Moving Kids around Town with a Trikidoo

Now this is great. My colleague has just got hold of a Trikidoo, (just before the price went up as well), essentially a pedal rickshaw for children. It’s in a princess pink to please her two girls and it just looks great. She was determined not to use the car to drop the children off at school and nursery, but both locations are quite a reasonable walk from her house. In the forthcoming winter weather, the prospect of long walks in the cold with tired out children and a dog was pretty bleak. Now with this marvelous piece of pedal-powered people transportation, she’s going to find it so much easier and certainly much more fun.

Now my colleague is keen to customise this fine trike further, I have one of the famous Rivendell best bike bells in the world to give her, she’s looking into a front mounting basket for the doggy (at the moment he runs alongside) and a must for this caffeine addict, a cup holder. It already has a cargo bag under the back seat, but there’s loads of things that could be added – umbrellas, flags, extra bags – oooh, what about a trailer?

It certainly adds a much needed dose of cycle chic to the streets of Salisbury, it’s bound to be a talking point, and hopefully we’ll see a lot more of these around our towns soon.

And off they go. Note dog running along side at the left.

Ting ting!

Heavy Spillage on the Birthday Ride

Bear with me, for I’m still blogging about September, now we’re up to the 21st. One of my eldest son’s friends was so proud of his new bike that he wanted to have a ride with his chums to celebrate his birthday. His father being the avid cyclist that he is, was naturally delighted with that idea, and when he explained the idea to me I volunteered to help out with haste – even though I had not been asked. My eldest son, is by a long way the youngest child in his year – in fact his pal who’s birthday it was is almost a full year older than him. You may recall that he had only learned to ride a few weeks ago, and at that time was not yet tall, or confident enough to ride his BMX. Consequently I found myself helping load his bike onto the top of the minibus and suddenly realising his wheels were half the size of his peer-group’s.

We drove down narrow country lanes – heading out towards radstock to join up with the Collier’s Way. This is an old railway line that has been given over to a cycle and walking path. The minibus duly crushed as far into the hedge as we could get it, we unloaded kids and bikes and set about the perilous task of managing a group of overexcited 5-7 year olds as they prepared to race off into the distance. It was a truly lovely day weatherwise, unseasonably warm, blissful after the wet and windy summer the U.K. has endured.

It quickly became apparent that all three adults were needed as the group became strung out. Like the old drovers or a group of cowboys, we needed one at the back to round up the stragglers, one in the middle with the bulk of the group, and one off the front with the young steers who have broken away from the herd. Within minutes one lad was off his bike, a black BMX, and in tears by the side of the path. He was more shocked than injured and he quickly recovered. My son rode at the rear, his tiny wheels held him back and it was rapidly made clear to him that his helmet was cool, but his bike, most certainly was not, at least not in the eyes of his contemporaries. I remembered how delighted he was with the bike when he got it for his birthday two years ago, but now I could sense his frustration and dismay as the others waited for him to catch up. I felt bad that his confidence was being knocked so hard.

We rode on at a gentle pace, stopping briefly for juice and biscuits. One little chap slipped off the saddle and onto the crossbar – as he put it ’squashing my woodpeckers!’ in the process. More tears, and a much slower pace. In the meantime, my son had realised that if he pedaled twice as hard as the others he could keep up with them, and soon he was making his way up the field.

3.5 miles in, we turned around and headed back for the mini-bus and the prospect of a roast chicken dinner. Now many members of the group started to tire, especially the little chap with the squashed woodpeckers. My son was pedaling so fast he looked like he was on fast-forward. We stopped again, this time for blackberries and the remainder of the jaffa cakes. The three adults gathered round the thermos and supped tea tinged with plastic. With everyone rested and stained with blackberry juice we set off again. Even though he was keeping up, some of the other boys continued to make mock of my son’s bike. This spurred him on into ever more bouts of furious crank-spinning, hunched over the bars he gave it a Merckx-esque effort, drawing from something deep inside inside of him. I was impressed by his stamina and his sheer determination. He barely noticed the derelict guard’s van on the rusted tracks as we passed it, he overtook leisure cyclists – tinging the tiny bell. I let him go a little way ahead with the others in his wake, wondering when he was going to tire and have to fall back, It didn’t happen. Our breakaway group of five (including myself) raced on ahead, taking turns on the front, knowing nothing of drafting, but each of them would force his way to the front then get a few cranks ahead before the others increased the pace and reeled him back in. The sprint, when it came was brief and difficult, being as how it was up the ramp to the road. My son was pleased with his second place, and as the lads stood astride their machines, panting, it was clear we had managed to ride a long way ahead of everyone else.

But then, disaster!

My son decided he would ride down the path and see if he could see them coming. Before I could react or turn my bike round he had launched himself down the ramp and cranked the bike up to a ridiculous speed down the steep hill. I could see the tiny wheels skittering around, see the speed wobble, and got my mouth open and the breath ready to shout “brakes!” when the bike just fell to the ground underneath him with appalling suddenness, catapulting him over the handlebars. He flew through the air and landed horizontally, skidding down the tarmac with the bike following him, until they both came to rest a good three meters ahead of the actual crash site.

There was a moments silence, and I was acutely aware that my heart had stopped beating. I threw my own bike down and ran down the path. His right hand came up feebly and a high keening wail came out of him. I chucked the bike off him and looked him over. A big scratch on the mouth guard of his full-face helmet, a scrape on his elbow, but he seemed ok. I stood him up, got him to wiggle his feet and his fingers as I held his skinny body. He wrapped his spidery arms round my neck and cried that his side hurt. Gently I lifted up his t-shirt to reveal a huge, angry, red patch of missing skin. As I lifted him he collapsed his whole body into me and held on as he cried his eyes out. The others arrived, and soon I was surrounded by concerned children. Luckily the birthday boy’s mum works for the NHS, so my son, happy with her qualifications, let her see the injury. The first aid kit didn’t have a big enough plaster, so he ended up with his shirt off, and a bandage wrapped round his middle holding on a pad. The others were all on the bus as he was bandaged up, and between sobs he said:

“It’s been the worst day, first everyone laughed at my bike and then I fell off and hurt myself!”

My heart felt heavy, and I felt so sad for him. I had spent a lot of my childhood feeling like I was less than my friends, knowing that my toys and clothes were secondhand, or second-rate compared to theirs. Feeling that everything went wrong for me, or that even the most wonderful experience had the potential to turn sour in a moment. This wasn’t what I wanted for him, it wasn’t how wanted him to feel.

I took a deep breath, and told him that he had proved himself as good as or better than the others because he had smaller wheels, he had had to pedal twice as hard. Imagine what he could do when he got on his BMX! And the reason he was hurting, was because he had rode so hard, and without fear, that the crash was enormous! No one else had dared to ride like that today! No one else would have tried to ride down the ramp that fast! No way!

He looked down, no longer crying, but his breath came in shudders.

“No” he said “It all went wrong, it’s the worst day”.

We got on the bus, immediately his friends were wide-eyed asking him questions, now that he could speak again.

“How fast do you reckon you were going?”

“How much did it hurt?”

“Can I see the injury!”

“Woah look at the bandage, awesome!”

“How did you get your bike to go so fast”

It suddenly dawned on him that he was the centre of attention, and he was getting some serious respect and concern from his friends. By the time we arrived back in the village, he was beaming from ear to ear and enjoying his new found status as the daredevil speedmeister of the group.

That roast dinner tasted pretty good.

A few days later he learned to ride the BMX, now at last he has a bike that looks like it’s the right size.

Daredevil speedmeister

Crepuscular Riding

John turned up bang on six thirty as he said he would. I was, however, not ready. Astute and regular readers may remember that I flatted the rear tyre of my Lemond Etape at the end of my last ride. I did not remember so I was still waiting for the glue on a patch on the tube to set when John arrived. First thing he did was admonish me over the state of my bike. It’s true that it had not been cleaned for a long time, not only that but instead of maintaining the chain properly, I had simply been adding more oil. Mud caked the stays and saddle, the protective sticker on the rear stay had been smothered under a film of oil and the whole machine looked dull and sad. John was eager to get on, so he gave me a spare tube, then showed me an incredible way of putting the tyre and tube back on that I have never read in any book, or seen anywhere else. It was so easy! I will film him giving a demonstration in the near future and post it here.

With the bike roadworthy again we were soon riding at an insistent, but by no means taxing pace towards the main road. I elected to take us down the lanes I had got lost and chased by dogs along a few weeks back. The evening was yet young, but we knew we would be returning under cover of darkness. This time I took a map, and as we ambled along it afforded an occasional stop to get our bearings, with John hardly breaking his narrative stride while he filled me in with the details of his still new job at Moulton Cycles. There was a hint of cloud though the air was reasonably warm considering this was mid-September (yes I am that far behind in my blogging), and we hardly noticed the dusk slipping quietly around us as we made our way through Faulkland. As we headed towards Stony Littleton we put our lights on, John’s was on his helmet and incredibly bright, throwing my shadow to the grey blur of the road as I rode in front. The ground dropped away and shot us down a steep hill – this was the same valley I had been sucked into when I cycled road-shocked into Wellow, on this pleasant early Autumn evening it seemed less threatening. Certainly the omission of slavering farm dogs snapping at the pedals made for a much more pleasant ride. At the bottom of the hill John exclaimed ‘We’ve got to get up this slope somehow in order to get home!’. I ignored him, too busy trying to control the bike as it skittered over water-damaged tarmac – an impromptu and recent ford, not mentioned on my map. The slope bore us up again, past recently harvested fields of stubble and the road surface became ghostly smooth in comparison to the tarmac we had just ridden down. Now I was eager to see the long-barrow at Stony, so I coaxed John onto a rutted farm track. Now it was really getting dark, and as I dragged John grumbling over a field, we could see the ancient burial mound hugging the horizon.

John checks the map - Long-barrow on the skyline

The map was no longer any help, and we found our way to a wooden footbridge and crossed the small but fast flowing river. Having been dragged over a sodden field, John was in no mood to continue looking for a way up to the monument, he was already going to be later home than he said he would be. So I snapped a picture of this alarming sign here and we powered up the hill.

We were soon in Wellow, a picturesque village, seemingly deserted as we saw not a single soul. Out of the village underneath a viaduct that John tells me carries a cycle path to Limply Stoke, then, o Lord, up that hellish hill. One of those gradients that seems to go on forever. Where every horizon reveals a further horizon, unfolding like some fiendish trap or puzzle, first the lungs and then the legs (though for others I know it’s the other way round, jelly-legs then gasping for breath). John’s fitness has improved much in the last year that we have been riding, and he was able to pull way ahead, I’m pretty sure he was pushing bigger gears too. At the top we headed for Hinton Charterhouse and then on to Norton St Philip. The darkness had well and truly settled in now, the witching hour was over and we were in evening and heading for night time. On the main road, I hit a bump and lost my back light, which shattered as it hit the ground with a horrible plastic skittering sound. I spent a few minutes gathering all the pieces up and shoving them tinkling into my pockets. Luckily we were mere minutes away from my home, so by riding in front of John I kept up the illusion of law-abiding safety. Thank goodness for my hi-viz vest, which I imagine is visible from space when illuminated by headlights. A cheery farewell to John, who still had a five or six mile ride home to go and I was back at the house. We didn’t put in a huge amount of miles, but we did get a good workout on the hills. Crucially though, I had exorcised the shattering ride along the same lanes of a week or so before.

A couple of days later, I took the Lemond apart and carefully washed the whole bike, tyres and all, and vowed never again to let it get into such a poor and muddy state.

In a Cycling Utopia, pedestrians and cyclists get on just fine (and you can cycle on water)

At the beginning of September, Lucy and I spent a long weekend at our local Center Parcs (Longleat). It’s like living in some sort of cycling utopia! A forest environment, a mere handful of vehicles on the road, masses of bikes, loads of bicycle parking, special bike trails and paths.

If you read the popular press these days, you will learn that cyclists are a menace in pedestrianised areas, that they don’t use their bells, that they cycle too close to people, that they cycle too fast, that they appear out of nowhere. If you unquestioningly take the opinion pages of the papers as gospel truth, you may well believe that it’s a wonder that there aren’t horrific casualties every single day that pedestrians and cyclists go near each other, I guess it’s a miracle that there are only a handful of cyclist on pedestrian deaths/serious injuries every year. We must have been VERY LUCKY to get away with it!

What’s curious about Center Parcs is that cyclists and pedestrians mix completely and thoroughly, yet I heard not one bad word exchanged betwixt the two camps. Even though cyclists were weaving through pedestrians strung out over the routes. Even though there were queues to get through gates. Even though at various times cyclists and pedestrians would have to give way to one another in an environment that was not heavily regulated. The difference is in the expectation, you come to Center Parcs knowing full well that there will be shared-use paths with bikes. There are few clear definitions like ‘pavement’ and ‘road’, so somehow cyclists are prepared to meet with pedestrians and vise-versa.

It rained a lot on the first day, which I actually found quite pleasant in the forest. I was reminded of my favourite sequence in the film My Neighbor Totoro, where the Totoro is delighted by the sound of the rain dripping from the trees onto his borrowed umbrella. To live amongst trees is a special thing indeed.

Some pics:

You can of course bring your own bikes

Sunlight dapples the cycle path

Redwood trees and my Brompton

Lucy and I in cycle utopia

Everyone cycles for cover as the rain comes down

Lucy took her Diamondback MTB and I took my Brompton, but when it comes to being on the water, you need a specialist machine:

Keep one in the garage for when the floods come

It was a surprisingly smooth ride – moving downwind anyway.

It is an Ancient Mariner, and he stoppeth one of three

On Friday October 17th 2008, in Bristol at The Cube Cinema, there’s going to be an event that I’ve been looking forward to for quite a while. My good friend Tom Stubbs (one half of the back-porch, West-country, banjo-xylophone-mandolin-guitar duo My Two Toms, one quarter of lo-fi supergroup The Lonely Ponies, community film-maker, artist, animator and alter-ego of Graham Lightside) is showing three films that he has directed or co-directed. They are the following:

The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner (on bicycle)

Shot in a frantic week in September 2007, and only recently finished ‘The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner (on bicycle)’ is a travelogue that cycles in the footsteps of the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge whilst also somehow being lost at sea with The Ancient Mariner.

Armed with a photocopy of the poem four intrepid Artists travel a route that Coleridge would’ve regularly walked, from Nether Stowey to Bristol. Along the way they drew as many people as they could into The Mariner’s plight.

The team worked with a primary school, a school for people with learning difficulties, several community groups, two homes for elderly people and a pub.

The film knits together The Mariner’s tale with drama, reminiscence, writing & animation, to make a psychedelic yet perfect mix between entertainment, community outreach and human interest.

Directed by Tom Stubbs, co-directed by Jay Kerry, Jon Nicholas and Joff Winterhart. Produced by Wolf + Water. Running time 50 minutes.

Shape UP

20 min video about healthy eating for adults with learning difficulties

written by Stephen Clarke + Tom Stubbs

A biggerhouse production for Learning Disability Services, Somerset in association with the engine room

Light and Dark

A Phantasmagorial autobiographic masterpiece exploring the minds of Michael Smith and Tom Stubbs, both have alter-egos, but whereas Michael’s Alter-ego is a muscled anthromorphic fox with a taste for sex, dark humour and violence, Tom’s Alter-ego is an earnest, technology obsessed video engineer.

All the films are superbly realised and beautifully produced. At the same time they are laced with humour, yet moving and engaging. I’ve been meaning to blog about The Rime of The Ancient Mariner (on bicycle) for ages, it’s just so marvelous that I want to share it with everyone, but it utterly defies description. It has too many lovely moments – Joff drawing the scenes described by residents of an old peoples’ home as they share their memories, A drunken narration of the poem in a rowdy west-country pub as the locals cheer on the press-ganged reader, a serendipitous meeting with a descendant of Wordsworth come to trace the same route, the way the primary school children throw themselves into the task of telling the tale, the double-booked hall.. it’s all good.

When I saw Light and Dark for the first time I was blown away. It’s very short and as soon as it finished I watched it again immediately. Again it defies description, all I can say is turn up on Friday 17th, watch and enjoy.

Music will be provided by the aforementioned My Two Toms and Bucky.

Admission £6 (£5 concession)
Friday 17th October 2008
Doors open 7.30

For directions and a map to the Cube click on the link below.

http://microplex.cubecinema.com/cubewebsite/directions.html

I hope to see some of you there.

Hellhound On My Trail

It was already dark as my bike and I hissed along the wet country road, though the sun was not due to dip below the distant hills for another half hour. A thin blanket of leaden cloud had clotted on the horizon, diminishing fingers of golden light dripped damply down from the smothered orb suffocating in the greyness. I rode lost in the lanes through this premature, sodden dusk, the day was choking in its final hour, an undignified ending. Barely six miles from home, but turned around by these tracks that weave around each other through the landscape, I had no idea which direction I was facing or what the next village might be. The next village did not appear from around the next bend or crossroads, nor from the junction after that. These were bad, bad choices of direction, the remains of rusted signposts were no help, one of them peppered with holes from a shotgun blast, the names of the villages lay in heap at the side of the road pointing mockingly into the centre of a muddy field. The rain came down, as did the blackness, and soon I rode along a line of silver in the road. This reflection from my lamp on the slick tarmac was my only source of illumination.

A farm on the corner, as I near, a coal-black shape detaches itself from the darkness of the hedge and runs towards me. A dog. Its barking is thunderously loud in the quiet of the evening, jaws hanging open, teeth bared, matching my increasingly panicked pace for twenty metres before I get enough speed up to leave it behind. But then at the next house, another loose dog, huge, angry. The bike is almost in the hedge on the right of the road as I accelerate past the careering hound, it slips in the mud allowing me time to get away.

At the next unmarked crossroads I unknowingly make another bad decision, moving further and further away from any villages. The road goes up and up, I know this can’t be right:

I am in blood
Stepp’d in so far that, should I wade no more,
Returning were as tedious as go o’er; - Macbeth

Cresting the horizon, the rain works its way into my clothing and a farm sits on the switchback. This time I sense the dogs before I see them and am already going at speed before they come hurtling, barking out of the open gate. The wheels slip on the mud, my guiding silver trail is gone, I ignore two turnings off to the right, because to cross the road would mean slowing enough that the dogs would catch me. Suddenly the road drops away and I am sucked down a hill and into the inky blackness of a wooded, steep-banked track. I let the bike go for a while as the dogs disappear into the distance behind me, but then I can see or sense nothing. All light ceases save for the weak smudge of silver given out by my front lamp. It falls into blackness, useless. Down, down, always down, the poor bike rides over and through the potholed and water-damaged lane, and I hold on, as a mariner might grip the shattered stub of a mainmast and pray to ride out the storm that hammers his ship. Now the wheels are locked and I am sliding down the hill, mud, leaves, shit… SHIT! I nearly overcook a corner and hurtle over a staggered junction with no time to make an informed choice of road, always down.

Until the bike is at rest, sitting on the raised ford at Wellow with the waters lapping at my feet.

A long walk up the other side of the hill, I turn right, hoping that I am heading for Norton St Philip, and not deeper into Somerset. Under a viaduct, and up a long boring hill, grinding out each metre as the bike fails to find the granny ring. At the top I am in Hinton Charterhouse and heading in the right direction. Tired and hungry the rest of the ride is a blur, clipping the curve at Woolverton, back tyre deflating as I pull into the village. A mere seventeen miles on the clock for two hours or so of riding. Exhaustion.

And the day keeps on worring’ me, there’s a hell-hound on my trail,
Hell-hound on my trail, hell-hound on my trail.

Robert Johnson

Support The Bike Show

The Bike Show, as far as I am concerned, is a national treasure. This fantastic radio show (also available as a podcast from iTunes) is probably the only show about bicycles on the airwaves in the U.K. It has it’s fair share of listeners the world over too. The content is always rich and varied, from rolling interviews (interviewing while cycling along), examinations of cycling and politics, town planning, weird cycle rides, sub-24 hour camping, a history of Moulton Cycles, Round the world by bike, bicycle films, bicycle music… that’s just the last six weeks or so. If you haven’t listened to The Bike Show, then I implore, nay, insist that you go to the web page and listen. There are also complete archives available, if you are just discovering The Bike Show for the first time, then there is over three years of previous material to keep you going, load them up onto your iPod and listen at your leisure.

In an interview, the Bike Show presenter Jack Thurston once said of the connection between bicycles and radio:

“I think they are both subtle technologies, and gentle technologies. Television shouts, whereas radio is just a word in your ear. I think a bicycle compared to a car is the same kind of thing. There’s a subtlety the bicycle shares with radio.”

He also has great taste in music, lacing the articles with sounds, old and new, to create a collage or a tapestry of sound. It’s lovely to hear the sound of gentle exertion as an interviewee eases up a hill while talking about an around the world trip by bike. Or the ringing of bike bells as the interview rolls along a canal path. Or my very favourite sound, the ticking of a freewheel.

If you listen to The Bike Show already, then, if you have not yet done so, you really should make a donation to Resonance FM, the radio station that broadcasts it. Actually if you have already done so, you should do so again.

“Resonance 104.4 fm is London’s first radio art station and is run by the London Musicians’ Collective. It started broadcasting on May 1st 2002. Its brief? To provide a radical alternative to the universal formulas of mainstream broadcasting. Resonance 104.4 fm features programmes made by musicians, artists and critics who represent the diversity of London’s arts scenes, with regular weekly contributions from nearly two hundred musicians, artists, thinkers, critics, activists and instigators; plus numerous unique broadcasts by artists on the weekday “Clear Spot”.”

Which is as much to say that it’s essentially run by volunteers. As you can imagine, it costs a lot of money to run a radio station, so Resonance rely on donations, it’s continued existence often looks a bit precarious. If you have listened to, and enjoyed, the bike show, I implore you to chuck them a bit (or a lot) of cash to help keep them going. It would be a sad day indeed if the bike show could no longer be heard thrumming out of our speakers or headphones on a Monday night. Support Resonance FM by making a donation here.

I’ll leave you with a photo that goes with a set from a recent interview on the show with the owner of London’s ‘anti-bike shop’ selling old restored classic bikes. More gorgeous pics from the flickr set here.