple of curious strangers rolling through town, and are eager to help out however they can...

13

T

he Road is more than just paved earth. It’s life unedited. And it can be addictive. The assurance that tomorrow you’ll wake up in a new place, leaving everything from the day behind – both good and bad – is a powerful drug. It’s the promise that we’re capable of climbing outside of our comfort zone, severing our umbilical cord, and giving birth to a more beautiful version of ourselves.

Wherever we go with these bikes, people ask us. Why are you doing this? Did you just wake up one day and decide to leave everything? Where do you live? Where are you going to live after the trip? Do you have a job? Every question fired at us is met with ambiguous answers and equivocated attitudes. We’re not trying to be difficult. We just don’t really have any answers.

People are inspired, confused, curious, and concerned, often all at once. We’d been preparing for this thing for so long though, it’s life as usual at this point. We’d both been moving around so much for the last few years anyway, and even as teenagers in the Florida suburbs we would read books and watch movies about the lifestyle, fantasizing about one day living on the road ourselves. We weren’t the first and we won’t be the last. We can’t pretend we invented the lifestyle or birthed the ideals, we’re just interpreting the mythology for our own lives, standing on the shoulders of a long lineage of road warriors who laid down the asphalt before we were even born.

14

In a way, The United States was born on the road. Throughout much of the young country’s history, salvation in the uncertain was exactly the appeal for Europeans looking to uproot themselves and plant seeds in fresh soil. The New World was an open road winding far past the horizon, although paved over those who had lived here for thousands of years.

But as the immigrant country developed at break-neck speed, blank spaces on the map were filled in, unclaimed land became owned, and the American Dream slowly slipped into the realm of myth.

Vague but powerful notions of freedom and independence lost their edge, and the Dream became less about courageous discovery and more about comfortable security. It seemed The New Deal put the last nail in the coffin after World War II, when the mass suburbanization of America began. A dream once defined by opportunity in the unexplored came to instead be symbolized by the predictable sterility of the white picket fence.

But cultural DNA isn’t so easily recoded, and droves of the country’s population rejected the new America. Feeling the rumble in the ground, the Beat writers in the 1950s sent out massive ripples from New York and San Francisco, helping lay the conceptual framework for the cultural upheaval that would rattle the bones of the western world just a decade later.

Put crudely, the Beats reinvented the dream in a country already explored and

conquered. Map already filled in? Well just throw it away and draw up a new one.

Kerouac and his crew made ‘The Road’ a proper noun, worthy of capitalization just like any city or country and a respectable place to call home. Homelessness became stylish, so long as it was done with purpose and poetry. They gave us a new way to think about freedom, a mythology that generations of youth have clung to, hoping to find in movement escape from the dull, the stagnant, the mundane. People across the world have since looked to Beat writers for their uniquely inspiring interpretation of The American Dream.

It’s a good thing we were so romantic about the whole thing – the first day was brutal.

All the literature and film in the world can’t prepare you for climbing a mountain on an old bike in the cold, hauling camping equipment, enough food to last a week, and everything we needed to document the thing.

But with each day, we grew a bit stronger and our bikes got a bit lighter as we munched away at the dumpstered food, our bodies converting garbage into bicycle fuel. We dealt with the cold, whiskey helping us sleep through the bitter nights.

The Road isn’t about passing between two points, as a period of transition or a time of waiting, but about finding meaning in the moment itself, life in the movement, and home in the journey. Living life as a rough draft, free from revision.

Always changing, always being reborn.

H

e said there was no address, and I’m not exactly sure what we expected. Half way up the track, a woman unloading a torn up sofa onto the dirt caught our eye. “Oh, you’re looking for Matty?” Her smile beamed at us. “He’s out picking up a generator. Go on up.”

The place looked less like a residence and more like a construction site. A handful of straw bale structures were scattered around six and a half acres – spots of civilization in an expanse of overgrown clutter. Building materials and garbage and tools were strewn about, an obstacle course for the myriad chickens and turkeys clucking about. Above our heads, one of the city’s power lines tore through the sky directly above a solar panel mounted in a vegetable garden.

This journey needed a method that spoke to its vision, and bicycles seemed an obvious start. But the bicycles wouldn’t just pop out of thin air – a great deal of labour, resources, and energy goes into putting a bike on the shelf in the first place. Sure, we’d be more connected once we got the bikes, but that would ignore the other half of the story.

The metal would probably be mined in Brazil, the plastic manufactured in China, and everything assembled and shipped around the world by a vastly impersonal network. How could we go forward starting with such a detached and convoluted story? Beyond that, there were practical factors to consider. We would surely suffer multiple breakdowns, and neither of us knew the first thing about bicycle mechanics. We were looking for an intimate, localized vehicle, and a cacophony of foreign parts thrown together into an indecipherable machine by invisible workers just didn’t fit the bill.

Lucky for us, we weren’t the first to harbor such concerns.

Going into the Recyclery for the first time inspired a mix of intimidation and awe. It lacked all the gloss of a business; the place looked more like somebody’s garage. The cash box was buried under scraps and catalogs and the irregular shop hours were scrawled on the door with the hurried imperfection of a tagger on the run from the cops. Inside lay a vast graveyard of old bicycle parts waiting to be resurrected by the team of volunteer mechanics who put the place in motion.

Slowly over the next week, we built a relationship with a vintage Peugeot frame.

Just the frame with a fork and handlebars, but they were beautiful., Light-weight with a brilliant red finish. We learned how to use a chain-breaker, how to adjust a derailleur, the differences between cantilever and caliper brakes. The bike began to make sense as a collection of cells, each with a life of its own that needed to be in good health for the entire organism to breathe. “It becomes an extension of your body,” said Matty as he wiped grease from his hands. “You turn into an android a little bit when you build it yourself and you know what works and what doesn’t work.”

myself, lest I’ll no longer require their service and maybe even become competition. With a cooperative model, there is no such dividing line between customer, boss, and employee. The space is truly run democratically, which allows for an inspiring exchange between the individuals that give it life. “People come in,” says Matty, “and at first they’ll say ‘Hey, do you know where that tool is?’ and then after a couple weeks they’ll say ‘where’s our chain breaker?’ and they start using this possessive pronoun. It’s everybody’s shop.”

It went day by day, piece by piece, hours digging through bins of old parts to find a working combination. It’s easy to forget the simple pleasures of doing something yourself, especially living in a country where pretty much everything we could ever want is sitting on a shelf somewhere with a price tag. The community here really inspired us to catch up on what we missed out on as middle-class suburban kids, and despite the divide, we were welcomed warmly. As we exchanged stories and laughs and sweat and grease, connections were formed that I’ve never felt as a customer at a business. Nobody was in charge here; it was just friends helping each other out.

The Recyclery was started by Joseph and his friend Mike. After plugging himself in 9 to 5 at a dot.com and learning to hate computers, Joseph met with Mike to embark on a cross-country bicycle trip, ending up in Asheville with a new ambition, divorced from the grind he left in his tracks. “We figured the best thing we could do was give people bikes,” says Joseph with a subdued drawl lost somewhere between Appalachia and Northern California. It was that simple.

What began with a few ideals and a backyard shack has now blossomed into a full bicycle shop downtown, fueled by a small army of passionate cyclists.

Money keeps us comfortably separate from one another. When I walk into a bike shop running under a business model, I can expect a rather formalized transaction.

I hand over some money (the origins of which are invisible) and the person on the other side of the desk performs a service.

The communication is often minimal, and it’s actually in the interest of the business that I don’t learn how to fix the bicycle

There are so many approaches we could have taken to this journey. Flying was out of the question. Driving seemed inappropriate. Buying bicycles would have been a compromise. In the end, building bikes with recycled parts seemed like the only honest approach.

Every time we tighten a brake or change gears, the chain extends all the way back to this little cooperative in Asheville where it all began.

15

J

ared took another hit of cheap beer and firmly planted his feet at shoulder width. His friends call him Lumpy. “I dunno what part of Jackson y’all went through,” he slurred, “but when I drove down I was thinkin’ I ain’t neeever comin’ through here again.”

“They gonna get this on tape man,” his older friend warned, leaning against the bed of his pickup truck. Lumpy just grinned and looked into the lens. “Let me put it this way,” he said earnestly. “I hate niggers.” We cringed. Noticeably.

Just typing the word now makes me uneasy, even carefully contained between quotation marks. “But aren’t there…” My mouth fumbled for words.

“Black people… around here?” “Yeah,” nodded his friend, “but they keep themselves straight.”

And they all seemed so nice. But then again we were young, white, American, and fishing. Probably straight and Christian too. The men marveled at our roadkill collection and eagerly shared fishing and hunting tips, even driving back to their homes to bring us supplies. One of them gifted us necklaces he had made, and another tossed us beer without hesitation.

When we expressed gratitude, we just heard the muttered mantra, “Southern hospitality, man.”

The sun shot brilliant orange over the trees as we rolled in the previous evening, spotting two laughing locals drinking next to a rather blunt ‘no camping’ sign. We figured we’d ask anyway. “Well hell man,” murmured one under a faded camo baseball cap. “I don’t see why y’all can’t just set up right here!” We spread our roadkill collection out to dry – the numerous wings, pelts, and snake skins we’d collected over the last week were starting to stink – and fell asleep to the soothing lull of the Pearl River. Morning hit softly. We ate breakfast and prepared to catch dinner, clumsily fashioning poles out of bamboo shoots, fishing line, and some bobbers we found on the side of the road. Our feet sank slowly into the muck at the water’s edge as we positioned a few rocks for make-shift seats. The worms squirmed violently around the hooks, lowered into the slowly rippling reflection in the 16

REDNECKS river. After a day of steady relaxation, two little red bellies populated our bucket– barely enough for a snack. But somehow the meager catch felt like a massive accomplishment.

Dusk began to creep over us, and locals gathered for the nightly ritual of riverside drinking. Collin pulled a whetstone from his truck and sharpened our knives, and we decapitated and scaled the fish. We skewered the little

felt like we were from different worlds, but somehow this river connected us.

Their eyes blazed open every time they talked about the land, and they seemed oddly nostalgic for a time before they were even alive.

“There ain’t no outlaws anymore,” complained one. “I wish I coulda grew up back in John Wayne’s time.

Be a lot better’n now. Have a dispute with a sonbitch, take care of ‘em. Saw

" I WISH I COULDA GREW UP BACK IN JOHN WAYNE’S TIME. BE A LOT BETTER’N NOW." guys and slowly roasted them over the crackling fire that our new friends jump started with half can of WD40 – it seemed to have burned off by now. But just as the brisk scent of fresh fish crept into my nostrils, a firm hand shoved 32 ounces under my nose. “Here! I thought this might taste better’n them fish!” A white paper bag followed.We munched blissfully on the fish and lustfully at the double cheeseburger extra value meals. Slurping up soda, we absorbed the group’s wisdom. How to start a fire with dry cow shit. Training a raccoon to sit on your shoulder for a motorcycle ride. Cooking up a tasty turtle soup. Tim and I told stories about camping out in the winter, roadkill squirrel dinners, and wild foraging. It

someone you didn’t like just shoot their ass be done with it. You didn’t have all this bullshit around.”

“And everything’s getting so expensive,” said another, grinning sternly. “I’m poor fuckin’ poor. Broke. Done with. Ain’t got a dollar in my pocket. Ain’t got no bank to go to to get a dollar…” he trailed off into his beer can.

“How’s life?” I asked. He took a slow sip and looked square into my eyes.

“Life’s great.”

THE MONTANA HOUSE

S

tandard subcultural labels don’t really stick here. There’s a kind of hillbilly hipster vibe that echoes through the house with a clear detour through sixties counter-culture, but none of that really pins it down. Bones and pelts hang amid the clutter like trophies, mingling with power tools and dream catchers. Despite the myriad animal parts, none of the 17 residents hunt, raising a provocative angle in arguments against fur and meat – these animals all met their end by somebody’s automobile.

Working on no budget, they tear down old structures around town in exchange for the materials, poke their heads in construction site dumpsters, and sort through garbage piles on curbs. They scavenge food that grocery stores throw away and butcher meat from fresh roadkill. There’s so much free material out there, and when you start to recognize it, the tendency is to amass as much as possible. Sometimes working at the house feels like you’re just moving trash from one pile to the next. But cabins, gardens, and work spaces have grown from the rubble, slowly evolving the space into a DIY wonderland.

It’s not a commune. Certain things are shared, like tools, art supplies and dumpstered food, but rarely have I met such fierce individualists – self-motivated people who thrive in

the constant presence of each other but have clear boundaries. Sometimes massively angry notes are found in the kitchen when somebody oversteps them.

“I couldn’t give it a name,” says Rob resolutely. “These are my roommates and most of them are wing-nuts. Therefore, the place is crazy.”

With so little structure, things can get out of hand, but they prefer the occasional mess to sacrificing their freedom to chore charts, mandatory Sunday dinners, and monthly kumbayas. At its worst, it becomes fraught with project ADD and mired in confusion. Soon after we arrived, Cory and Rob got an old house boat with the idea of fixing it up and taking it down the Mississippi, but gave up a couple of weeks in when the scope of the project became clear. The metal shop, bicycle shed and vegetable garden lay in ruin, those who tended them having moved on to other projects or spaces. One morning, I woke up to a filthy kitchen and Rob in the back yard, suspending a ladder aimed to the sky. When I asked what he was doing, he calmly retorted, “I’m making a ladder to nowhere,” and continued working. I don’t think he saw the irony.

But at its best, the house breathes life into the entire group, everyone feeding off of each others’ inspiration to make the place worthy of their vision. Even

though the garden is full of weeds, the soil is fertile and the greenhouse ready.

The blacksmith tools still work. It just takes one or two people to make the change, and the momentum can be difficult to reverse once it gets started.

Most of us have the luxury—or the misery, depending on how you look at it – of living alone, with a family, or a lover. We interact with the greater world wearing a thick mask of manners and niceties, and it can get exhausting.

After coming home from a day at work, many of us just want to plop down and relax, away from the social demands of the spectacle. Here though, there is no escape, and it can be suffocating.

Eventually you just learn to let it go, and are forced to confront yourself and your community in a way that most of us never have to.

In rooted societies, people share thousands of years of family, culture, and deeply entrenched tradition and ritual. When you gather twenty Americans in the 21st century, any successful attempt to live intimately will have to honor not only the group, but each individual composing it. Raised in disparate backgrounds, each of us has developed a different kind of rapport with the world, and there is little glue to hold us together as we seek family outside the prejudices of genetics.

17

W

e rode up to the house where Rob stood silent, eyes burning and slightly elevated to the sky. “There’s a bear.”

The words came out like they were supposed to mean something, but after seeing our confounded silence, he went on, “I’ll go get a tarp and some gloves.” Turning around, he made his way through the back yard to the wood shop he lives above, his body bursting out of a tank top and tiny red cutoff shorts. Despite the absurdity of the whole situation, it sounded urgent enough. It was time to pick up some roadkill.

Parking the car a couple exit ramps up for reconnaissance, we piled into the truck and pulled onto the interstate median. It was just a minor traffic violation, but the whole thing felt somehow… illegal.

The adrenaline surged to our brains and we just watched ourselves as we rolled the 300 pound corpse into the tarp, dragged it between six lanes of honking steel projectiles, and hoisted it into the truck, zooming past police cars just moments later.

" AS WE RODE FURTHER WEST, EVERYTHING CHANGED, THE INSPIRING DRAMA OF THE MOUNTAINS REPLACED BY AN EERIE STILLNESS."

Back at the house, Tim and I sheepishly watched as the boys went to work sliding knives through the hanging beast as a few others ran between the computer and the yard with useful information. “In China, they use the gall bladder medicinally!” The surgical focus of the group quickly eased our nerves, and before we knew it we were getting our own hands bloody while the group performed an autopsy.

The bear had sustained fatal head injuries from the collision. It must have had just enough sense to wander into the grassy median before collapsing, after which an army of winged arthropods began to congregate around its collapsed cranium. It was still warm inside, indicating a fresh kill, and portions of purpled, bubbly muscle tissue showed heavy bruising. It was crucial, warned Cory, not to pop the stomach. The food inside had begun to rot, and judging from its heavy bloating, a puncture would unleash a crippling odor.

After burying most of the internal organs in the back yard and processing the rest of the animal, we had a freezer full of bear meat, about ten mason jars of rendered fat, and the hide had been salted, scraped, and brought to a taxidermist to be tanned. The bones were wrapped in chicken wire and dropped off at a stash spot where bacteria, maggots, and carrion beetles would get to work over the next month to ensure a clean skeleton for display. Rob planned to turn the scrotum into a coin pouch for his girlfriend, but it ended up rotting in the fridge instead. Luckily, the testicles had been preserved in alcohol and placed on the spice rack next to the cumin, paprika, and free-range squirrel head.

DIGITAL HOBOS

“

Good morning, guys!” Dan, one of the organizers walked in and flipped on the lights. I groaned, rolling onto my stomach and piercing an internal organ or two on the edge of the old army cot. It was just the two of us in the room that night, passed out next to rows of pews packed with bibles and hymnals – the other guests and residents were in more permanent lodgings below. Dan handed us some furniture cleaner and a rag. It was time to scrub down the altar before breakfast.

We rolled into town the day before, shut down by 36 hours of gray skies and rain. Our days were averaging over forty miles and we were ahead of schedule, so we felt little guilt sitting down for a two-hour diner breakfast, slurping sixty cent bottomless cups of caffeinated sludge and inhaling homemade biscuits drowning in a sea

18

of sausage gravy. Everyone seemed to know each other like family, and they quickly connected the loaded road bikes stacked outside to the two scrawny, dirty outsiders. An older man who cycled himself approached us to express admiration, and before long people were yelling from across the room.

“You don’t wanna camp in this weather,” said a heavyset blonde sitting with her family.

“Y’all could stay at the church tonight on 4th street. They run a homeless shelter.” She wiped the butter off her baby’s face. “But you gotta go to service at seven.” A hot meal and a roof through the rain sounded great, but it didn’t really seem a viable option. These places, it seemed, weren’t built with people like us in mind.

But we are homeless, if you wanna be honest about it. A few days ago, I strode

into a Wendy’s, unshaven and wearing a torn up old Army jacket, digging through garbage cans like a madman looking for paper. “Excuse me, sir!” I froze, flustered by the manager staring at me from behind the counter. “Oh,” I stammered. “We’re camping and just wanted to get some of your waste paper to start a fire with.” She gave me a soft, knowing grin. “Here, take this.” She handed me a packed paper bag. I guess I looked the part, at least enough to earn her sympathy. And a free bag of chilli.

Sure, we go through a lot of the motions, but we’re coming at it from a different angle here – hobos by choice.

Digital hobos I guess, sleeping under bridges and eating out of dumpsters but pulling cell phones, notebook computers, lenses and microphones out of our sacks when we have something

we want to say. We know we can go back to the luxuries of jobs and apartments and beds and cars if we ever want to, a security not afforded to the others at the shelter.

For them, homelessness represents failure – for us, freedom. Over dinner, one man enthusiastically gushed about an apartment he might be moving into and another about how he paid a barber at Wal Mart $5 to shave his head. Our stories were about the fresh rabbit we ate off the side of the road and how beautiful it is to sleep under the stars this time of year. The men around us had been broken down by a world they never learned to navigate. We had been spoiled by lives of availability, and for us eating garbage and sleeping outside meant momentary release from the numbing shackles of affluence.

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DUMPSTER DIVING

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inter turns the world into your meat-locker, and when you see how blurry the line is between food and garbage, a whole host of financial pressures disappear. American cities are swarming with free sustenance, and it’s not just stale bread and rotting vegetables (although even they make for great compost). Every day, restaurants and grocery stores place leftovers and overstock in the giant metal refrigerator out back, colloquially known as a “dumpster.” We find shrink-wrapped organic produce, boxes of waxed cheeses, and still-frozen packages of meat. A few days before Halloween, we picked up 25 gallons of fresh apple cider. At some point you stop questioning these things and just see a good haul for what it is.

This is one of the most profound shifts that our perspectives underwent here in Asheville: learning to unashamedly recognize waste as a resource. We all know America has serious waste management issues, but actually poking our heads in dumpsters was a mind-blowing experience. Make no mistake about it, landfill mining will be a hugely profitable industry one day. It becomes a kind of treasure hunt, and now I can’t ride by a dumpster without thinking of what might be waiting inside.

One of our friends went dumpster diving on his birthday and ended up with a working high-definition plasma television. But sometimes you just get a bag full of rotting meat and maggots.

FAST FOOD

C

arefully rolling out from under the bridge, we headed right into Georgetown, Mississippi. At first glance, it seemed like just another depressed dot on the map, forgotten by even the locals.

Downtown had been reduced to crumbling buildings adorned with fading shop signs, and vegetation was beginning to fill the cracks, slowly returning the town’s corpse to the Earth.

But right across the street, a modest white building breathed slowly. An older man with dark, oily skin stood outside holding a steady grin in his eyes, attentively setting up a welcome sign.

“We don’t have breakfast,” Henry told us with a humble lull, “but we open at 11 for lunch… probably the best lunch you’ll find anywhere, in fact…”

He quietly went back to work as Tim and I glanced at each other. We were skeptica – we hadn’t had much luck with food lately. Sitting down at most diners in the region, you’d never even know you were right in the middle of expansive farmland. Finding fresh food is next to impossible, and buying food from local farms is often illegal. The best meals we ate were always those we cooked ourselves, usually huddled over a fire, away from the communities we were so intent on connecting with.

But the lunch here was a slap in the face, a stark departure from the instant potatoes and canned vegetables we had come to expect. Even the building itself felt eerily authentic. The décor was mostly scavenged from garbage cans and curb sides, and the tables and chairs were borrowed from customers who fondly remember when such a place wasn’t an oddity, when towns boomed, food was slow, and community gathered for a good meal.

The whole patchwork felt vaguely human, a tiny but fertile oasis in the expansive desert of sterile chains and processed foods.

“Sets it apart from all these glamorous restaurants,” said Henry with a nod.

“That’s the appeal. Food can bring

people together. If it’s good food, it really can. Might go to different churches and different schools, but once they here they all the same.” He paused for just a moment as the words sank in. “It’s hard to find home.”

Those five words speak volumes.

It’s somewhat shocking that this place is even worth mentioning, that a restaurant in the south that serves southern food to southerners is somehow relevant to any kind of bigger picture. But it was the only one of its kind we found on the entire ride, despite the people’s deep longing for what they took for granted growing up. It’s mostly all gone now, the nuances of small towns that once pulsed independently burned off by the ferocious flames of multinational industry.

It’s a rather clever process. In the modern example, McDonalds moves in, boasting jobs and hamburgers sold on the cheap and at two in the morning. But then the restaurant with a personal investment in the town goes under. Most of McDonald’s revenue gets sent elsewhere, the town becomes poorer and unhealthier, and in the end they’re living worse than they were to begin with. McDonald’s isn’t really any cheaper if its very presence impoverishes a community, but the illusion persists just long enough to get its foot in the door. By the time the town sees through the hustle, it’s already too late.

It seems to have happened everywhere.

Small businesses couldn’t stay afloat and small-scale farming became economically unviable. Families spent their evenings at home watching sitcoms filmed in Hollywood rather than dancing to a jukebox downtown. As needs became fulfilled by organizations based far far away, local economies dried up. And with nowhere to take root, community and culture were soon to follow. The options available to ambitious youth today are grim. Either get a job as a cog at The Dollar General and work your way up, or move away to chase bigger dreams.

THE HUSSIN BROTHERS ARE NEARING THEIR FINAL DESTINATION ON THE WEST COAST, AND WILL BE PUTTING TOGETHER A BOOK, FEATURE-LENGTH FILM, AND INTERACTIVE WEBSITE ABOUT THEIR JOURNEY AND THE COMMUNITIES THAT HAVE INSPIRED THEM.

IDYLL DANDY ACRES

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Tonight, we celebrate the reversal of darkness,” shouted Mountaine, slowly pacing back and forth between the crowd and the fire. “And sometimes that darkness outside reflects a darkness within.”

It was the longest night of the year. The sun sank behind the ridge before 4pm, and our evenings had been spent huddled near a wood-fire stove with ten or so others at Idyll Dandy Acres, eating homemade meals and falling asleep encased in goose down.

The Winter solstice was little more than another cold, dark night here. Right over on the mountainside though, the Radical Faeries were preparing a pledge of renewal, remembrance, and rebirth.

The place has been running for some thirty years now, one of the very first Radical Faerie sanctuaries in the world.

The Faeries reclaimed the homophobic slur ‘fairy,’ changing its spelling to reflect the spiritualism of mythical faeries. For the Faeries, the societal role of homosexual men was largely spiritual, as in some Native American cultures. They were thought to have an insight into life that others could not attain.

The Radical Faeries were just one of many liberation movements that sought to free people from the clutches of heteronormativity – an intricate game we play with one another. The many facets of biological sex are channeled into an M or an F, and from there the machinery of gender and sexuality is set into motion.

We’re prescribed emotional and intellectual dispositions, types of clothing, appropriate work, and expected to experience certain types of sexual attraction.

The Radical Faeries empowered men to embrace their femininity. Finding strength where others saw weakness, they nurtured a culture centered around healing and compassion. But despite the central role of interpersonal connection in the Faerie

ethos, they were historically separatists, restricting Faerie culture and community to homosexual men.

IDA now identifies as a queer space.

Around IDA, there are plenty of people with Adam’s apples and breasts or with facial hair and makeup. Female carpenters and male bakers, feminine lesbians and androgynous transgendered people, it all melts into a beautifully nuanced fluidity.

Few of us ever have the chance to see sex and gender deconstructed right before our eyes. Men and women and everyone in between and beyond quickly become just people. Words like gay and bi and straight become blurry approximations – flags that some of us fly over our heads, but not the kind of thing that keeps us on separate fronts. It’s more than just a change in language. It’s queering the thought process – breaking down the biases and binaries between our senses and our brain.

Most people would probably call me straight, although I’ve never worn it like a badge. The person I’m having sex with is a woman. And I’m a man. And when I’m attracted to somebody who happens not to be a woman, I’m expected to stop cold. “Oh, but I thought I was straight!

Now I need to rethink everything,” the mind asserts. “Does that mean I’m gay?

Or maybe bisexual. Or bi-curious. That’s a thing, right? Maybe straight guys can be attracted to other men sometimes…”

Why can’t I just be a person who is attracted to other people? Maybe most of those people happen to be female. Maybe some of them don’t. Maybe that will change

as I live my life, and maybe it won’t. But this casual ‘is what it is’ analysis eludes our identity-centered culture. We feel compelled to lay claim to a category – to know what we ‘are’ and to stick with it, and to have a little existential crisis whenever we notice ourselves washing outside the lines we’ve so carefully drawn in the sand.

We set out on these bikes to discover what separates us from one other – to push deep through the layers we’re buried under and dig up something authentic.

And what’s more personal than sexuality?

What’s more intrinsic than biology and what could be more pervasive than gender? Every male pressured to appear dominant and every female who has feigned weakness is a victim of a culture that forces us into corners irrespective of our individual needs and impulses. Most of us repress our queerness just enough to get by. But some people’s nature departs so far from societal expectations that to repress it would be to live a constant lie, never fully awake in their own skin.

As in the Native American traditions that inspired the Radical Faeries, some will step forward to offer their wisdom, strength, and guidance. They will invariably be the revolutionaries of gender and sex, the ones who dedicate their lives to creating a world where normativity wanes and individuality can flourish. And a world where anybody, whoever they are, can look into a mirror and see a more honest reflection looking back.

Read, see and watch more: www.americarecycled.org Write to them at: americarecycled@gmail.com

Illustration Jacob Stead / www.flickr.com/jacobstead

MYHEAD “Freakin' intellectuals on bikes. They're everywhere.” Jonny slammed his beer glass on the table.

“Where?”

“Out there...” He pointed round the Oxford pub in a wide arc.

There was a gambling machine and an old man in the corner staring at a glass of ale. The gambling machine reflected neon on the outside of the old guy's inch thick glasses.

“Can't see any.”

“Out there” said Jonny, “on the streets.” He prodded at the imaginary masses. “The crème de la crème of a generation, scuttling round on their bikes from lecture to lecture...” He banged his fist down on the table so his pint of beer and his bike helmet lurched upwards, “and none of them are wearing helmets.” He screwed his finger into his temple.

“Mental.”

“And you're as sane as a fresh walnut?”

“My head,” he said, tapping his skull, “is my livelihood. And I'm not going to risk it like those,” he paused for emphasis, “tosspots.”

Jonny built missile guidance systems for the military. I did try and point this out, given that he built the brains that killed brains, but after four pints of beer and a packet of pork scratchings he was unwilling to see the paradox and left in a huff.

I watched him wobble down the dual carriageway on his old racer, his helmet strap flapping loosely under his chin.

“Tosspots!” he shouted at the distant domes of the Oxford colleges.

Words Jet McDonald / www.jetmcdonald.com

of road safety this makes no sense at all. You can look up the facts and you can place your bets but I just want to ride with my mop of hair in a greasy flop in the spring air. In no way does this denigrate those who don't want to ride with their greasy mops in the spring air. It's just my choice.

And choice is a feverishly potent word. It suggests a moral ambiguity in the equations of risk. For me it's not about whether you wear a helmet or not, it's about why.

Jonny believes that his “livelihood” is his head. But the head is just a hood for a life. And life is a sensuous dance of the mind and body. If you're wearing a helmet just because of that part of you that flops backwards and forwards on the top of your spine, you may as well be on a monorail. A bicycle will spin you through the world, head, body and soul, like a cartwheel, if you let it.

Jonny's ethic is built on the ideas of René Descartes, a seventeenth century philosopher. “I think therefore I am,” said René and the Western World doffed its hat and agreed.

Descartes was a “Dualist” who divided the mind and body into two distinct substances, a view of reality that prized the head over the neck below. But if I am anything I am a “Monist”, where the mind and body are one. And the truth of it is that anyone that gets on a bike is also a Monist.

There is yet to be a bike that runs on telepathy. And there is yet to be a bike powered by a headless telepath.

Freakin' Monists on bikes. They're everywhere.

If you pop a head open you find the left and right hemispheres and, a bit lower down, like a bow tie, the cerebellum. If anything is the “mind” of a cyclist it's this chap, astride the flip flop head and the adjoining spine. The cerebellum is the middle man, wheeling and dealing information between the brain and the limbs. It is responsible for a cyclist's muscle memory so that we don't have to keep doing those twitchy left right wobbles for the rest of our life when we first take our feet off the ground.

In the evolutionary scheme of things when man had enough muscle memory to lope around picking veg, the cerebral hemispheres bloomed above the cerebellum, which brought the mixed blessing of consciousness and, in Western civilisation at least, a mechanistic view of life that prioritised mind over body.

Cycling without a helmet, at least in the UK, is up to the individual. It's a debate so old it’s got cobwebs coming out of its lugholes. I don't wear a helmet. Other people do. The difference between me and other people is not measured by virility, foolishness, dullness or heroism. It is measured only by a helmet. My choice is a mop of hair. Other people's choice is a plastic shell that increases the safety of their noggin by a measurable percentage.

But it was not always so. The oldest existing works of Western literature are Homer's 'Iliad' and 'Odyssey' from ancient Greece. And as Michael Clarke points out in 'Flesh and Spirit in the Songs of Homer' Homeric man had no understanding of body or mind “rather his thought and consciousness are as inseparable a part of his bodily life as are movement and metabolism.”

I know that the responsible thing is to wear a helmet. And I really do want to be responsible. But I just don't want to prioritise my head. I like the whole of my body. In the world

A man might consult his 'thumos', a vital energy that leads to certain thoughts and actions, but this thumos also required drink and nourishment. Homeric thought is associated with “the palpable inhalation of breath, and 23

the half-imagined mingling of breath with blood and bodily fluids, in the soft, warm, flowing substances that make up what is behind the chest wall.”

And I would argue that the cyclist lost in the hypnotic rhythm of a long ride, cerebellum flickering, propels this same 'thumos'; the mind flowing in body, breathing in the breathing world. And, like Homer, “the common ground of meaning is not in a particular static thing but in the ongoing process of living.”

Are cyclists the Homeric heroes and heroines of ancient Greece? Sometimes it's hard to feel like this stuck in the guff of a five lane traffic queue. At the rump of three millennia the archetypal Western man is Homer in the cartoon 'The Simpsons', plumbed into a television by his eyeballs, his body extrapolated into an engulfing sofa. (It is left to his son Bart to kick off the kerbs on a skateboard and flow with the wind, his wisecracking 'thumos' whirling past the lanes of traffic).

is that the separation has become so absolute that it is now the logic of the left hemisphere that predominates and it is this binary logic that directs so much of our debate. Good and bad. Dirty and clean. Happy and sad. Helmet or no bike helmet. There is no room for the ambiguous flux of choice.

I spend my time pootling around on bike paths and in parks.

Perhaps I won't wear a helmet. Perhaps I will. It is a flexible choice but it is still a choice.

I cycled 10,000km from England to India with my helmet strapped to the back of my bike. Some would argue that was a foolhardy choice and I would be inclined to agree but I enjoyed having my sweaty head exposed to the air. In fact I was more of a high viz man, fluoro over my trunk, while my girlfriend preferred a helmet. We seemed to epitomise the mind–body divide as we rode along separately but together we looked like one reasonably safe unit. I didn't think my girlfriend was any more or less wayward than me. After all she had also chosen to cycle east for a year.

" A RE CYCLISTS THE HOMERIC HEROES AND HEROINES OF ANCIENT GREECE? SOMETIMES IT'S HARD TO FEEL LIKE THIS STUCK IN THE GUFF OF A FIVE LANE TRAFFIC QUEUE." So how did we get from here to there, from 'thumos' to plasma TV? It was all Plato's fault, chief Greek philosopher and betrayer of Homeric verse.

“Originally man was only a head,” said Plato, “and so that head might not roll upon the ground with its heights and hollows of all sorts, and have no means to surmount the one or climb out of the other they gave it a body as vehicle for ease of travel.” After a bit of shenanigans over the next thousand years this kind of thinking ended up with Descartes and his mind body divide, each part stuck together like bits of an Airfix kit. But the bicycle refutes this. Emerging out of the industrial revolution it is the most wayward of machines.

Then, as now, it nurtures the buried belief that the mind is body and the body is mind.

Ian McGilchrist's recent book 'The Master and his Emissary', examines mind within body by describing the cerebral hemispheres of the brain, the walnut atop the cerebellum.

He proposes that the right hemisphere, with its predominant role in the body, its ability to synthesise meaning and empathise, its openness to intuition (the functions of the “lunatic, lover and poet”) has become too separate from the left hemisphere, with its formulaic agenda, its internal logic, its reliance on language.

He argues that this separation, and with it the prioritisation of left hemisphere thinking, has led to the mind–body divide in Western life; “....the body has become a thing, a thing we possess, a mechanism, even if a mechanism for fun, a bit like a sports car with a smart sound system.”

You can see this in Sports Science, where the physical outputs for athletes have become systematised and maximised, where cyclists recognise only cadence, speed and kilometres. The head watches the click of the cycle computer and not the roll of the road.

But the right hemisphere cannot exist without the left, for as a poet needs the logic of language, so a daydreaming cyclist needs the science of gears. The difference for McGilchrist 24

Why carry a helmet all that way on my bike and never use it?

A talisman perhaps. Or rather I preferred to know it was there if I needed it, the wind blowing through its cage like reckless thought.

The bicycle at its best fits the human body as if it was a part of that body, so right does it feel. And if we are clear that the body is not a machine but part of the wholeness of being human, then by extension a bicycle is part of that humanity.

Am I saying that a beaten-up utility bike in a skip has soul?

Yes if you yank it out, grease it up and ride with the sun on your legs, rain on face and wind in your mop of hair.

Yesterday I was cycling home and these kids on BMXs nipped past doing hops off the pavements. It looked like they'd just made it back from the barbers and the winter sun shone off their shaved scalps.

I pulled my cycling cap tighter. It didn't protect my head but it kept it warm. It was merino wool, breathable, top of the range. The left hemisphere approved. I needed to get home to do some DIY before the sun set. The left hemisphere approved. I needed to get to the hardware shop to get the tools to do the DIY before the sun set and I clicked into a higher gear. The left hemisphere rejoiced. But the kid in front then stopped to bunny hop over a manhole, forcing me to brake in a skid, as the skinheads raced on laughing.

“Tosspots,” the left hemisphere thought.

Then, instead of using the concrete slope, the kids rattled down the steps that led down to the bike path, cackling and whistling as they bumped.

I turned after them and bombed down the steps, only to catch my foot in a toe strap, topple sideways into a flower bed, and end up with the bike on top of me and a big smile breaking across my foolish face.

The right leg ached. The whole man approved.

A LT B A U R A D K R I T E R I U M

'IT’S GOING TO BE A WORLD CUP SERIES!'

WO RDS

b ur n hard / i d a k

P HO T O S B eg stei g er K EG, wel p oner, b ur n hard & chr i STO P

IT ALL BEGAN ONE RAINY DAY IN THE SPRING OF 2010 IN GRAZ, AUSTRIA, WHEN A FELLOW HOUSEMATE IN OUR APARTMENT, (A PAD WE CALLED 'MUCHAR'), GLUED A TUBULAR TYRE 1 FOR THE FIRST TIME ONTO THE REAR WHEEL OF A 1970S PEUGEOT RACING BIKE. ONCE THE TYRE WAS ON, MANY QUESTIONS WERE RAISED: 'HOW LONG WILL IT TAKE TO DRY?', 'HOW MUCH TYRE PRESSURE WILL IT NEED?' AND 'WILL IT STAY WHERE IT IS?' IT WAS RAINING OUTSIDE, BUT THE BIKE AND ITS NEWLY-GLUED TYRE JUST HAD TO BE TEST-RIDDEN. TO TAKE THE BIKE OUTSIDE INTO THE RAIN WOULD HAVE BEEN AN INSULT TO THE PREVIOUS OWNER AND ALL OF THE EFFORTS HE HAD MADE TO KEEP THE RACING BIKE IN SUCH GREAT CONDITION. SUDDENLY FROM NOWHERE A RATHER DISTURBING VOICE CRIED OUT, SOUNDING SOMEWHAT LIKE MY MUM'S...

'NOT IN THE HOUSE!' 1

A tyre that has no metal beads around the edge to hold it in place and is instead glued on to a specially-designed rim.

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A

voice that echoed around in my head, born from childhood memories, repeated again and again until it became imprinted into my consciousness. But since my 30th birthday was long gone and the apartment didn't even belong to my Mum, the debut test run of the Peugeot ended up alongside the fridge, next to a fellow Muchar resident who was almost pissing himself with laughter. But if a ride from Burn Hard's room straight to the kitchen was possible, surely there must be more, as-yet undiscovered indoor routes? Our pad, you see, is what would be referred to as an 'altbauwohnung' (literally 'an apartment in an old building'), a special kind of apartment usually found in houses over a century old, that have large, interconnected rooms making them very open and sociable and, more importantly, extremely rideable.

Thus it was that by the third of the Peugeot's indoor test runs, almost the whole of Muchar had been cycled through and the idea was born – 'Indoor cycle racing!

Let's stage a bicycle race in our very own apartment!'

A couple of weeks later the name of the cycle race was decided upon: the 'Grazer Altbau Rad Kriterium'– the 'Grazer Old Building Cycle Criterion', in honour of the annual Grazer Old City Bicycle Criterion which was held in Graz (the capital city of the Austrian Province 'Styria') back in the day. A date was fixed in our diaries and we promptly began to promote the race using social media. More questions arose, 'Are we going to tell the landlady?' and, 'Where will we put the bikes between heats if we don't tell the landlady?' and 'Is it possible to get ten riders with their bikes into a 75m² apartment without other residents noticing, including the landlady, especially as she lives in the same building?' More importantly, we asked ourselves, 'Would anyone even turn up?'

These questions were duly ignored and the night before race-day, some basic rules were drawn up by the instantly-founded 'WorldApartmentCyclingSyndicate'.

These were as follows: There were to be 2 x 2 minute heats in different directions around the apartment.

Any foot down or touching of walls or furniture with one's hands results in a one lap penalty.

The rider with the highest lap count wins a crate of beer and is allowed to wear the aforementioned tubular tyre that originally inspired the whole idea.

That same night, after the excitement of the first training heats had settled a bit, the concerns we had relating to possible damage to furniture, the 100-yearold hardwood floor, bikes, bodies and the tenantlandlord relationship came up again and again. Since the idea of involving our 90-year-old landlady in our indoor bicycle race was out of the question, the stress level rose to Alert State Red and only dropped off when the landlady, by chance, left around noon on race-day and did not return until the race was over and most of the bikes were already back outside.

The day of the race was upon us. All ten registered riders were ready to go, sporting all manner of different 26

racing machines – folding bikes, downhill mountain bikes, highrisers, classic 10speeders, city bikes and one very nice, 40 year-old ladies 'Puch' bike from a longgone Austrian bicycle factory.

THE WHOLE RACE BECAME BETTER AND BETTER WITH EVERY STARTER AND WHEN EVERYBODY, INCLUDING THE SPECTATORS, GOT INTO THE RHYTHM OF THE SEQUENCED STARTS – AND STOPPED BLOCKING THE TRACK FOR VISITS TO THE BATHROOM OR GETTING BEER FROM THE FRIDGE – IT WAS GREAT FUN. Everyone was excited about cycling fast around an apartment and after a couple of runs, everyone wanted to see just how fast it was possible to go and a competitive element developed. Aside from a few slideoffs and a spectacular over-bar jump into a bed, nothing terrible happened, even though a couple of beers had disappeared during the training sessions and race.

The winner‘s girlfriend liked it all so much that she offered her apartment for the next race. And so the decision was made - it was going to be a World Cup Series. Two months later, as the date of the next race drew ever closer, new topics came up for discussion, 'Is anyone allowed to register to race?' and 'What will happen if there’s any damage or injuries? Would we be responsible just because we organized the race?' Once again, these concerns remained unanswered and the second 'Grazer Altbau Rad Kriterium' took place at 'Muz Manor.’ The stress level of the Muchar racing team, again at fever pitch, ascended even more during the training session, since racers who don't know the owner personally tend to take tight turns around corners.

But hosting apartment bicycle races was not the end of it. We started building fixies, restoring 1970s workaday bikes, participated in the international Bicycle Film Festival and had several newspaper articles written about us and our exploits. Above all, each race has been a great experience; time spent with beautiful, passionate people who love and enjoy their bikes just as much as we do.

Eighteen months on, we’ve staged nine major races in apartments, an art gallery, an underground parking lot, a crèperie and a concert venue, and we‘ve learned that bicycle racing should not be limited to roads, mountains or velodromes. There are no limits to what can be accomplished by people who love bicycles and enjoy the thrill of racing them, even if neither the bikes nor the track were built for it. watch the short films here: www.altbauradkriterium.wordpress.com

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MYBEAUTIFULBIKES

by Allan Ishac

Photography by Eric van den Brulle / www.evbphoto.com

I turned 55 this year but people say I don’t look my age; that I could be 10 years younger. If it’s true, I give the credit to cycling. I was drawn to pedal power the moment that I realized spoked wheels meant freedom, and throughout my life, bikes have been a source of joy and sanity, exercise and escape.

My first two-wheeler was a black, off-brand trainer that my parents bought at our local New Jersey bike shop when I turned five. I was determined to jettison the training wheels the first week I had the bike, and my frequently

rode that Raleigh until he died, and I always imagined he went in the saddle – a pedal “stroke” probably.

When I was in my thirties, my bike became a temple.

Struggling with relentless career pressures and high anxiety, I pedaled my heavy Fuji Royale over many months and countless miles. The soothing, circular cadence became a silent mantra, the reassuring rhythms calmed me, the regular exercise stimulated enough darkness-fighting endorphins to keep me from a life bonk. This simplest of machines proved to be the best medicine.

" I liked to watch the shimmer of the silver metallic seat in the filtered light of the street lamp slanting through my window." distracted father stayed with me throughout the wobbly learning curve, despite not knowing how to ride himself. He patiently pushed me into motion, guided me from behind, and speed walked alongside me as I teetered and rocked on the cheap training wheels. I did cast off the stabilizers in that first week and my Dad seemed as proud of me as I felt.

Every bike I owned was a constant companion. Some became family members – like the 1966 blue Schwinn Stingray Fastback with the 5-speed stick on the top tube that I parked by my bed at night for months. I liked to watch the shimmer of the silver metallic seat in the filtered light of the street lamp slanting through my window.

Once I was so excited to get on that bike, I launched myself clear over the banana seat and did a face plant on the driveway. I wore dental braces then and the impact impaled my upper lip on the metal orthodontics. The lip swelled up so grotesquely I had to go to the hospital to have them peel it off.

Since neither of my parents could ride, I took cycling inspiration from a down-the-street neighbor named Mr. Perry. I rarely saw the man except for the times he cycled past our house, something he did regularly at dusk in the spring, summer and fall. His riding outfit never changed – a plaid, short-sleeved shirt, pressed khaki pants, brown penny loafers, and a tweed flat cap, which I suppose conveyed “sportiness” back then.

Rail thin and tall, Mr. Perry looked impressive riding his upright, 3-speed black Raleigh. If I was playing on the front lawn, he would glance over and nod, but never waved. I liked the focus, athleticism and speed of the old man. He

I thank the biking Gods for all my trusted steeds – the red St. Etienne that my father bought wholesale when I was a teenager with the cranky drive train that needed constant attention; a couple of fancy Japanese folding bikes, both of which eventually disappeared from the city streets where I’d locked them; a Cannondale mountain bike with perfect geometries that is still effortless to ride even with its unforgiving hardtail; and a Litespeed Teramo that wants to go a lot faster than I ride it. I had to up-angle the headset a bit on the Litespeed to take the pressure off my neck in the drops – one concession to my advancing age.

This past spring my lifelong ride looped back to my cycling origins. At a garage sale in Long Island, I found a 1964 Schwinn Tiger in beautiful condition with the iconic red, white and blue checkerboard decal on the seat tube nearly intact. There is also a faded yellow Burlington, Iowa license decal on the rear fender that adds a touch of “paperboy” nostalgia to this vintage cruiser. Everything on the Tiger is original, from the chrome fenders and spring-action seat to the Westwind white-wall tires. All that’s missing is the classic bullet headlight that no doubt disappeared into the Iowa cornfields long ago.

This peach of a bike always gets longing looks and nods of appreciation on the road. It is a fitting mount upon which to launch my next half-century ride, but I’ll be bringing all my other cherished machines along on the journey with me.

Allan Ishac is the author of New York's 50 Best Places to Find Peace and Quiet / www.allanishac.com 29

Illustration Rosie Gainsborough / www.rosiegainsborough.com

BIKE

by Michael L askey

Yo u , w h o h a v e b o r n e t h r e e s o n s o f m i n e , s t i l l b e a r m y w e i g h t r o u t i n e l y , t r a n s p o r t i n g m e .

A n o d d p a i r : y o u r c l a s s i c s p a r e l i n e s – e l b o w s , b o n y f r a m e – a n d m e , b e a r l i k e , c u m b e r s o m e , n o s i n g t a n g l e d c o i l s o f a i r y o u c u t t h r o u g h w i t h y o u r p u r e p u r p o s e f u l g e o m e t r y.

W i t h y o u i t ’ s f e e t o f f t h e g r o u n d , a f e a t p a s s i n g u n r e m a r k e d t h o u g h i n f u l l p u b l i c v i e w .

K e e p i n g e a c h o t h e r ’ s b a l a n c e .

O u r t a l k s l o w r e c u r r e n t c l i c k s , companionable creaks.

T h r o u g h y o u I ’ v e c o m e t o k n o w w i n d s i n s i d e o u t a n d r a w weather ignored before; a n d n u a n c e s o f s l o p e s , t h e m o v i n g e a r t h , g r e e n t r a c k s f o r b l a c k b e r r i e s a n d s l o e s f o r g i n , f o r j a m : t h e t u g a n d t a n g o f f r u i t p u l l i n g m e clear of the wheel of myself.

www.michael-laskey.co.uk

THE GRAND TOUR ON A GRAND

BY KERRY O'NEILL

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www.thegrandtouronagrand.com

" WHY ON EARTH SHOULD A PERFECTLY RESPECTABLE, WELL-LOOKED-AFTER AND DOMESTICALLY FULFILLED WOMAN WISH TO DO ANYTHING SO UNSETTLING, UNPRODUCTIVE, AND UNLADYLIKE AS TRAVELLING ABROAD?" from 'Unsuitable for Ladies: An Anthology of Women Travellers' by Jane Robinson

CONVINCING CONVERSATIONS

PLANNING FOR A PIPE DREAM

LADY TRAVELLERS

“ The Grand Tour, eh? That rings a bell…Isn’t it the name of those rather indulgent European tours that Britain’s young, rich, aristocratic men used to make in the 1700s and 1800s?”

Now, I’ve never smoked, but had wanted to puff on this particular pipe dream for a long time. Losing my job last year left me with two choices. Peck despondently at the paltry scraps on the floor of a decimated job market, or, take the redundancy money and run headlong into a brilliant summer of adventure, leaving the consequences to be worried about some other time (namely, autumn). I took the money and ran or, to use the correct verb, cycled.

You’d be forgiven for thinking that Grand Tours were just for the boys – voyages of cultural, artistic and often sexual enlightenment from Britain through Paris, the Alps, Venice and Florence to Rome and beyond. Architect Christopher Wren and Romantic poets Byron and Shelley are some of its betterknown male graduates.

“ That’s the badger. I’m going on my own modern-day Grand Tour.” “ But, you’re not male, you’re not young, no-one is mad enough to join you and, the last time I checked, you had just lost your job. How do you propose to do it?” “ On my own, with my final month’s pay. I’ve renamed my bike P45 and am going to try to ride ‘The Grand Tour on a Grand’ from Bristol to London, then to Paris and over the Alps, up to Venice then down to finish in Rome. All in six weeks, leaving soon, with, er, no training.”

“Good luck with that…”

Many plans never see the light of day. Even more almost spark into bonfires of brilliance, getting soused at the last minute by a ‘lack’. Popular lacks include ones of money, time, planning, equipment, partners in crime and motivation – occasionally all six simultaneously. But I was adamant that my plan to cycle the Grand Tour on £1,000 (a.k.a ‘a grand’) would happen, and not least because I was particularly fond of the word play. Despite being an unemployed woman in her mid thirties who really should have been securing a new job with prospects and perhaps a pension plan, I just wanted to get outside, to sing and bathe in the sunshine, and to cycle from my home (in the UK’s first and foremost cycling city: Bristol) to Rome. If 21-year-old consumptive poets could do it in the 1800s with their own horse-drawn carriages and fawning retinue, I knew a robust 21st-century girl could, too.

But pick up any anthology on the subject and, as ever, dozens of equally exciting women appear, too, generally banished to the marginalia but occasionally given their own chapter or, in rarer cases, an entire book. Being sick over the sides of boats to Calais, trampling over the Alps and getting nibbled by bed-dwelling nasties in Piedmont…the record can barely contain its cast of feisty and wellfunded females.

From Florence Nightingale and writer Mary Shelley to arts patron Hester Lynch Thrale and blue-blooded Ladies Bessborough and Holland – the lives of the Grand Touristas were as captivating as those of the men. And I wanted to join their ranks, albeit a century or three too late and, admittedly, not on the most ladylike of carriages: P45, my Marin Alp city bike.

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PRE-TRIP PREP The first bricks in the foundation of my slightly less ostentatious trip were claims. Big, bold, verbal claims to people I didn’t want to disappoint.

They involved sentences like “I’ll just find places to camp along the way”; “I’m sure I’ll be quite fit by the time I get to the Alps”; and “No, I don’t think I’ll be frightened by the animals”.

When the time came, I was in fact terrified by a marauding sounder of Tuscan wild boar, which was about as scary as it got. Even if that incident were inexplicably made into a film, it would still only be classified as PG for its ‘sudden burst of strong language and a fleeting moment of mild surprise’.

To cement my pre-trip planning, I attended a free bike maintenance evening at Evans. Arriving late and slightly out of breath after the flat, 10-minute cycle there, the assembled others were therefore a little surprised to hear that I was heading to Rome, solo. Yes, the Sunday of that week. Yes again, the Rome in Italy.

With so much Grand Tour reading to do, I didn’t want to waste any precious time on any physical training. And I mean, on any physical training.

My back was so stiff from the weeks hunched over my book-strewn desk that, days before departure, I could barely stand up straight.

But, I figured that flat, southern England would be the warm up. The Burgundy region of France had wine aplenty, to soothe away any aches and pains. I then envisaged being sleek, powerful and in tip-top Tour de France territory by the time I hit the Alps.

After crossing into Italy at the Col du Mont Cenis (a traditional Grand Tour pass long since paved by Napoleon), I was confident that the law of ‘what goes up, must come down…’ would then leave one final exhilarating downhill to propel me all the way to the Coliseum.

Self-delusion is a wonderful, wonderful thing and the single most important element of any pre-trip plan. To omit it is to place the entire trip in jeopardy.

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ALL THE GEAR…

NO BACKING OUT

Mental preparations done, it was time to move onto some very important purchases. I selected a tent as lightweight as my cycling stamina, plus some other minor items like panniers, a pump and two water bottles – none of which I owned at the time. If I could have received real-time advice from a Victorian counterpart – let’s make up a generic one and call her Sally – it would have stressed the importance of travelling light (for ease of flight, if need be), carrying no more than one portable carpet-bag. I deemed my brand new pair of daisyyellow Ortlieb panniers a fitting modern-day equivalent.

Next I bought a website for £24.99 (thegrandtouronagrand.com) and started filling it with routes, distances, historical parallels and wildly ambitious talk about the book I would write on my return. Once I had a website, and a blog with followers, there was no backing out. Untold web-browsing millions were counting on me. I couldn’t let them down.

For my ‘sundries’ list, I researched what Victorians would consider absolute essentials. After some serious mulling, I decided to replace Sally’s silver teapot with a featherweight titanium bowl; her heavy-duty leather sheets with a silk sleeping bag liner; and her cumbersome clogs with some £2 Asda flip-flops. My first-aid kit too forewent the pure opium and liquid laudanum options, tempting though they both sounded, and instead contained a far less exotic strip of plasters; a dozen ownbrand aspirin; and a tube of chamoisbottom-related cream that I am actively trying to forget I ever needed.

With hindsight, if I had devoted half as much time planning my route as I did to blogging and indeed attempted kit blagging, weeks later I might not have been escorted from an Italian motorway by leather-clad policemen, nor gotten lost amidst a meeting of wild boar beneath the setting Tuscan sun. But uneventful trips make for uneventful reading and if Sally could reach Rome without a GPS device, I was sure I could, too. Goodbye precision plotting, hello map-reading on the go.

SAFETY FIRST As a lone woman traveller, I wasn’t afraid in advance about the trip as I’ve done a fair bit of travelling on my own, though nothing on this scale. Once on the move I was rarely frightened as I was on relatively familiar territory: France, Switzerland and Italy. It was hardly the Democratic Republic of Congo/ Afghanistan/ insert other terrifying sounding destination of your choice. I wrote my brother an email with a few key details and passwords and in which I left my beloved campervan to my friend Kate should the worst happen, but I wasn’t for a second expecting it to come to that. I was mainly going for the views, the pastries and the tiramisu-flavoured gelato – all of which I feasted upon on an almost daily basis.

Sally, however, would have made a proper will before embarking on her Grand Tour. In the late 1700s, the Alps alone were generally viewed with unmitigated horror. It might not have been possible for her to purchase a return steam-boat ticket to certain destinations, as some crossings were considered too risky, and she may well have had genuine reason to fear for her life on several occasions en route.

“I CAN’T!” “YOU CAN!” Her knowledge of what lay ahead would have come from the poetry and writings of Thomas Gray, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (La Nouvelle Héloïse) and the Romantics Wordsworth (Memorials of a Tour of the Continent, 1822), Byron (poetry plus his published journals) and Shelley (The History of a Six Weeks’ Tour, 1817). It didn’t come from Wikipedia, TripAdvisor, or Twitter. Hats off to sprightly ole Wordsworth by the way who, rather impressively, walked twothirds of his first 3,000-mile Alpine expedition in 1790.

Setting off for the Continent informed only by over-egged travelogue and flamboyant epic poems makes Victorian women unspeakably courageous in my book. Compared to heading bravely into virtually unknown territory (unlike my ‘virtual’ knowledge of much of my route courtesy of Google Earth), my getting on a bike and pushing languidly off from Bristol was an absolute walk in the park. With tea and biscuits. Served by Hugh Laurie.

" IN AN ARM WRESTLE, EXHAUSTION AND THE EUPHORIA OF AN EPIC DAY IN THE SADDLE BEAT ‘UNNECESSARY FEAR OF SOLO CAMPING’ HANDS DOWN."

Despite the fact that women travellers have been doing seriously brave things for centuries, on their own and often flying in the face of social etiquette, some women still find it difficult to embark on their own adventures, 300 years later. They should. You should.

As early as 1870, women Grand Tourists who had already been there, done that and bought the petticoats, were advising their peers that “any woman of ordinary prudence (without belonging to the class called strongminded) can find little difficulty in arranging matters for her own convenience.” And that was pre-WiFi. Many of you will have already done solo bike tours, from day-long picnic pedals to circumnavigations of the globe. For those who haven’t but who want to, here’s a possible place to start.

You say you could never go to a café on your own. Of course you could, you just haven’t decided to yet. You can overcome this one before you even get home tonight. One down. You say you could never go to the cinema on your own. Don’t be daft. Next time no-one wants to see the latest Ryan Gosling film with you (swoon), go alone, and congratulate yourself with a massive Häagen-Dazs. Two down.

You say you could never camp on your own. OK I admit, this is a far tougher proposition altogether and was my major personal challenge. But, simply apply the same rule as above and you’ll probably discover, as I did to my continuing surprise, that it’s not that bad. Tents, being so claustrophobic and cramped with two in them, are surprisingly comforting and calming when they’ve only got you to cocoon.

And no self-respecting murderer is going to target a tent, anyway – everyone on the campsite would hear.

In an arm wrestle, exhaustion and the euphoria of an epic day in the saddle beat ‘unnecessary fear of solo camping’ hands down.

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COUCHSURFING If my convincing argument doesn’t have you hooked, then save up some more and book hotels en route instead. Or for a more people-focussed approach, try couchsurfing.com or warmshowers. com. These are reciprocal hospitality websites on which lovely people offer lovely people like you their couches (in practice more often their spare beds) out of sheer human kindness. I know.

Sounds suspicious, doesn’t it. But after ‘surfing people’s couches’ in Paris, Fontainebleau, Geneva, the Alps, Lake Garda, Vicenza, Tuscany and Rome, I can honestly say that the worst moment, each time, was having to leave my newfound friends in the morning.

Those transient but unforgettable human connections were what made my trip, and were worth far more than a luxurious yet impersonal night in a Hyatt Hotel – or an over-priced stay in an under-serviced roadside inn, as Sally would have had to tolerate.

CARRIAGES VERSUS BIKES Letters, diaries and published Grand Tour journals make much of the discomfort of the actual travelling.

Neatly, Eighteenth Century travellers often averaged around the same distance as this leisurely touring cyclist, namely about 50 miles per day. Sally’s carriage probably felt like an old trunk set on wheels, “best calculated to ensure misery to its occupants”. Such vehicles didn’t fare well on the sinuous and rutted Alpine roads. At particularly tough passes, some carriages were even dismantled and transported across by mule, whilst their inhabitants were carried over on sedan chairs.

On the way up my toughest ascents (Cormet de Roselend, Col de l’Iseran and Mont Cenis), I fantasised that when I reached the summit, I would ask some of the invariably present and burly motorcyclists to carry P45 and I over the highest point, just for tradition’s sake. Alas, I never quite summoned the nerve.

Road-wise, many of my choices weren’t great, in terms of road quality and traffic levels. Compared to Victorian Sally’s experience, though, where some ‘roads’ gave the impression of being made purely out of the compacted wreckage of previously broken carriages, my wheels were essentially floating over heavenly, paved surfaces, every single day. Which I think is an opportune moment to mention that I didn’t get one single solitary puncture throughout the entire trip. Trip discomfort issues and bike maintenance costs: zero. Yet another reason why a Grand Tour by bike trumps the original.

IT REALLY ISN’T ABOUT MY BIKE, HONESTLY On rereading my first draft of this feature about a long ride, I realised that I hadn’t mentioned my bike much. Which sums it up, really. Lance Armstrong (author of It’s Not About the Bike) and Rob Penn (author of It’s All About the Bike) clearly have opposing takes on why they ride. I definitely fall into the Lance camp, as I view my bike more as a metaphorical than an actual vehicle. It gets me places, it brings me together with people. Apart from the fact that I was on it and that people, usually male people, asked me complicated things about it that I didn’t know, like, “How many gears has it got?”, I didn’t really think about the bike much at all.

When buying it I took lots of advice from people who really knew their stuff, then simply went into my closest shop and bought the whitest one I could afford (£499). It has the word Alp in its name which has turned out to be a bit prophetic. It’s also oh-so-nearly got the name of a cake in it (Madera), which gave it a second thumbs up in my view. I still genuinely don’t know how many gears it’s got. 18. 24. 21. 18. Can I phone a friend? It’s got enough to get over the Alps, that’s all anyone needs to know.

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JUST RIDE IT Compared to Rob Lilwall (who spent approximately £50 per week during an eighteen month stretch of his trip Cycling Home From Siberia) and Alastair Humphreys (who averaged about £33 per week on his four-year ride round the world), my weekly budget of £140 seems positively lavish.

In my defence, I was in Western Europe not to mention the most expensive city in the known universe – Geneva – and not the dusty outbacks of Asia.

The original Grand Tour shaped modern tourism, helping to create the routes and destinations that are still followed and enjoyed to this day. My trip has no such lofty aspirations.

I merely copied its highlights and pasted them against a slightly different social and budgetary backdrop. Don’t even ask me my specific route, I can’t remember and wouldn’t recommend half of it to my worst enemy but, on balance, it worked for me one magical, unforgettable time.

As one Grand Tourista said: “Next to the ennui of making a journey through France, I can imagine nothing more tiresome than perusing a journal of one.” Well said, Madame Speaker.

Create your own, make your own mistakes – don’t put off making them by endlessly reading about the ultimate successes of others. Ride to the people and the places you’ve always wanted to meet and to experience. Take as long as you need. Spend as much as feels right.

Just ride it.

GREAT READS HOW THE ENGLISH MADE THE ALPS – JIM RING. SPINSTERS ABROAD: VICTORIAN LADY EXPLORERS – DEA BIRKETT. THE GRAND TOUR IN THE 18TH CENTURY – JEREMY BLACK UNSUITABLE FOR LADIES: AN ANTHOLOGY OF WOMEN TRAVELLERS – JANE ROBINSON FULL TILT: IRELAND TO INDIA WITH A BICYCLE – DERVLA MURPHY 37

The black of the screen is bleached with light and texture. A vibrating taste of static and iron. Pain floods in behind the bridge of my nose and I can feel a bruised hole in my tongue, but I am still distracted by the taste and texture. The texture is then perfectly translated into a visual image as the texture of tarmac. It is impossible to understand this tarmac as a road.

It has no lines or boundaries. If the moment could be frozen and rewound, it would be possible to look up and see the desert of tarmac into which my consciousness was being born. Endless tarmac. Warm and vibrating, its texture had penetrated my mouth and everything that existed in this moment.

In this country, road kill happens in the early hours of the morning.

Rabbits, foxes, badgers and birds.

These are the hours of overlap. The countryside’s nocturnal inhabitants returning from a night’s hunting, foraging or scavenging, and the animals of the day, with which we are more familiar, taking the opportunity of empty roads to pick up the debris of the night before.

Words Petor Georgallou

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In the same way that we are drawn to the sea in the autumn after it has been warmed by the months of summer and the temperature difference between air and water diminishes, creating the illusion of a much warmer sea, reptiles of all description are drawn to tarmacked roads at dusk. In warmer climates, where reptile species are more common – as they are in Cyprus, the country of my genetic heritage – the majority of road kill occurs in the two hours succeeding dusk. During the day, the black of the tarmac heats up,

The like a solar panel, or the infinite blue of the ocean and, due to its thickness and density, during the hours of dusk and the hours immediately after, the warm tarmac of the road is where insects and reptiles are drawn. They bask there, the warmth of the road breathing life and energy into their cold blood.

When I was twelve years old, a school friend asked me to check whether his pet lizard was still alive as it had not moved for several hours. I glanced at its cold, unblinking eyes and shouted down the stairs, ‘It’s fine!’ Several days later, he picked the lizard up.

Rigor mortis had set in long ago and it remained poised, as if sunning itself in his hands, in the way that a plastic lizard would.

The merging of my knowledge of road kill and this fragment of memory from long ago, combined with the hue of the light, told me that the time at which I had been born into the infinite vibrating tarmac was the time around dusk, as the tarmac felt warm on my hands and cheek. This sparked a chain reaction of realisation that, attached to my mouth, nose and consciousness, there had to be a cheek and hands with which the tarmac had become acquainted and that this cheek and hands were also vibrating, pink, bloody and full of grit. I lay for a moment in this desert I perceived, basking like my schoolmate’s lizard.

My consciousness quickly became re-acquainted with its apparently fragile physical body. The words ‘apparently quite fragile’ resonated sarcastically in what felt like the cavernous hollow of my mind.

Crash.

The construct of the desert was destroyed as the retina of my one open eye strained, agonisingly slowly, to shift its focus to the reflective white line separating this side of the road from that side of the road. No longer was I in an imagined desert, a calm sanctuary of warm vibrating tarmac, from which there was no reason to move, and where the issue of contentment had not been formulated as a question, but on a road. Informed by the distance away from my retina at which the reflective white line lay with its new companion, a cat’s eye, I could deduce that this road was a dual carriage way. The world had changed dramatically. Dual carriage ways existed and I was in one. Understanding this, my mind accelerated at an immeasurable rate from Zimmer-frame to space rocket, from noticing and wonderment to blind panic. This change in state was marked by an explosion of sound. Cars everywhere, deafeningly close and booming voices shouting my name and ‘Shit!’ and ‘Fuck!’ One of these voices belonged to Dave.

David was a marine welder. He welded boats. To me this meant that he would weld underwater, which is something I have always found baffling, fascinating and logically impossible. However, he informed me that this was a skill that he did not possess. He was tall and lean. He stood a little over six feet tall, with a long and shapely black beard reaching his belly button. He wore two T-shirts, each so burnt and eaten by moths that together they still barely made up one T-shirt. David was a little over fifty years old and it seemed that he always

had been and always would be. It was only his looks that gave his age away, not his demeanour. David may have had no hair but nobody would ever have known this, as even when changing his T-shirt(s) for a yellowed but fresh-smelling cycle jersey he would not remove his black wraparound sunglasses or his faded red welding bandana from his head. David was a veteran cycling champion and this was why I found myself with him.

David was calling my name.

David’s presence equated, in my mind, to a bicycle-related activity. However, this particular activity was not one with which David was familiar and, in truth, it was he who had found himself in this situation because of me. I had invited David to an alley cat, an illegal street race through London, and now I could realise, using David as a land mark, the whole of the situation. As I tried to pick myself up, grasping hands came from everywhere, detached from bodies or persons, dragging me away from the tarmac where I once lay.

They were a hindrance. I struggled to regain my position as, in my mind, regaining this position meant that I would also regain the mechanical extension of my body, which had allowed me to participate in this activity, but I could not see it. Where was my bicycle? I didn’t continue struggling against the hands because not only did I understand them to be the hands of fellow competitors moving me to safety but also I was limp and completely powerless to move my limbs in the way that I wanted. Both eyes now opened and fixated on the spot on which I once lay with the sole goal of returning to it and regaining bicycle. I exclaimed

‘Where’s my bike?’ longing to bring it with me to safety. The thought of it being wrenched from between my thighs, run over, bent and broken was simply unbearable. The words started in my head, I inhaled sharply, pushed the air hard out of my lungs - but by the time they had passed my vocal chords and reached my tongue they had already become distorted.

They were further abstracted by the deranged movements of my wet, red lips. I felt saliva dribble down my chin into my beard as I spluttered the words through these irrational mouth movements, ‘Pleughpleughplerr’.

As I did so small specks of blood appeared on the seemingly distant tarmac, from which I now felt very separate. My eyes and head were turning separately to my conscious decision-making process. I began trying to understand the dual carriage way and its location. It had a familiarity but in the way that a roundabout in a far corner of our island might, simply due to the use of the same road-planning as a local and more known roundabout. Flashes of colour and texture (of which I was unusually aware) denim, beard, a red bus stop and then nothing.

I’m still not sure where or why I fell off, and what happened for the majority of that week remains a mystery. My cycling companion Dave died recently, but at the time he said that he had been in front of me, and turned back when he realised I wasn't there anymore. I don't think I was unconscious for more than a couple of minutes, but I'm not exactly sure. My memory has not been the same since.

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WHERE DO BICYCLES GO TO DIE? DOCUMENTARY PHOTOGRAPHER MARKO VUORINEN HAS BEEN CAPTURING THE SOULS OF ABANDONED AND STRIPPED BICYCLES PRIMARILY IN THE EAST VILLAGE SECTION OF LOWER MANHATTAN, NEW YORK CITY. THE AREA IS A WELCOMING HOST TO THOSE LOOKING FOR A FINAL RESTING PLACE.

W W W. M A R K O V U O R I N E N . C O M W W W. S K E L E T O N S N Y C . C O M

WORDS ANDREW TOBERT

Much has been said, at least by me, about the similarities between owning a bike and looking after a child. It’s a largely positive analogy – loving something that you’re responsible for, a sense of pride. But it goes a lot deeper. Bikes, like children, get sick and need looking after. And bikes, like children, get bullied.

The day had started well. I was on my way down the road to help out at a friend’s event. The sun was shining and the air was crisp. London on a sunny winter day like this is magical.

I was happy. I arrived, I chained my bike up. Life was beautiful. The venue was on one of those streets where the pavement is fenced off from the road (as a side note, if cars are so dangerous they have to kept in cages, maybe we shouldn’t be so keen to let them into our city centres?). As all the pavement-side space was taken, I chained my bike on the roadside. My chain is a D-lock so there’s limited room for the bike to manoeuvre, but over the course of the day, manoeuvre it did. The front wheel turned in a little bit. It was overhanging on the road by approximately 20 centimetres.

There’s a rant to be had here about the attitudes of motorists, the selfentitlement, the aggression, but this is not the place. Once I start, I won’t be able to stop, and no one wants to read the rants of an angry white man. This is not the Daily Mail. Suffice to say, my bike, my overhanging-by-twentycentimetres bike was not universally avoided. A motorist couldn’t get through (and presumably didn’t want to wait until there was no traffic in the oncoming lane. Difficult on quiet backstreets). He sped up, crashed my bike out of the way, then sped off.

This was retold to me by a friend, an eyewitness. I looked the bike up and down, thought it would be OK, then rode off, and almost instantly knew what was wrong. My bike kept lurching to the right, which is surely not a natural thing for it to do; this is a bike after all, not the Lib Dems.

I couldn’t even brake properly; rather than a smooth, gentle deceleration, applying the brakes was more like

ILLUSTRATION JOE WALDRON / JOEWALDRON.BLOGSPOT.COM

asking someone to sit on one of the handlebars. I was violently out of sync, risking life and limb with every pedal. Something needed fixing.

Deciding what exactly that was however, would prove harder than first thought. Originally, as the wheel was wobbly, I thought I should true

wheel was true. Apart from buy him a coffee and apologise profusely, there was nothing more I could do. I was stuck.

Now, no one could accuse me of cheating; when I started writing these columns, I promised myself I wouldn’t chicken out and go to bike shops.

And generally, I’ve been good. So

...MY BIKE KEPT LURCHING TO THE RIGHT, WHICH IS SURELY NOT A NATURAL THING FOR IT TO DO; THIS IS A BIKE AFTER ALL, NOT THE LIB DEMS... it. This was both an honest, rational assessment and also something I just wanted to do. I like the verb I guess. I true, you true, he, she or it trues.

Truing, for those who have never done it, is actually lots of fun. The sort of quiet, methodical activity that one should really do on a hangover, which was fortunate. All you do, for hours seemingly, is turn the wheel and look at where it moves closest to the brake.

Find the spot, then gently adjust the nearest spoke a quarter turn in the right direction. Keep going, nice and gently, checking, adjusting, checking, adjusting. Like a post-coital spliff, a wave of calm envelops your body and all is right in the world.

Whether or not you’re doing anything is anyone's guess. There’s a whole other level of knowledge you’re supposed to pay attention to, like the orientation of the spoke (i.e. is it coming from the left or right hand side of the wheel? Look at a bike and you’ll know what I mean) and if the wobble is too left or too right.

Basically, you fart around until you get bored. At least that’s what I did.

But it didn’t solve anything. It was either a perfectly true wheel to begin with, or I’m just incompetent.

Assuming incompetence (always a safe position to take), I asked around a few friends of mine, one of whom, bless him, came into town on his day off.

Pointlessly, as it turned out. On arrival he promptly decreed that in fact, there was nothing wrong with my bike. The

good. Unwritten about are the times I changed tyres in full view of the cool people in bike shops, and times when I’ve walked home (two hours, remember) thanks to a faulty bike. I’ve been good, really I have. But this was different. My bike was lopsided and dangerous and I didn’t know why. It was time to cave.

The bike shop (whose name, I should add, I got from this magazine) took one look at it and told me what was wrong. My fork was broken. The car that smashed into my bike had done it with such force that the steel (is it steel?) frame was bent out of whack.

I needed a new frame.

And then a new chain, new handle bars... one month later and all that’s left of my bike are the pedals and the brakes. And only on the condition I replace them at a later date. Almost £500 later, and countless Tube journeys (do not EVER get me started on Tube journeys), the scale of my neglect over the years has hit home. And bike, if you can read this, you should know that I’m sorry. I really am.

I see now that I took you for granted. You’re better now, with a vintage, British-made frame, handlebars at just the right height and a shiny new lick of paint, and I want you to know that I’ll do everything I can to keep you that way. I’ll oil you if you want oil, fix you when you’re broken. I’ll change.

I’ll be the owner you deserve, and so much more.

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Illustration Max Lockwood www.maxlockwood.co.uk

Words Nigel Land

The Veteran-Cycle Club was founded in 1955 “to stimulate interest in all types of old cycles and cycling history.” In the same year the first copy of the Club’s journal - The Boneshaker - was published; it’s now reached issue number 187. I joined the Club about 11 years ago when starting a local history project – about the Elswick-Hopper Cycle and Motor Company Ltd of Barton-on-Humber. I have cycled all my life, but had not thought much about the history of the bicycle until I joined the V-CC in search of information on the company.

Ten years of research culminated in the publication of a book early in 2011, and along the way I became perhaps a touch obsessive about cycle history, to the point where I took over as editor of The Boneshaker in 2008, starting with issue 176. My first edition included the story of Ernie 44

Clements, founder of Falcon cycles, and a history of the ‘humble’ toe clip. The Club now has around 2,500 members and has developed, in conjunction with the National Cycle Collection, a comprehensive and ever-growing internet library of cycle-related material.

With members all over the UK and a growing number from around the world, the Club’s publications are an important tool in achieving its objective. Current affairs are covered in a bi-monthly magazine, News and Views, and every four months it is joined by The Boneshaker. As an example of what goes into it, here’s a recent article by member Roger Bugg about the exploits of Marcel Planes (and others) in the year 1911. The story has been condensed somewhat from Roger’s original 17 pages.

MARCEL PLANES

T H E C E N T U RY C O M P E T I T I O N O F 1 9 1 1

Just over a hundred years ago, Cycling announced a competition more demanding than any they had previously offered. On 14 December 1910 they informed readers of ‘Our Great Road-Riding Competition for 1911’. Their offer was to present a gold medal to the cyclist completing the greatest number of 100-mile rides during the year, with bronze medals and certificates for those with smaller scores.

An outline of the competition was given. It was intended to appeal to hard-riders rather than racers and was only open to amateurs. Each century had to be completed in a single day, although there was nothing to stop an exceptionally keen rider from knocking off a second century in the same day. Scores from the leading competitors were to be announced each week from the beginning of January until the end of December.

Speed was immaterial, Cycling taking the somewhat optimistic view that the journeys should be seen rather as ‘pleasant recreation’. Riders could travel singly or in company and there was no rule about pacing. However, holding on to a faster vehicle was not allowed and would lead to exclusion if found out. In a burst of moral exhortation consistent with the age the article went on: ‘We have an abiding faith in the good sportsmanship of the average cyclist, and we are content to rely to a great extent on his sense of honour'. Just in case a sense of honour should not prove sufficient checking

cards were provided, to be verified later by Cycling staff.

Competitors were urged to ride a few extra miles in excess of each 100 to be on the safe side.

Plenty of support for the competition was received from readers of Cycling but there were also queries and suggestions.

The main complaint was that competitors who could ride every day of the week were at an advantage over those who could only get out on Sundays and perhaps a half-day in the week. Cycling brushed this aside, stating that they did not believe the competition would be much of an attraction to the man of leisure: ‘In our experience we have found that those who work the hardest also play the hardest, and that the man who is free only on Sundays and one other afternoon in the week is the keenest cyclist’. There were queries whether centuries gained on Sundays could be counted. Today it is easy to forget that the Sabbath then was considered a day of rest. The whole matter of selecting routes and mileages rested with individual competitors.

Cycling refused to offer advice on queries such as ‘Will you tell me how far from Herne Hill to Windsor Bridge will be reckoned?’ In ‘A Wail from Wales’ a writer complained that Welsh competitors did not stand a chance due to the hilly nature of the country. Cycling responded tartly, ‘We cannot 45

With better weather in May the number of completed checking cards rose, with 480 entrants now riding. With over a quarter of a million miles covered Cycling anticipated an even greater increase over the Whitsun holiday and the extra holiday for the Coronation of George V on 22 June. Marcel Planes had taken the lead and was on 95 centuries.

At the end of August Marcel passed the 200 mark for completed centuries and Mrs Elliott recorded 38 centuries by mid-September. By October the total mileage of all competitors was approaching 750,000. However, it was not all positive. In its editorial for the following week Cycling revealed that ‘irregular practices’ amongst some of the 700 competitors had been discovered. With a certain world-weariness, Cycling acknowledged that, “Even in England, where we pride ourselves upon the purity of our sportsmanship, we cannot escape entirely from the man whose motto is ‘Win by fair means if possible, but – win’.”

Legal proceedings were threatened against any competitor making fraudulent claims. However, it seems that the competitors who had been sending in checking cards ‘bearing bogus signatures’ were simply removed from the list.

accept any responsibility for the Welsh mountains. Does our correspondent think we ought to have them rolled out?’

One point struck home and that was from a lady who asked ‘somewhat indignantly’ why they did not state that the competition was open to ladies. Cycling could only reply rather lamely that it had not struck them that there was anything in the rules barring ladies.

It only took until 18 January before the Editors had to wag their fingers: “We regret to state that it has come to our knowledge that a number of unscrupulous persons are soliciting trade assistance in their attempts to score the highest number of ‘centuries’ in our Century Competition”. Cycling warned that any person found guilty of ‘shamateurism’ would be immediately barred from the competition. The co-operation of manufacturers was asked for in withholding trade support.

By the end of January, W R Wells was in the lead on 13 and Marcel Planes had moved into third place with eight. Overall 312 centuries had been completed. Cycling gloated that this belied the pessimistic view held in some quarters that winter riding was in decline.

Bright ideas were definitely the thing in 1911. The issue of Cycling for 15 March 1911 made a proposal that ‘it would be very much to the benefit of the competition and the riders alike if some form of combination could be formed amongst the 800 competitors’. Every large centre was invited to form some sort of organisation (a club), with officials to select meeting places for the century riders and to arrange suitable routes. In this way, hitherto solitary riders – ‘loose ends’ – could be gathered up and become part of a club. Cycling suggested ‘some name such as the Century Road Club’.

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In our own celebrity-obsessed age, it is hard to imagine that Cycling would wait until mid-October before telling the readership anything about Marcel. In photographs he appears as a slight figure of medium height, usually with a solemn expression. There is nothing to suggest the single-minded determination needed to ride 100 miles day in and day out for a year. His machine was six years old and heavy. In a polite understatement Cycling said it was ‘by no means ideally suited to its purpose’. Fully loaded it weighed 45lb and the chain had a habit of jolting off downhill. The seat stays had fractured and were bound up with string, a state they had been in for some months. The front forks had been replaced following a collision with a hay cart. Marcel had carried on riding with bent forks and in considerable pain for some weeks until he realised that one of the forks had fractured. The coaster brake had ceased to be of much practical use, presumably having worn down to the rivets. Marcel had worked out that his costs per hundred miles were 1/- or less, and nine consecutive centuries had been ridden without a farthing in his pockets.

He admitted he would be glad when the year was up but was determined to keep up a century a day to the end. Cycling was sure he would last but not so sure about his machine.

Nonetheless, when the final positions appeared in January 1912 Marcel Planes was the gold medallist with 332 centuries. There was a special medal for W R Wells and silver medals for eleven others. A special silver medal was awarded to Mrs Elliott in 18th place for her 60 centuries. The total mileage was in excess of 850,000. Cycling made full acknowledgement of Marcel’s achievement. The 21-year old had had only a few years of cycle experience to build stamina and experience. In addition, he had to finance himself entirely, riding his six year old machine from his home in Dean Street, Soho (in central London) and back every day. ‘And the reward is nothing more than a gold medal!’ said Cycling sadly.

Apart from broken seat stays and forks, Marcel had worn out four back and three front tyres. He had also had to replace the chain, handlebar, bottom bracket spindle, and bearings in the front wheel. On the clothing side, Marcel had worn out three pairs of cycling knickers and two pairs of shoes, each pair being resoled twice.

At the inaugural meeting of the Century Road Club held on 10 January 1912 at the Phoenix Hotel, Princes Street, Oxford Circus, Marcel and other members received their medals from cycling legend G H Stancer. Marcel offered a vote of thanks on behalf of himself and the other competitors to Cycling for organising the Century Competition.

Although other ladies entered, only Mrs Elliott achieved a certificate. Cycling was not in favour of ladies racing but did applaud her ‘purely pleasure cycling’, often in the company of her male competitors. Mrs Elliott attributed her success to wearing comfortable garments, a knitted jersey being ideal.

Cycling rather daringly commented on her ‘excellent ankle action’. Her 60 centuries were only a part of her total mileage for the year.

In a tale by the brothers Grimm they all would have lived happily ever after but this was a club and these were cyclists and for Marcel things were about to get grimmer. The first signs of something being wrong appear in the minutes of the meeting held on 17 January 1912 of the Century Road Club. Marcel had joined the committee at the inaugural meeting but resigned without giving a reason a week later.

Something was brewing and at a special meeting held on 8 July 1912 the chairman, G H Stancer, spoke at length on ‘the controversy at present existing in connection with the

M R S E L L I O T T AT T R I B U T E D H E R S U C C E S S TO W E A R I N G C O M F O RTA B L E G A R M E N T S , A KNITTED JERSEY BEING IDEAL. CYCLING RATHER DARINGLY COMMENTED ON HER ‘EXCELLENT ANKLE ACTION’ anti-advertising question’. It was not until the committee meeting on 9 June 1913 that it finally all came out. Stancer made a report ‘upon circumstances that have recently come to light concerning the behaviour of M Planes in the closing stages of the Century Competition. Apart from any connection with the anti-advertising clause, it has been discovered that he had professionalised himself, and which meant for that reason alone he would never be accepted for any road race by any club. It has been proved beyond dispute that he made a false declaration when he won the Century Competition. He had been in receipt of a weekly wage and received a substantial sum for a testimonial from the Hutchison Tyre Co, during the closing stages of the Competition.’ Marcel was suspended from membership of the club pending further action by the committee. The intention was to call a special meeting and ask Marcel to attend. This did not take place as Marcel wrote resigning from the club.

In 1913 Marcel bought himself a new BSA light roadster, now in the V-CC’s possession, and went on to become cycle department manager of John Barker and Co Ltd of Kensington.

It is a wonder he ever wanted to see a bicycle again.

Further information on the V-CC can be found at www.v-cc.org.uk. The Club has many Sections around the UK that organise regular rides, events and an annual summer camp. There is also an annual International Cycle History Conference, being held this year in Roeselare, Belgium.

Find out more about The National Cycling Collection at www.cyclemuseum.org.uk.

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Words Rob Lewis Illustration JesĂşs Escudero jesusescuderoilustra.blogspot.com

When we pulled up at a crossing in Nanning, Southern China, I was surrounded by hundreds of bikes. Being a Chinese city of seven million people, you'd expect that, right? You might imagine hoards of cyclists, sporting coolie hats and loaded up with chickens and bamboo on their way to market. Think again.

This is China in the 21st Century and things have changed somewhat. Yes, there were hundreds of people on bikes - but these were not the type you pedal but the type you charge.

Welcome to the electric bike (e-bike) craze which has now swept across China.

Four months into my year-long cycle touring adventure from New Zealand back to the UK in 2011, I was witnessing something I had never seen before. A transport revolution has resulted in a young and busy Chinese populace getting around their cities not on bicycles, not in cars or even buses, but by electric bikes. Resembling a Vespa more than a bicycle, these brightly coloured machines have become the dominant method for urban transport in this part of the world. China is now forging ahead on its own mission to become the economic powerhouse of the world and with this, old ways are being swept aside. Out with the old push-bikes and in with a new way of travelling, the e-bike. The near silence of gliding bicycles has been replaced by a high pitched buzz of electric engines. An army of bees swarming through an urban metropolis.

I cycled through a number of cities in China and all of them suffered pretty severe air pollution; a major driver for the promotion of e-bikes. The sky was always misty and grey, but I was never quite sure if it was because of clouds or because of the factories and vehicles which belch out thick plumes of smoke.

In an effort to tackle this increasing problem, the Government made developing e-bikes an official technology goal in 1991.

Following this, many Chinese cities introduced bicycle lanes to help commuters beat the rush hour congestion and more than ninety went even further by introducing a ban on petrol-powered motorbikes. In addition, outside of cities, the government has been promoting its “EV 2-wheelers to the countryside” policy whereby EV 2-wheeler buyers from rural areas can get subsidies.

The results of these policies have been significant. In 2008 the Chinese bought 21 million e-bikes compared to 9.4 million cars and now over 100 million buzz up and down its streets.

I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand it’s good to see measures tackling air pollution. On the other, electric bikes – largely powered by China’s numerous coal-fired power stations – only shift the problem of air pollution away from cities. They don’t solve it with regards to the mitigation of climate change.

And beyond this bigger global agenda is my feeling that people who don't cycle are missing out on something wonderful in life.

Something that makes you feel free, exhilarated and provides the ultimate transport solution for most of our journeys. Maybe in their rush to embrace modernity the Chinese are missing a trick here. The wonder of cycling takes so many forms for me; the sense of freedom it gives, that healthy, alive feeling you get after even a short cycle ride, and the fact that despite all the technological advances it remains pretty much the fastest and cheapest way to travel around a city.

Amongst many of the people I met in China and South East Asia, there was a strong feeling that the bicycle was the transport choice of the poor, a last resort if you will. Consequently, when someone could afford to buy a motorbike, a car, or as was so common in Chinese cities, an e-bike, they did so. This sits in stark contrast to Europe and the West, where cycling is undergoing a great resurgence. During the time I spent in China I saw surprisingly few people using push-bikes, the notable exceptions being children, and poor people. This seems a great shame considering China was once so well known for its love of our favourite two-wheeled vehicle.

THIS SENTIMENT MADE MY WIFE AND I, ON OUR YEAR-LONG CYCLING TOUR, A BIT OF AN ANOMALY. WE WERE WHITE AND WESTERN (SO IN MOST PEOPLE' S EYES AUTOMATICALLY WEALTHY) AND YET WE CHOSE TO TRAVEL BY BICYCLE. “Why don't you buy a motorbike or a car?” was a question we were frequently asked by people who approached us on the street or pulled up alongside us as we cycled. “Because we love cycle touring,” I responded. Several shakes of the head and general bemusement would ensue at this point.

Looking at the bigger picture, it’s not only the Chinese who are getting excited about e-bikes. Whilst the biggest market is in Asia, their popularity is increasing all over the world. The fastest growing markets are currently in the Middle East and Africa but growth is now picking up in mainland Europe and even here in the UK. On major cycle retailers' websites, electric bikes can be bought for as little as £650 with a top of the range model costing around £2,500. These bikes, unlike those in China, resemble the bicycle more than the Vespa, with a standard bike frame and an electric engine that acts as a boost for when you don't want to huff and puff your way up a hill or even when you’re tired of cycling on the flat (often referred to as “pedal-assisted” bikes).

With all the recent talk about electric cars you could easily forget about the role of their two-wheeled counterparts. But interestingly, an American market survey company called Pike Research recently published 10 predictions about the electric vehicle market, one of which was that the best-selling electric vehicles won't have four wheels but two. They have two main advantages over electric cars: their batteries are easier and quicker to recharge and they are significantly cheaper. All of this paints a fascinating picture of what our cities might look like in ten or twenty years’ time. Electric bikes could become one of the most popular forms of transport, dwarfing in number the humble bicycle and even possibly the car.

Although the e-bikes electricity will mostly come from coal or nuclear power stations, they’re still better than cars in terms of pollution and congestion - and hopefully not bad news for the popularity of cycling.

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Words Ben Moss / Film Stills Hubub Films

"IF WE CAN GET ANYONE IN HERE [WHO] DON'T KNOW NOTHING ABOUT BIKES, WE TEACH THEM."

WITH MY OWN TWO WHEELS THE BICYCLE AS A VEHICLE FOR CHANGE AROUND THE WORLD It was at the 2011 London leg of the Bicycle Film Festival that 'With My Own Two Wheels' was first screened in the UK. Weaving together the experiences of five individuals into a single story about how the bicycle can change the world, one pedal stroke at a time, the film truly inspires a wholehearted belief in the power of the bicycle to do good on a global level.

For Fred, a health worker in Zambia, the bicycle is a means of reaching twice as many patients. For Bharati, a teenager in India, it provides access to education.

For Mirriam, a disabled Ghanaian woman, working on bicycles is an escape from the stigma attached to disabled people in her community. For Carlos,

a farmer in Guatemala, pedal power is a way to help neighbours reduce their impact on the environment. For Sharkey, a young man in California, the bicycle is an escape from the gangs that consume so many of his peers.

I left the film passionate, with this as a snapshot of what some visions of a sustainable, bicycle-inspired utopia might look like; excited to share this vision with others around me, but also keen to find similar projects bubbling up around the world. Boneshaker caught up with Jacob Seigel-Boettner, one of the film's Directors, to ask him about the making of the film and to talk in more depth about some of the projects featured in it.

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" WE KNOW THAT WE DON'T HAVE TO SPEAK FOR THE MÁQUINA (MACHINE), THE MÁQUINA SPEAKS FOR ITSELF." First up Jacob, how did the idea for the film come about?

My brother and co-director Isaac and I literally grew up on bicycles. Our parents brought us home from the hospital in bicycle trailers and our family vacations were bike tours all over the globe with their students. The bicycle was this really cool, expensive toy that we got under the Christmas tree. So in that sense, part of the idea for the film has been there since day one.

I guess the real spark for the film came during my sophomore year at the University of California Berkeley, when I spent a semester working for a project in Rwanda that designed and distributed cargo bicycles for coffee farmers. It was a huge eye-opener. The communities that I was working with relied on their bicycles as trucks, minivans, school buses and ambulances. Two wheels were so much more than a toy for them. This experience made me realize how much I had taken my bicycle for granted and just how onesided our view of two wheels is in much of the “developed” world.

That summer, my family led a bike tour across Rwanda with a group of my dad’s middle school students from Santa Barbara, CA. It was a very humbling trip for all, and Isaac had the same realization that I had had that spring. As filmmakers, we wanted to share the story of the bicycle that we had seen in Rwanda: the story of the bicycle for the other 99% so to speak.

'With My Own Two Wheels' was born.

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" I WAS VERY HAPPY WHEN I GOT THE BICYCLE. I FEEL REALLY GOOD RIDING MY BIKE."

How long did it take to film and how many of you were in the team?

We shot the film on a whirlwind two-anda-half-month round the world trip. Seven countries. Nineteen airports. One lost passport (mine). It was nuts, but certainly one of the most exhausting and rewarding journeys that I have ever made.

The crew was made up of myself, my brother Isaac, and our good friend Ian Wexler. All three of us grew up mountain biking together in Santa Barbara, CA. When we came up with the idea for the film, Ian was studying cinematography at Emerson College in Boston, and was a natural first choice for a director of photography. Fortunately, he is just as crazy about bikes as we are, and signed on before we even had any funding. It was a very skeleton crew for budget reasons, and we all wore a lot of hats. Everyone held a camera, monitored audio, and contributed something in post. We have official titles in the credits, but really this was a film created by all three of us.

How did you go about getting the film seen?

Well, the film really has taken a life of its own in terms of promotion and no two screenings have come about in the same way! We had our Premiere at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival, which was great, as I have wanted to make films ever since I saw Peter Jackson speak at SBIFF when I was in middle school. We then got a grassroots tour off the ground with the help of World Bicycle Relief –

one of the organizations featured in the film. They connected us with supporters across the country, who in turn organized screenings at universities, bike shops, and schools. Through word of mouth, the three month tour quickly turned into almost an entire year on the road with the film. Again, it was an exhausting but incredibly rewarding journey.

In addition to the grassroots tour, the film was also accepted by the Bicycle Film Festival and Mountainfilm in Telluride, Colorado. Both festivals not only screened the film at their premiere events in New York City and Telluride, but also included us in their travelling programs.

The final segment of the tour has been a series of screenings at high schools across the U.S.A. I think the characters in the film – and the bicycle – can be powerful teaching tools for young people. With all of the statistics and headlines that kids see on the news about poverty, hunger, and disease, I think many get overwhelmed. They are looking for ways they can make a difference. The bike is something that is very tangible to most kids but most don't realize its transformative potential.

I think the film helps them connect the dots...to see how something that they take for granted can have an impact on a global scale.

We have also released the film online through LinkTV, an alternative media outlet based in San Francisco and New

" WHETHER THE PATIENT WAS NEAR OR FAR, RAIN OR SHINE, I USED TO WALK. THE BIKE MAKES THE JOB OF A CAREGIVER LIGHTER." York. They put it up on their ViewChange site, a sort of YouTube for social and environmental justice films.

You've been able to travel far and wide to see these inspiring bicycle projects and their hugely positive social and environmental outcomes. Are there any of these local to you that you would like to see replicated further afield?

'Bici Centro', a community bike repair shop and education centre in Santa Barbara, that we featured in the film, is the perfect example of a local project that can and should be replicated across the 'developed' world. I think sometimes many of us have a tendency to ignore poverty and inequality right on our own doorstep, in our own communities. Bici does a great job of shedding light on the often ignored urban poor in Santa Barbara, a place that many only know as a wealthy escape for Hollywood celebrities.

But what Bici doesn’t do is patronize.

It equalizes. If you go into the shop on any given day, you will likely see college students, wealthy roadies, and homies all working on bikes. What you might not realize is that the shop volunteers teaching others how to work on their bikes are often the tattooed characters with sagging shorts. The students are those with iPhones, carbon fibre, and BMWs. At Bici, those who are often ignored become the teachers. It is an amazing thing to see how the bike – through a place like Bici – brings together people who previously had very little interaction. Very humbling for someone

" IT [WORKING AS A BIKE MECHANIC] HELPS ME TO ACHIEVE SOMETHING...

AND I FEEL PROUD."

who grew up in Santa Barbara and did his fare share of ignoring.

Do you think that these projects initially spring up around and rely upon one driven individual such as Maya Pedal in Guatemala?

I think that it definitely takes an individual with a vision to get things rolling. In Guatemala that was Carlos, a farmer with no college education. In India it was Armene Modi, a professor from the region who had taught in Japan and the United States. In Zambia, it was F.K. Day, the co-founder of SRAM, one of the largest bike component companies in the world. It definitely takes an initial spark from a person who is willing to put in a lot of work for little or no pay or recognition to get projects like those in the film off the ground.

In those circumstances when an individual is the catalyst behind the idea, how does the project become able to ride on its own two wheels without the passion of that individual?

Having a passionate founder doesn’t make a project successful or sustainable by any means. The most sustainable projects that I have come across are those that are able to grow beyond just their founder; to bring on many passionate and talented locals who are quite capable, invested and motivated to run the project themselves.

There are locals out there – like Carlos and Mirriam – who have the drive, they just need the resources and support to make things happen. It is crucial to bring

these individuals on board to foster local ownership. This can help ensure that the project can continue to operate – given the resources – even after the founder has moved on.

Recognising this local talent also reminds those who started the project that the people who they were initially seeking to 'help' are not powerless individuals with no ability to better their circumstances. I think the most successful project founders and directors are those who partner with – rather than patronize – those in the community that they are seeking to help.

Development work is a two-way street.

Often you'll find that the project founders will tell you that they themselves have learned from and been helped or inspired by those they set out to help.

However, I don’t think that any one particular management style is an absolute recipe for success. Ability Bikes works because it is a cooperative. Ashta No Kai has been successful because Armene Modi runs a tight ship... but being from the region she is also very invested and in things for the long haul. I think the only structure that doesn’t work is when you have inadequate local representation or ownership in the management structure.

World Bicycle Relief is a great example of a combined structure that works: while their Board is based in the United States, the vast majority of their staff in Zambia, Zimbabwe, Kenya and South Africa are... surprise... Zambians, Zimbabweans, Kenyans, and South Africans.

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This might sound hokey, but there is something magical about the experience of riding a bike. I think there is a reason that most people can’t help but smile when you ask them about their first time on two wheels.

The people making many of the dayto-day operational decisions have a very direct stake in the outcomes.

You must also be aware of the broad range of challenges that constrain these sorts of projects from growing to greater things?

I think that one of the biggest factors limiting the expansion of a project is, paradoxically, its own desire to expand.

In my opinion, one of the worst (though well-intentioned) mistakes that a project can make is to expand rapidly without focusing on the long-term sustainability of its efforts. People can get very excited about initial success, and scale up too quickly. Projects that do this can get way in over their heads and collapse.

This leaves those that the project was attempting to help no better off than they were before and often fosters a deep mistrust of future projects in the region.

This is not to say that projects shouldn’t try to expand as soon as they are able.

They absolutely should. But they should make sure that they are doing things sustainably at a small scale first. When we were in India, I was very surprised when Armene Modi told me that she didn’t want to expand Ashta No Kai’s bicycle bank program yet. She wanted to make sure that they were doing things right on a small scale before expanding. I think a lot of project managers could learn from her.

Is there a bike project missing out there that you think is being cried out for?

I think that what is missing the most is the adoption of the bicycle on a wide scale by the larger development organizations such as CARE, Oxfam, various UN agencies, USAID, and especially the World Bank. I think there are a ton of smaller bicycle-focused projects out there 54

that have had tremendous success on a small scale. Now we just need to get the bicycle incorporated into the mainstream development discourse.

Watching the film I became aware of probably how many projects you had to omit... yet each one, I'm sure has something vital both to show to global society, and also to other projects. Do you know of any platform where this information can be shared? It seems to me that we're crying out for something like this – an electronic and/or paper manual comprehensively documenting these sorts of projects.

About a month ago I actually just stumbled across this website, www.worldwidecyclingatlas.com.

They have a great printed version as well.

There are a bunch of projects out there not currently featured in their database, but it is a start. I think the biggest chunk missing are the locally-founded projects like Ashta No Kai in India who may not call themselves a bike project or embrace what many of us may think of as bike culture, but they are changing the world with the bike nonetheless.

Tell us about what makes the bicycle special to you...

As clichéd as this might sound, the bicycle has taught me things about myself and the world around me that I never would have learned anywhere else. I have both pushed my limits the furthest and achieved the most profound sense of “flow” while on two wheels. I see the world in a different way when I am riding a bike. Everything slows down and becomes sharper. I appreciate views that I never noticed before. I wave to strangers. I find new teachers in places that I never expected.

A final question, one to riff on for a bit if you like... time to put on your bicycleshaped, rose tinted spectacles - in this wonderful future that we're hurtling towards, what's your vision of utopia?

I think David Branigan from 'Bikes Not Bombs' put it very well when he described “access to resources” as a human right. We have plenty of resources - money, food, medicine - on the planet, but they are either unequally distributed, or geographically out of reach for many. I think the bicycle can begin to provide access to these resources for those who are currently without them.

In that sense, I see utopia as a place where people are able to access the resources that they need with sustainable transportation... by using a bicycle! The bicycle will not solve the world’s problems by any stretch, but it can begin to chip away at issues of inequality and accessibility – one pedal stroke at a time.

On a slightly less concrete note, I see utopia as a place where people remember that riding a bike is, first and foremost, fun. When we asked all of the individuals featured in our film if they rode their bikes for leisure, their faces lit up. Bharati beamed as she told us how much fun it was to bike to school with her girlfriends. Fred told us about how he went on a 100 kilometer ride to his friend’s village to watch a football game... on his 55 pound steel single-speed. He loved every kilometre of it. It is easy to get lost when talking about the bike as a tool for development, a way to stay in shape, or a scheme to take over American cities and strip citizens of their personal freedoms (seriously?). We often forget that – regardless of our wealth or lack thereof, political beliefs, or willingness to wear spandex – we all smile when we think of the first time that we rode a bike. Utopia will be a place where we never forget the magic of flying on two wheels.

WATCH THE FILM HERE . . . . . . . . www.viewchange.org/videos /with-my-own-two-wheels LINKS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . www.withmyowntwowheels.org www.bicicentro.org www.worldbicyclerelief.org www.bikesnotbombs.org www.projectrwanda.org www.worldwidecyclingatlas.com

And I think that might have been the fastest I’ve ever been on a bike…

TEN, FIFTEEN.

Arrowing through long sweeping country-lane curves, trying not to flick the brakes, almost doing so in places…

TWENTY.

The bump and grind and slide of the loose tarmac, don’t lose the front wheel, boy, relax… silent tears of wind and excitement…

THIRTY.

Keep it steady and true, keep it tight and loose… no cars this time, poised, crouched ready to react, correcting the slightest wobble and weakness, tyres roaring in celebration, the rest of the bike quiet and determined… round the right hand bend taking the inside, but still no cars, keep hoping, but never knowing… legs locked in hard…

FORTY.

Hard to see now, eyes streaming, nose and chin prowing through the air, the blind crossroads coming up much too fast, round the last corner thin hard tyres drifting ever so slightly on gravel debris... stop sign… make a decision…

FIFTY.

Bursting through the crossroads like a bullet through plate glass, breath held, no thought of other traffic, the only sound now the wind in my ears and feeling nothing but the blood sloshing around my veins, pumping through my head…a vague, numbing head rush washing over me, a grin sidling out the corners of my mouth, B Y D A N I E L O ’ S U L L I VA N relaxed, refocused, alive…

THE DESCENT

AND BRAKE.

Illustr a www.r tion Rich O ich-o rr.blo rr gspot .com

www.karolinschnoor.co.uk

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Eagle-eyed readers might notice a few select cycling-related brands gracing the pages of Boneshaker in future issues.

As well as making good things for bike-lovers to enjoy, these fine folk are helping to keep Boneshaker viable for the future. If you'd like your company represented in the magazine, or you’d like to share alternative ideas as to how Boneshaker might earn its keep, do drop us a line at boneshakermag@gmail.com