Nailed it!

I have now worked out a good route to work.  Time this morning: 15’.  Time back this evening, 11’ - better than 60'!!  So far, the good news.  The bad news, of course, is that such a short journey is not what I am after.  In the old days back home in Manchester I used to do 45’ in the morning and 55’ in the evening – in other words, a good free workout.  Showers and storage room at work enabled me to keep some items (shoes, for instance, or a winter coat) in the office, while in the pannier I carried the clean clothes for the day.  It worked a treat – it became a well-oiled routine.

Now the future is uncertain and the present, well, the present is the future, if you’ll forgive the Orwellian tangent.  As I’m enjoying a temporary period of living quite close to work, which in a few weeks may be replaced with moving further afield or going back to the Rugby commute,  I don’t really feel like spending time exploring more leisurely routes to extend my cycle to anything approaching what I used to cycle before.  Also, now I work in a small office with only very basic facilities – so I’m cycling ‘a la Europea’, dressed as I intend to work.  It’s worked reasonably well on mild days, but this week there’s a heat wave (yes, really) and I just want to let go and put some power into my pedaling, sweat it out and enjoy the ride.  

Finally, there’s the bike.  The Ridgeback Attaché is great as fold-ups go – it is a million times better than my £30 contraption.  But it is still a fold-up – closer to the ground, the handling a little bit less stable.  How I would love to get on my trusty old Tourismo24!  Nostalgia, this is – of cycling to the hills on days bright and sunny or murky and foul, feeling that freedom for once is a place on earth, and that ‘beyond the horizon’ no longer means that it cannot be reached.

The Road to leafy Islington

007, a photo by cocosolis on Flickr.

After a month commuting to London from Rugby, cycling to the train station at the Rugby end on my Father-in-Law’s 1970’s compact bike, and trying to use the Boris bike in London, I am now enjoying a month in leafy Islington, a mere 2 miles from my workplace, thanks to the generosity of some friends.  To put the icing on the cake, the flat comes complete with a Ridgeback Attaché fold-up bike.

Setting it up took me longer than I’d expected – it’s not that it was difficult, but it has to be done in the right order and instructions aren’t always as crystal-clear as the manufacturers tell you. And I don’t read instructions anyway. It’s all about where you put the things that perhaps are not meant to fit nicely – the pedals, the handlebars, the saddle.

My friend explained they hadn’t used the bike for years – bought it, then a couple of accidents they heard about put them off the idea – and the tyres were totally flat. I pumped them up, then left it for 24 hours, the idea being to make sure the flat tyres were just lack of use and not a puncture of some sort. Meanwhile, I would walk to work and plan my route a bit – I’ve come to the conclussion that in London you should cycle on quiet roads whenever possible. My route seemed pleasant yet very effective – it took 25’ on foot, crossing a canal over a pedestrian/cycling bridge. No major roads were involved.

The next day I got up early and set off to work on my bike. Needless to say, I didn’t manage to replicate the route I’d taken while on foot. A wrong turn somewhere and presto! I was lost. Eventually I got to work but via Hoxton Square – I had gone a bit too far north.

Getting back was, however, even worse. This time I got lost from the start, and compounded the mistake so that, after 25’ of cycling (by then I could have done it on foot faster) I realised I was going in the wrong direction altogether – literally, back to work. A check of the map enabled me to retrace my steps and eventually get home – an hour after setting off.

Now, a word of caution about cycling in London: you can cycle on quiet roads, but have to do a lot of navigation; or you can stick to main roads, brave the traffic but make navigation much easier. In my view, you can’t do both – not unless you have the brain of a homing-pigeon, but bigger. Like a London cabbie.