by Ned Boulting
Then, washed and pomaded, and slightly full of myself, I sat at the head of the family dinner table, and held court on my considerable accomplishment. I kept my audience in thrall, like a solo polar explorer in human company for the first time in six months. I had seen things which required a telling. I had wrestled metaphorical bears, and vanquished them. My family hung on my every word.
‘The remarkable thing is it’s actually not that bad once you’re past Deptford. I suppose you even get to go through that bit of Surrey Quays which you normally can’t drive up around the one-way system and there’s a cycle lane the whole way through and actually the traffic could be worse and did you know about Southwark Park? Well, that’s a whole thing in itself, never been there before and there’s a bandstand and tennis courts and an art gallery right in the middle of it and you can turn left onto Tower Bridge, which cars can’t do, and then when you’re coming back you can stop off outside the Cutty Sark and grab a coffee without worrying about your bike because there’s an open air café . . .’
My eldest daughter shrugged. My youngest banged a plastic spoon on the table and grinned at me toothlessly.
An awkward silence fell across the family table, and then they started talking about something else. I was left alone with my thoughts, which were now mostly played out in the muted pastel shades of an A to Z map.
London had opened up to me. The city that I had called home for the important part of my adult life had started to make a different kind of sense, and pose questions in entirely unexpected ways. And it did this, I understood, simply because of the movement of a bicycle.
My wonderment at the human body’s ability to propel itself eight miles there and eight miles back was only the start. It wasn’t long before my desire for greater bicycle-related adventure led me to embark on ever more ridiculous journeys. I upgraded my bike, buying a second-hand Shogun aluminium thing with a Campagnolo chain set, and allowed the Saracen to give itself over to rust under a tree in the garden.
The Shogun was a game-changer. I loved that bike with risible ardour. It cost me £350, and when it finally succumbed to a hairline fracture and had to be dismantled six years later, I honestly felt like I had lost a friend. It was skinny, gold and fast.
I fitted it with normal pedals at first. Then I bought some pedals with toe straps. Then I went the whole hog and bought cycling shoes with cleats. Naturally, I succumbed to a catalogue of slapstick tumbles while I got used to riding ‘clipped in’. The silliest of these involved turning right in front of three lanes of traffic on London Bridge, realising that they had the green light, trying to stop, and slowly falling sideways onto the tarmac, locked to the bike and smiling apologetically all the while. I lay on the tarmac for some time, blocking the entirety of London’s southbound traffic heading over London Bridge, before my feet finally wriggled free and I was able to exit the scene, chastened and bruised.
Most of the miles I clocked up over the happy six years my Shogun and I shared together were ridden around London. Rarely did we venture out. Once we rode around the Scottish borders for a few undulating miles, and on another occasion we rode in and out of Edinburgh from my parents’ house near Livingston. Both times, I found the lack of traffic, the noiselessness and isolation of the country road unsettling. Left alone with just the act of turning pedals and pushing onwards, I found my mind wouldn’t settle. It couldn’t break free from the narrow confines of the act. There weren’t enough distractions. I needed a Ladbrokes and a Costcutter’s within arm’s reach.
No, London, with its ever-changing backdrop, its appalling dangers and its thousands of fried chicken shops and hair salons, was my cycling Nirvana. I enjoyed the cut and thrust and puncture, the elbows-at-the-ready nastiness and surprising camaraderie of the commute. I developed instincts for the rogue left-turning white van who overtook you simply to cut you up. I became wary of pedestrians, one of whom had stepped into my path and sent me to hospital with concussion. None of it deterred me though. The city drew me in. I am never more content, more distant from my everyday neuroses, than when I am perching on my saddle between the throbbing scarlet flank of a Number 53 bus and a parked black cab, or jostling for room alongside delivery vans and courier motorbikes in the green space reserved for cyclists at junctions.
Riding a bike over many years around a city as vast and intricate as London is like being a spider spinning a web. Scuttling off in every possible direction, leaving a silken trace of memory where it has been. For me, those traces connect Lewisham with Wembley, Richmond with Canning Town, Hammersmith with Croydon.
Like so many other London men and women of a certain age, I have discovered the unreserved joy of pushing past the capital’s great, wind-picked water on a bright spring morning, or riding in the early-onset gloom of a November dusk through Hyde Park to London Bridge to see the hubris of the Shard tower rising month by month, or watch the shifting scenery, the shop fronts renovated, burnt out, gentrified, or boarded up for ever.
Few cities open up to the bike like London does.
The riding grew stranger, more niche. It became organised, almost becoming a pastime. Things were morphing fast into something new, and, as my curiosity grew, so London’s sweeps and curves, lumps and bumps continued to amaze.
In the spring of 2011, I was invited by some complete strangers to take part in a gentle Sunday ride known as the London Classic. It was a bizarre London homage to the Belgian Classics, those one-day road races that invariably feature sharp climbs and long stretches of cobbles. After briefly scanning their website and watching a cheerful little film all about the 2010 edition of the ride (‘The Bone-Shaking Cobbles and The Lung-Busting Hills’), I contacted them back and gratefully accepted their invitation. It sounded fun. Sort of.
So one crisp Sunday morning, I rode over, with my friend Simon, to the pub in Crystal Palace where we were all to meet. We arrived too early. They were just setting out the trestle tables and starting to fry bacon. We drank a coffee and watched the organisers of the London Classic go about their work. They had entry forms to set out, race numbers to pin on jerseys and souvenir stickers for the bikes. They were secretly enjoying the administrative banality of it, while giving off the impression that they would rather have been anywhere else. I liked them. As they tut-tutted and joked with each other, I wondered how many other disparate hobbies were being pursued that morning (with tut-tutting and trestle tables) up and down this country of tut-tutting hobbyists.
When eventually we set off, we dropped down into Central London through Dulwich and Brixton. That much was fairly straightforward. Then, after crossing the river, the route became tortuous. Somewhere near Covent Garden it started going crazy, doubling back, looping round, zig-zagging and circling: doing nothing that so much as resembled a straight line for anything more than a hundred yards.
There was a reason for this. The organisation had scoured images of London on Google Earth for signs of cobbles. And everywhere they found them, they routed the ride. Little arrows were pinned on lampposts all along the thirty-seven miles. Some sections of pavé were only a few metres long. Others, such as those in Wapping, were a few hundred. All in all there were twenty-six sectors of cobbles (graded from one star to five), and seven ‘bergs’, short, sharp climbs up and away from the river as we headed back to Crystal Palace. They bore iconic names: Maze Hill, Gypsy Hill, Honor Oak.
At the fearsome Vicar’s Hill (a Category Two climb), my family came out to cheer me on, it being just around the corner from my house.
This was a big moment for me. My home turf, my family out to honour me as I passed. How many times had I seen this enacted on the Tour? The local hero riding off the front of an indulgent peloton and into the bosom of his family at the roadside. But that’s not quite how it happened.
Simon (an actor who you may remember from his defining role in a Bananabix advert which aired briefly in 1997), had the audacity to attack. It was an unforgivable breach of cycling etiquette. The jobbing thespian, whose stagecraft
had helped to shift a banana-based cereal, crested the summit before me, and drew cheers and whoops from my turncoat children.
And then it all went wrong for the theatrical artist. From my perspective, a few dozen metres behind him on the climb, I was delighted to see him slow down to take the applause, lose balance and fall in a ghastly sideways arc towards the road before he could unclip his shoes. He landed with no dignity left to his name in front of my children. The cycling gods had exacted an instant and terrible revenge. By the time I lumbered to the top, my family had stopped laughing at Simon and were looking rather pityingly at my effort. In case I needed a reality check, the looks on their faces told me that I wasn’t in fact racing the Tour of Flanders. I was wasting a Sunday morning in the company of a bunch of South London misfits pretending to be somebody else, somewhere else.
But no matter. I loved it all. It was a ride masquerading as a race, an eccentric nod to one of cycling’s great Continental institutions, executed with perfect earnest, British, dottiness.
I instigated still bigger and bolder adventures within the M25. Sometimes I had to dream them up. Sometimes they were breath-taking in their simple-mindedness. The eighty-odd miles it took me to visit every football ground in the capital was a high-tide mark in futility.
At each ground (Crystal Palace, Fulham, Brentford, Chelsea, Arsenal, Tottenham, Barnet, Leyton Orient, West Ham, Millwall and Charlton; in that order), I self-consciously took a picture of myself to prove that I’d done it. It took me hours and hours to complete the loop.
Somewhere in Edmonton, I bonked (cycling-speak for ran out of energy), staggered into a newsagent and stuffed two Turkish Delights straight into my mouth before I’d even paid for them. I had to sit down on the pavement for a minute or two after that while the world turned into a pink chocolate-coated jelly. Barnet nearly killed me. And by Leyton Orient, I had given up looking for back routes, and ended up ploughing down the A12, buffeted by the passing turbulence from three lanes of thundering trucks.
Eventually, but hours later than I had imagined I would, I arrived home exuberant. I swiftly uploaded the photos, and emailed the whole series to my dad on the bizarre assumption that my adventure might somehow impress him. I was in my forties. Other things might have impressed him, but not that.
He replied by email the next day.
‘Where’s QPR?’
But I am not alone. The madness is not mine alone. In fact, I would hazard a guess that I am only mildly afflicted.
The last time I rode over Lambeth Bridge at 8.45 in the morning, I burst out in spontaneous laughter. Three self-organising lines of cyclists, each ten bikes long had formed at a set of traffic lights. Each rider failed openly to acknowledge the absurdity of this event. No one nodded at anyone in recognition, nor in wonder at the sight of so many other like-minded cyclists on the road. But one by one, and a little po-faced, the commuters took their place in this new pageant, becoming a very British affair. The ‘slow lane’ for hire bikes, heavy mountain bikes and Brompton folding bikes, the ‘middle lane’ for fixies and hybrids, and the ‘fast lane’ for white middle-aged men on carbon-fibre bikes worth more than their houses. The cars didn’t stand a chance. It was remarkable. People are remarkable.
Something good has happened here in London, which perhaps has found an equal reflection in towns and cities the length and breadth of the country: the number of people using bikes has gone from ‘negligible’ to ‘something’. And sometimes, that ‘something’ amounts to ‘really quite a lot’.
Car drivers rail at cyclists riding two abreast. I get into arguments at dinner parties with car drivers who rail at cyclists riding two abreast. Then, when I am out on my bike with friends, I find myself riding single file so that car drivers will not rail at me and my friends for riding two abreast. It’s a first-world problem, I suppose. And cyclists can be every bit as sanctimonious as motorists can be unreasonable.
I took the kids on a cycling protest ride shortly before the 2012 mayoral election, thinking it would be a family-fun happy/smiley kind of affair. It wasn’t. It was freezing cold, drizzling and militant. Before I could object, one of the organisers had draped a hi-vis marshal’s gilet on me, and charged me with cycling ahead to major junctions and blocking the road by sheer willpower while our long stream of protesters cycled past. I spent the morning in agonies of discomfort, quite unable to discharge my duties with anything that even faintly resembled conviction. I must have looked like a vegan in a pie shop.
‘Critical mass, mate!’ my fellow partisans would yell at me. ‘Reclaim the streets!’ Oh, whatever. I weakly grinned back at them, and then looked at the motorist I was inconveniencing, with a cringing countenance. Wrong man. Wrong job.
But the cyclists are here to stay. They are a day-glo visible presence, with LED lights winking out their pious Morse code. They jump lights, they enrage drivers, they hug the gutter, they slip through the traffic, they slosh through puddles and they ring their bells in moral outrage. They race, they trundle, they rock from side to side. They puncture and they ride on. In all their manifestations, suddenly, they are everywhere.
The explosive and unheralded interest in cycling has penetrated previously inaccessible recesses in the capital. Places like the Village Barber’s, at the end of my road.
This very unpretentious Turkish barber shop, run with occasional zeal, but mostly Daily-Mirror-reading, Lambert-and-Butler-flicking carefreeness by Ahmet, a second-generation Cypriot immigrant in his late twenties, is where I have been going for years to get my hair hacked off. On every one of those visits we have observed the same, barren, routine. Until last summer, that is.
Normally, up till now, I cycle to the end of the road, and lock up my bike outside his shop. He watches me, as he pauses briefly over the TV guide in the paper. Then I go in and ask for a ‘number four’.
And always, when I am seated, and he has tucked in the red nylon sheet thing into my collar, the same question. ‘Natural neckline? Or square?’
‘Um . . .’
Since I have never seen the back of my head except in those awful seconds when a mirror is held up at the end of the cut, I am never sure what the correct neckline answer is. ‘Oh, just the normal.’ I hedge my bets.
‘Not working today, my man?’ This, too, always gets asked, since I am invariably the only customer and it’s normally a Tuesday lunchtime, when upstanding, productive citizens are at work in offices.
‘Yes, I am. Kind of.’ He looks sceptical. I try to tell him about my imminent trip to Northumbria to cover a bike race. But it doesn’t work. Ahmet has not registered a thing. He never does.
Until suddenly, last summer, the summer of 2012, when there was a confluence of two events. The first was an almighty traffic jam. It took him an hour to drive the three miles to work (no Olympic lanes in Sydenham).
The second was the arrival of his new neighbour, Mark.
At the side of Ahmet’s shop, there is a tiny little room that has variously been rented out to all manner of chancers and shady entrepreneurs. The last tenant operated an IT Solutions and Web Design Service, which mostly unlocked mobile phones and did the odd photocopy for 10p a sheet. They didn’t last long.
Then Mark, a wiry young bloke, took on the lease and, implausibly, opened a bike repair service. Instantly, it started to thrive. One day Ahmet looked up from his Daily Mirror, took notice, and promptly bought a bike.
Mark told him that there is a cycle path almost all the way from his house to the shop, along a river and through a park. It came as a revelation. Ahmet now rides with delight and pride into work every day, and no trip to the barber’s shop is complete any more without a discussion of London’s cycle network, the speed of commuting, and his elaborate preparations for the onset of the cold winter weather.
But it goes further than that. He’s had new bike racks installed outside the shop. He takes a solicitous interest in how securely the bikes are locked. He recommends Mark’s service to his customers, and Mark has brought ne
w customers to Ahmet, middle-class men who would normally never have considered the Village Barber’s at the end of the road, where a cut costs £9, and has done for as long as anyone can remember.
The two things, hair and bikes, have become movingly symbiotic.
When I lived in Hamburg, during a worryingly long directionless period of my life in the early nineties, there used to be a shop called ‘Wein und Schuhe’. As its name suggests, it sold wine and shoes. You’d pop in for a bottle of wine, and end up buying some shoes. Or, while trying on a pair of pumps, you’d be tempted by a South African Chenin Blanc. It was odd, but perfect. Now, at the end of my road, Ahmet and Mark have created the same perfect storm. It is equally miraculous.
But, if my claim to be a London cyclist was really going to stand up to scrutiny, then there was one pilgrimage I had yet to complete. It seemed inevitable that one day I would make my way to London’s Herne Hill Velodrome, and quite shaming that I hadn’t yet done so.
Its name, spoken with affection and reverence, kept cropping up. Every time I talked, either idly or with intent to anyone with a feel for the history of the sport, and in particular with a London connection, the place would get a nod and a name check. The only surviving stadium from the Austerity Games of 1948, Herne Hill has been in continuous use ever since. It reeked, even from a distance, of ‘heritage’, which is what you get when your ‘legacy’ acquires wrinkles. It had a holiness all of its own, that much was self-evident.
I had been skirting it, literally, as well as figuratively, for long enough. Given that my home is no more then three or four miles away, the fact of my non-visiting seemed increasingly to be preposterous. Indeed, it was becoming a source of mauvaise-foi; a deep-set shame that I would try to hide from the wider cycling family.