Me and the Bicycle Throughout that journey, from a child to an adult, I suppose the bicycle became my touchstone, my talisman. Of all that will be sold away, please allow that the bicycle be the last thing to remain sacred. I loved cycling through impulse, through instinct, and long before I was cursed to try articulating that feeling with words. Across the miles I’ve given it a great deal of thought, finally resolved that perhaps for me the bicycle represents some small saviour from mortality, the opportunity to make something greater of myself, to move with such speed and power that a portion of the mind is able to believe in magic, believe we humans are not after all so banal as I must otherwise confront. I love the bicycle like nothing else, the one institution I’m happy to live by, for in it you can feel euphoria. Kash d’Anthe It had started in Istanbul, the Cihangir crossroads, where I’d met a couple who were a year into cycling around the world. They’d told me of a Scot by the name of Kash d’Anthe, aiming to break a world record for a circumnavigation by bicycle. Back in London I’d looked him up, and soon after, by chance, scarcely had to look for him at all… d’Anthe was well on his way to minor stardom, a subject for television, advertising and corporate endorsements. Come that time he’d broken the record, ridden 18,000 miles in little over six months, an average of 90 miles daily. The start of my curiosity was the feasibility of the target. Riding leisurely to Istanbul I’d averaged 70 miles a day despite lengthy breakfasts, no thought of haste and sitting in cafés scribbling stories for five hours each afternoon. And yet that alone would never have been enough to tempt me into the pettiness of that dumb record.
It was the manner in which d’Anthe went about his feat that roused my ire… snagged a pathological part of my personality I’m not the least bit proud of. He was sponsored, up to the eyeballs he was sponsored… banks and investment funds all over his chest, his smiling face and a thumbs-up next to a business model that cared nothing for people or for bicycles, only the right numbers in the right columns of a balance sheet. I was well desensitised by then, didn’t expect much to be left sacred, but it was the final straw… to see the bicycle reduced to no more than a corporate marketing strategy. We had things in common… d’Anthe and me were not so very different, both in our mid-twenties, both politics graduates. I couldn’t fathom how someone of such similar years and education, of the same passion for travelling by bicycle, could come to hold such different priorities. His pitch was a strong one, a stroke of genius. The financial sector he endorsed was without heart or love, working only for financial gain, and so the undertaking, ostensibly for spiritual gain and the joy of the task, was perfect. Their business wore suits and worked in skyscrapers while d’Anthe would see those who still lived in huts and dressed in loincloths, all traditional-looking to offset the garish and the modern. Finance wanted to be brave, to be beautiful… finance wanted to be adventure. They loved d’Anthe, were ready to make his whole life easier. They threw money at it… he sold… and with a smattering of charity thrown in, the banking world purchased a tiny piece of the human spirit. I decided to go around the world, faster than him, and without bankers billowing my sails. The following excerpts are from the book I’ve since written about that ride.
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