Pedalling Too Fast? You Have More than One Gear

This is a posting griping about something I am seeing on an almost daily basis these days, even though I have moved into a close.  It is cyclists coming past me with their feet spinning around on their pedals and yet them progressing slowly.  This used to be confined to young people and where I lived it seemed to be common among East Asian residents, but now I am seeing people of all ages and ethnicities doing it.  I could understand it if I lived in the Peak District or the Grampians or even on the Downs, but I live in southern England, to the East of the Tees-Exe line and so steep hills are not particularly common; indeed a lot of the roads have minimal inclines.  Yet all of these cyclists are riding around as if they are about to attempt to ride up Mont Ventoux or Alpe d'Huez.  You see their feet spinning around as they progress slower than walking along a flat road.  In the past I have challenged people as I have walked by but soon learned that not only was that deemed unacceptable no matter how politely I did it, but the cyclists had little idea of what I was talking about.


You have to wonder at the lack of curiosity on the part of the cyclists.  Whenever I buy or rent a new car I try out all of the buttons to see what they do.  Clearly these cyclists have not tried the levers or twisted the grips which operate the gears.  Perhaps it is an issue of there being so many.  When I was a boy, the bicycles that ordinary people rode had 3, 5 or 10 gears.  Only those who raced had more.  These days even a child's bike will have more than 20 and rather than seeing the cable pulling the guide wheel across it is all confined within the frame and adjusted by something looking more suited to a motorbike.  Perhaps seeing other cyclists around them similarly spinning their feet around people assume that is what cycling is normally and they do not realise that they could be moving far more effectively and indeed speedily especially on the flat or shallow inclines.  Cycling around a town you probably need only 5 of the many gears you have and it seems ironic that most people have their bicycle set on the one which would enable them to ride up an alp rather than a high street.


I do not know how you solve this issue.  We live in an age in which people do not read instructions and certainly are angered by anyone offering advice of any kind.  I suppose we just have to cycle or walk past them marvelling that they have so little sense of self-preservation that they will not try out all the functions on their machine and work out what is best for them in a given situation.  Where this does become a hazard is when you also hear the squeak of a chain that has never been oiled, despite bicycle lubricant now being available in supermarkets and with tyres with so little pressure in them they flop around and are liable to puncture.  Children are supposed to pass a cycling proficiency series of classes but adults are simply allowed to get on a bicycle and try to go.  Drivers say that cyclists need licences and insurance, largely, however, as an excuse for hitting them.  However, I think there would be benefit in having to secure a cycling permit including basic maintenance and how to cycle safely and efficiently.  The challenge is how this would be administered and how unlicenced cyclists would be caught and penalised.  For now I just have to walk passed people on squeaky bicycles moving slowly along the road believing they are cycling for real.

Has Cycling Become Simply A Poser's Hobby?

As regular readers will know, after being bullied for twelve months, I went into melt down and ended up losing my house and living with my parents, something which proved to be more of a challenge than I had anticipated.  Not only were there the issues of being around them but also the fact that they have lived in the same house since 1968 meant that there were far too many ghosts of the people who had bullied me for around a decade in my youth in the small town where they live to allow me comfortably to go out around there.  Consequently, I tend to keep to my room and play games.  Eventually I managed to find a room closer to my work and moved to South-West London, into districts I had never visited before.  Whilst many of the locals are very rich and come with attitudes of the kind that make the government insufferable, I felt pretty comfortable here.  With my mental health a lot better, I started looking at my physical health.  I had put on about 5Kg since things had started going wrong.  I am supposed to be 82Kg for my height, but have typically been 90Kg since the mid-2000s; 95Kg was certainly too much.

My job is not well paid and given that I am so physically unattractive I can alarm people in sporting venues, gym membership was out of the question.  I have failed at fencing and Aikido, so such sports seemed to be pointless, though I did consider badminton, though was worried it would simply be too middle class all round.  I was not able to find any swimming pools around.  I considered taking up running.  It seems to be a common urban sport.  In addition, I have always had a curiosity to find out where specific roads go to.  My interest in modernist and other 20th century architecture means that I can actually find going through suburbs pretty interesting.  I know it is sad, but there it is.  Given I have spent much of my life living in suburbs, I suppose it is a good safety mechanism.  Saying that I would never go back to Perivale.  That exceeded my tedium level and I could not get out of there fast enough.  I imagined that running would be a comparatively cheap sport.  Yes, I might need so decent shoes and one of those fluorescent tops that would keep me safe but not sweat too much.  However, reading 'The Guardian' guide to running last month: http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/the-running-blog/2013/may/28/running-etiquette-10-commandments  I was utterly put off even trying.  It might have been good for my fitness but facing up to the scrutiny and the disdain were too much and threatened to throw me into the haunted state I had when living with my parents.  I know the locals now and disdain flows from every pore even if you skulk away from them.  Shoving myself into their line of sight so clearly was bound to lead to heckling.  I have experienced this when cycling for not wearing cleats, but the advantage is you can get away from it easier than when running.

With running ruled out, I thought of a return to cycling.  As regular readers know, I used to cycle a great deal, even going on cycling holidays of my own making.  One key problem is that I cannot cycle fast enough.  I average 14.5kph (around 9mph) whereas cycling clubs require you to go at 15mph (24kph).  My father averages 10kph but he is 75 so I think they give him some leeway.  My father only cycles mid-week and whilst he comes past my work, I would only cycle on weekends so there would be no chance of humiliatingly running into him.  There was one big challenge and that was that whilst I had a bike that had once cost £329 (I got it in a terrible state for £90), I had not ridden it much.  The last time had been when unemployed in 2012 and I had felt terrible vertigo as if I was constantly going to crash over the handlebars; I often felt nauseous though never actually vomited.  That was on a 3Km ride to and from the job centre.  I thought that given my blood pressure was down, I should be in a better state.  However, thinking about it the woman who used to live in my house had similar symptoms and had to stop motorbiking as a result, so maybe there was some inner ear infection we caught, I do not know.

Anyway, the decision about whether to return to my bicycle was soon made for me.  I know I live in a snobby area, but no-one who cycled passed me did not look like they were about to race for a leading team.  The bicycles were generally more expensive than my car (it is insured for £1000); I have now seen bicycles for sale at twice that amount.  Even Halfords sells bicycles for £850 (€977; US$1300); let alone the Giant dealership I passed, with bicycles for £4499 (€5699 - their exchange rate; US$6883).  As when I drive it is clear that I would be disparaged for simply what I was using.  The other thing is the clothing.  Very few people ride around on a bicycle in normal clothes, let alone work clothes.  The time when people would ride in their suit or overalls to work are long gone.  The only people in ordinary clothes on a bicycle are either children generally in school uniform or people riding on the pavement.  These days adults riding on the road, whether it is a weekday or the weekend must ride in a pristine cycle team strip.  I used to have the Credit Agricole strip because Chris Boardman rode for that team and they were only bank in Falaise which would change my traveller's cheques.  That was my kit until I got chocolate ice cream on it at a restaurant somewhere South of Fecamp.  I guess these people change when they reach work and probably shower too.  Given that my workplace has no air conditioning and the window beside me does not open; it has an extractor fan embedded in it which does not work but madly is cleaned periodically.  I would arrive with sweat dripping from me and having to squeeze into a toilet cubicle to change.

What soon became apparent is that like football and running, cycling is no longer a democratic sport.  Football was captured by the prosperous middle classes (as opposed to me who was middle class and not prosperous) in the 1990s and running soon after.  In swimming there has been a similar attempt, but fortunately most pools at least leave some segments of the pool clear of the swimming lanes that these 'elite' practitioners favour to demonstrate their skills.  Heaven help you if you attempt to swim in them, you will be swamped and even kicked to get back into the non-laned area.  The sense that 'you are not doing it right' and thus open to public ridicule, sometimes very vocal, has now become embedded in all of these sports, cycling among them.  It is as much about how you appear as about what you do or what benefit you are gaining.  The other day I sat in central Esher for about an hour; 34 cyclists in small groups of individually came passed me going off in different directions.  It is clearly a crossroads for different routes around that part of Surrey.  Of those that I saw, and there may have been others I missed, only three cyclists, all men, were not wearing a pristine cycle team strip and riding a bike which, at least, would be at the top of Halfords range if not that of Giant.

As they whizz past, you get that look of disdain and often are told to get off the road, back on to the pavement, apparently nowadays the cycle path for those just using a bicycle as a mode of transport rather than a status symbol.  Non-status symbol cyclists now get it from all sides.  Of course, we have always been shouted at or pushed by car drivers, for 'being in the wrong place' or 'not knowing the law' especially when turning right or using a cycle lane.  On the pavement the large pushchair mothers shout as if cycling there is tantamount you trying to abduct or crush their child and now the poser cyclists have a go at you for being where they want to be and not dressed 'right'.

Yes, you can have your Sky Rides around city centres and all of the initiatives to get more people cycling.  However, it is too late, certainly in southern England.  Too many influential people want to keep the average person off their bicycle.  As with running and visiting gyms, cycling is now the preserve of the rich.  They identify themselves by what they wear and ride and have no tolerance for 'plebs' trying get in on the game.  It is all about status, as Professor Felipe Fernandez-Armesto when lecturing on the cultural perceptions of fatness, it has all been turned on its head from three centuries ago.  Then it was the rich who were seen as fat as they could afford to eat well.  Now it is the rich who are the slim ones, sometimes looking as if they are starved, because they can still afford to eat well; our definition of 'well' having changed.  Thus, they are going to prevent any ordinary person from exercising so that they cannot aspire to even look like their 'betters'.  They do this by making it so unpleasant to take part that individuals abandon it for not wanting to suffer further chastisement.  I was blind to this, but realise now that I own no house, living in a sub-let room and drive a 15-year old car, there is no way I would be accepted into the ranks of cyclists and to even try is to open me up to more of the bullying I have too often experienced in my life.

P.P. 06/08/2013
I read an article in 'The Guardian' on Saturday 3rd August 2013 which seemed to sum up my fears.  One person interviewed said that 'cycling has become the new golf' for upper middle class males.  The newspaper's own coverage of Sunday's 100-mile ride for serious amateurs seemed to reinforce this view.  It is all about the kit and now increasingly about downloading the statistics regarding your ride from some on-board device.  Performance now seems to out-rank achievement.  Despite the newspaper arguing that cycling has become 'less cliquey' in fact itself is showing that simply the clique has shifted from rather nerdy individuals of the past to snobby ones of the present.  Nothing is going to keep me away from cycling more than knowing I am going to be heckled for not only what I am wearing and riding but also what electronic equipment I might be carrying.  Cycling, like running is now an elitist hobby.  What is going to be next?  Darts?

Cambridge And Me

The other day looking for work I went to Cambridge.  It is a town that I have visited erratically over the past 20 years.  One day I will produce a posting about Oxford which I have a much longer, deeper and more complex relationship with.  However, for now I will look at its 'sister' university town.  The first time I went to the town was in 1987.  At the time I was a student at a different university, but wearing a university scarf meant tourists simply assumed I was at the University of Cambridge.  Having been rejected from Oxford, I felt ambivalent about that as I was still filled with a kind of fantasy of what university life should be, as with many people, something pretty much like 'Brideshead Revisited' or at least 'Shadowlands', with lots of intellectual discussion in cafes. 

I do not know if universities have ever really provided that experience.  I am sure even in the days of C.S. Lewis let alone Alan Turing, the obsessions were much the same as now, with the opposite sex and alcohol, perhaps with posing.  Unfortunately I had a very romantic approach to these things and had enduring fantasies of meeting the right woman (i.e. one who could envisage having an intimate relationship with me however briefly) and acting out our romance against such a backdrop; Freiburg-am-Breisgau was even worse for that. Cambridge, like towns such as Oxford, Salisbury, Bath, Durham, York, Warwick, even parts of Norwich, seem to be almost like theme parks.  If they did not exist then they would have been created by some developer from the USA.  Much of these towns effectively have stunning cliff faces: buildings of a certain religious or academic architecture that present an impenetrable face to the large majority of visitors to Cambridge.  Even if you get inside, you are never 'inside', always the alien to these spaces.

I travelled from Coventry to visit a friend of mine who was studying at the university.  We went to see The Bhundu Boys a Zimbabwean band which were very popular in 1986-7, even supporting Madonna.  It was a surprise on the part of my friend.  I had already bought tickets to see them in Coventry and so ended up seeing them twice in the same week.  The music was good but I was not really that big a fan.  My friend was making a move on woman at this stage.  I never know what happened to that relationship.  We saw the band in The Cornmarket but what I primarily remember now is a middle-aged man who looked like he had just stepped off the beach, steadily swaying backwards throughout the course of the evening, edging our group of four, typically British in not saying anything, further and further back towards the rear wall of the venue.

The second time I went to Cambridge was as a detour travelling back from Norwich to London. I remember going to Ely and across the flat rural lands in a diesel train which more resembled a bus from the 1970s than it did the usual type of train. I remember a Chinese student being charged a supplement on his ticked because he had gone and sat in the first class section of the carriage, a short, broad glassed off area. Why simply having a glass door in front of you warranted paying more given how noisy and smelly the train was overall, I do not know. The landscape made me think of the mid-West of the USA though I guess there the horizon is much farther away.

Anyway I arrived in Cambridge and visited my friend who was still at Queen's College one of the historic ones.  The first time I had gone he lived in accommodation on the edge of town which looked like a disused hospital; this second time he had a room in the historic college buildings themselves. He was keen that in the few hours that I had, that I should experience the whole Cambridge experience and go punting. The gloomy weather and wind saw that plan off. We just wandered around The Backs which means along the banks of the River Cam which means you tend to look at the rear of the main colleges in the town centre. I remember we were with his Canadian girlfriend who later would begin correspondence with his friends directly, something I found very peculiar. She also turned out to be both bisexual and unfaithful. I suppose an ideal character for a modern murder mystery, perhaps given her forthright nature, even the detective.

These visits allowed me to see the side of the town that tourists saw and the locals.  I remember certainly on the first trip going into the suburbs and a mundane pub.  That sense of the everyday alongside theme park looking buildings and an archaic university system always reminded me of a kind of parallel worlds, something like 'Neverwhere' (1996) in which different ways of being live alongside each other, rarely bisecting.

It would be over a decade before I returned to Cambridge and this time it would be on a bicycle rather than a train and coming from Milton Keynes, which lies 70Km to the West of Cambridge.  This was my most touristic experience.  I came on a bank holiday weekend, on a Saturday in 2003.  I stayed in the youth hostel and returned on the Sunday.  It was a gloriously sunny weekend.  I remember walking around all the tourist locations and having tea in the grounds of a church, a nice break from the press of the crowds.  I did walk extensively around town, which is not difficult given how small it is and how the main sights are packed into a narrow area.  I remember I was asked to take a photograph of a couple, tourists, with King's College in the background.  It was the first time I had used the digital camera and I was put out when they came over and looked at the image I had taken and insisted that I did it again.  I continued using film cameras myself until 2008.

I remember I found it a challenge to get dinner in the early evening after cafes had closed and before reasonably priced restaurants opened.  I managed to be the last customer getting food in a pub before they stopped serving at 6pm.  This is one thing that has changed massively in the past nine years, something I discuss below.  I remember walking back and forth across the large stretch of grass called Parker's Piece to reach the Grafton shopping centre.  It is a modern shopping centre which seems terribly incongrous sitting so close to buildings hundreds of years old.  However, it was there that I saw sequel, 'Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life' simply to pass the evening.  With this visit I felt I had 'done' Cambridge.

It would be another six years before I returned and I realised that I no longer held any wistful attachment to the town.  Perhaps that youthful sense had been burnt out of me by repeated failures to have any kind of relationship let alone one set against some romantic historic town.  Maybe it was simply age.  Anyway, I was coming for an interview and this time driving.  All I remember is the sat nav being utterly confused by the one way systems and me driving around for ages trying to find a car park then the office that I was being interviewed in.  My impression of the whole day was worsened by the fact that the interviewers could not operate the computer and screen projector that we were compelled to give presentations on and all the interviews were delayed by an hour as that was how long it took to get a technician in.  Given that I had an interview in Southampton later the same day, this destroyed my delicate schedule.  The other mad thing was that the interviewers had asked for every single academic certificate I had received going back to my first 'O' level in 1983.  A man sat in the corner of the interview room comparing the originals against the photocopies I had made and signed each copy off when he was satisfied as if me getting a 'B' or a 'C' in 'O' level Chemistry in 1984 was going to make any difference to do the job I was being interviewed.  My dismay at this behaviour and the lack of technical knowledge probably came out in the interview.  I neither got that job nor the one in Southampton.

Anyway, I went back to Cambridge before Easter and was very much prepared to have any affection for the town burnt out of me.  However, I guess my previous experience put me in a stronger position.  I ignored the sat nav and simply headed to a car park with spaces though detecting the entrance to a car park is a real art in Cambridge town centre.  The fact that students were already on 'vacation' for Easter helped in reducing the (cycle) traffic.  I found the office without difficulty and the interview was run well.  It was glorious weather but too early on in the year for Cambridge to become the mad press it does in the summer, like a seaside resort without a beach.  I did find the town claustrophobic and on some of the roads into the centre very tired.  There certainly seemed to be a need for street cleaning and a general smartening up.  All ancient towns have 1960s and 1970s bits that look very grim these days.  The greatest change that struck me in the nine years since I last wandered the streets is simply how many food outlets there are.  Simply walking along the Hills Road where I had looked for somewhere to eat in 2003, I found that three to four out of every five frontages was either a cafe or a restaurant.  Most of the restaurants were not open being lunchtime, but some were, as were all the cafes.  I guess these all feed the numerous tourists.  What struck me in the town centre was that whilst there were some charity shops there were no empty shops; this and the number of food outlets suggested the town remains prosperous.

Cambridge is a town I feel I should like more than I do.  There are parts that are timeless and are beautiful.  The amount of green spaces in the town centre is wonderful.  However, compared to Oxford it suffers from its size.  You cannot pack so many people into a historic town like that without it seeming overfull.  This means it seems dusty and noisy when you are seeking quiet.  It also contrasts to Oxford where there are many parts you can step away from the crowds very quickly even at the height of summer.  Maybe I should go there in winter and look at the frost covered buildings and grass.  Maybe it is simply I am jaded and I would have lost my affection for places which held such charm for me such as Oxford, Norwich and Freiburg.  Maybe I should avoid going back to them so as not to 'use up' the crumbs of wistfulness that seem so important to me.

Attitude To Cycling Betrays Wider Societal Attitudes

Over the weekend I read a report featured in 'The Guardian' which not only noted that only 2% of journeys in the UK are by bicycle, compared to 25% in the Netherlands, 24% in Moscow, and 20% in Denmark, but that the bulk of adults saw cycling as something that only children or eccentrics did.  Subsequently people noted that the Netherlands is a flat country, but that is only part of the story as in Germany 12% of journeys are by bicycle and in Switzerland 9% and Austria 8%, countries with some of the highest mountains in Europe.
There are regional exceptions.  It is noted that in French cities like Paris and Marseilles fewer than 2% of journeys are by bicycle, whereas in Grenoble and Lille it is over 5% and in Strasbourg, over 15%.  In the UK, towns like Doncaster, Oxford and Milton Keynes are noted for having higher levels of cyclists.

Another factor people neglect is the fact that in the UK house prices mean that people have to commute farther than anyone else in Europe in order to reach work, making cycling there far harder.  Even back in 2003, Britons commuted for 45 minutes compared to 36 minutes in France and 23 minutes in Italy and the EU average of 38 minutes.  People with higher education qualifications in Britain commute 50% more than the UK average; given that 42% of 18-year olds now attend university,  average commuting times must now be higher.  Ironically the cost of living in the UK makes it less likely that people will cycle simply because they have to cover such large distances between home and work.  The fragmentation of secondary schools with so many faith and specialist schools where even just twenty years ago there would have been comprehensive schools taking all comers brings a similar issue to teenagers.

Geography will play a part but mountainous countries such as Spain and Colombia are noted for their world class cyclists as much as flatter countries like Belgium and the Netherlands.  However, there are attitudinal issues too.  Britain's success in cycling events at the Beijing Olympics, the Halfords sponsored city races and the greater prominence of British cyclists in international events appears to have not shifted attitudes at all. 

One might think that a prejudice may develop from seeing cycling as an activity of poor societies, with cities such as Dhaka in Bangladesh having 40% of its journeys by bicycle and Chinese cities such as Beijing (48%), Shenyang (65%) and Tianjin (77%) even in an era of capitalist prosperity, adhering to a mode of transport more reminiscent of China's Communist past.  Yet, you only have to go to an average bicycle shop, rather than a chain store like Halfords, to see bicycles for non-specialists retailing at over £1000 (€1090; US$1590) and to get even a basic adult bicycle new is unlikely to cost less than £300.  The key problem in Britain is less that it is seen as being an activity associated with the poor or undesirable (when did you ever see a chav on a bicycle?), it is that when you cycle you actually have to take consideration of other people around you, even of the weather.  You have to expend personal energy to propel the vehicle, thus drawing on traits other than your wealth or ability to intimidate other road users.  That is not what the average British person wants to do.  When they go on to the roads, they want to demonstrate how much better and richer they are than other people.  They expect other road users to get out of their way or to be able to intimidate them to do so.  Now I am driving in London more, I am witnessing many more cases of drivers in side roads forcing their way into the main flow of traffic purely through intimidation not right of way.

In many Western countries there is a reluctance to cycle, the figures show it.  Even in France, the home of the greatest cycle race in the world, the number of cycle journeys is little more than double the British figure.  However, having cycled in France, Belgium, Spain, Germany and Austria I know that whilst drivers may not want to cycle themselves they do not seem to have the desire to prevent other people from doing so.  The hostility to cyclists in the UK is alarming.  I have numerous personal anecdotes of abuse, fortunately in most cases a person on a bicycle can out manoeuvre a car slowing down and certainly outstrip a driver who chases after you on foot.  There is an intense anger against cyclists from car drivers as if we are out to deliberately offend the drivers.  Much humour is derived from shouting, spitting and manhandling cyclists in a way which would be deemed criminal activity elsewhere in the world or, interestingly, even in the UK, if both individuals were on foot.  The key problem is that too many drivers see their self-esteem based on their car and people acknowledging repeatedly, their 'superiority' throughout the duration of their journey.  The British are so insecure that they have to conjure up such challenges and resassert their machismo/a on a daily basis.

Anyone who drives in the UK, knows these things to be self-evident.  The situation has deteriorated since I received my driving licence in 1986.  Even if the number of vehicles on the road had not increased, a view that to get into a kind of battle and 'stomp' around in a car with no signalling and little recognition of right of way or the purpose of lanes or what red lights signal would make driving so hazardous.  Anyone who was on British roads on the afternoon of Friday 3rd June 2011 would have seen in front of them and heard on the radio reports the consequences of such driving.  Vast sections of major motorways and main roads were at a standstill as a result of accidents and jams caused by bad driving.  The thing is that such attitudes, such contempt for other people simply trying to make their way home as if they were doing something corrupt or perverse is pervasive right through British society.  There seem to be few countries in the EU in which people hold others of the same nationality in such contempt as in the UK.  It is most apparent on the roads, but you see it in shops, in parks, on the street even abuse shouted between neighbours.

The attitude to cyclists is only a most visible example, in so much of British society the assumption is that any other view, any other need aside from that of yourself, is wrong and intrusive and not only has to cease but the perpertrator has to be chastised through abuse and even assault. Margaret Thatcher's property-owning democracy made bicycles items that we strove to forget our poorer parents rode on.  David Cameron's 'Big Society' only makes the me-first attitude worse, by reducing the opportunities and resources in society the fighting over them becomes that harsher.  It literally adds to not the 'big' society but the 'fragmented' society, the broken glass society, the society of a sixty million bunkers from which people spit and punch out at anyone else, even in the houses around them, let alone in their town, let alone across the country as a whole.  Britain is becoming an increasingly violently intolerant society.  How, if people cannot stomach someone who drives in a different way or is simply one car ahead of them, let alone on such a weird (and clearly threatening) form of transport as a bicycle, can they ever live among people with different surnames, let alone size, age, colour, religion, politics ...

The negative attitude to cycling is a part of the negative British attitude towards pollution and to ill-health.  It seems ironic in particular that we think obesity and ill-health is someone else's problem.  These above everything else are actually our problems.  By turning our noses up at a way which can help us (and even more vitally our children) keep fit and reduce pollution we will harm ourselves and the ones we fight so hard to protect from 'weirdos who ride bicycles'.  I am pessimistic that we can break the current pattern of aggressive, even violent driving.  This means that cycling will be a hazardous activity and in turn seen as something only those too young to have a proper recognition of what it means to be a 'real' wo/man, i.e. being a driver or something only those who should be despised would indulge in.  Until we can address the aggressive individualism which is so prevalent in British society we are never going to see an increase in cycling, instead we will continue to see the rise in pollution and obesity.  Thus, gauging the attitude to cycling and cyclists is a way of seeing how healthy a society is as a whole.

Books I Read In 2010

This is the latest in my annual series of reviews of books I have read.  See:
http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2010/01/books-i-read-in-2009.html
http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2009/01/books-i-read-in-2008.html
http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2008/01/books-i-read-in-2007.html
for previous postings in this series.

The number of books I am reading seems to be steadily falling from between 30-40 per year back in the 1990s to much lower figures now.  Interestingly there is a direct correlation between how much I am unemployed in a year and how little I read.  You might think that being out of work would leave me lots of time for reading, but it is also about being inspired to read and when I am without a job, the debilitating lethargy quickly creeps over me.  I guess this is why I know I could never be self-employed.  Like the huge majority of the population from the moment I started play school I have been conditioned to having my day structured for me whether directly or indirectly through people making timed demands.  As a result, being out of work so much in 2010 I have read less than even in the previous years.

Some people say that the book is dead and young people in particular tend not to read books.  Pre-secondary school children do still seem to engage well with books, as sales of things like the Beast Quest series show.  Reading is in fact at a height.  The internet, though providing lots of video content, is actually full of text.  A lot of that text is very badly spelt, but it is text all the same.  Blogging is a very text based art and develops writing skills, though I accept to a limited extent in some cases, and reading too.  The book as a medium rather than reading as an activity may be in decline but it is not that apparent.  I remember when supermarkets did not sell novels or any books in fact, and yet, these days even comparatively small branches have a row of books.  I find them in 99p shops too.  Some of this I imagine is about the digital divide; 30% of people in the UK have no internet access and many others have poor, low band access.  I am a well educated person who cannot afford a Kindle, whereas I can fill my house with books from charity shops and actually have a backlog of a few hundred books to read; I have not bought a new book in the past two years trying to keep the stack down.  People give me books too.  I think the tactile element of reading, the robustness of books, their ease of reading in a variety of light situations, the fact no-one is liable to steal your book, means that they will be around for a lot longer.  The recession means they will be more appealing to those with few funds and a lot of time.

Anyway, for me, not having travel on public transport, no longer having a lunch break and having a lover who is often averse to me reading in bed, my chances for reading for pleasure rather than for information or trying to find a job have declined severely, and last year's very short list of book titles shows that.  Expecting to have to move house at any time last year I focused on the heaviest books in my collection.  Many removal companies refuse to move books (certainly three companies out of the last four I have used) and so I was concerned that if I could not reduce the weight I would have to abandon large quantities of my collection if I could not fit them in my car.

Fiction
'The Daffodil Affair' by Michael Innes.
This was the third in a three-book collection of terribly over-rated novels by Michael Innes. I commented on 'Death at the President's Lodging' and 'Hamlet, Revenge!' last year.  This third book was even worse than them.  It is a weird fantasy of a police detective sent during the Second World War to South America to investigate a man interested in psychic phenonmena who has abducted various people, a horse and even haunted buildings and brought them to a settlement he was creating.  How anyone could do that during wartime seems odd.  Of course, many of the people simply have mental health issues.  The whole novel is very peculiar, totally unbelievable and a real waste of time.  In nothing I have read by Innes does he seem to warrant the acclaim he was given.

'Chimera' by John Barth.
I really seem to have had a bad run of novels.  This one was an utter shambles.  It received an award in the mid-1970s and I can only imagine the award jury were on drugs at the time.  It is supposedly a three-part novel that draws on Greek myths and stories from the Arabian Nights.  It starts rationally enough re-interpreting the stories from a 1970s perspective though set in the ancient world.  However, quickly the text becomes almost incomprehensible with the plot running out of steam and even if you know great details of the original myths, the writing is soon a mish-mash of phrases and snippets that seem to think they are so clever but in fact are pathetic.  I certainly would warn you away from this novel, though I imagine there cannot be many left in circulation.

'The Deadly Percheron' by John Franklin Bardin.
I immediately worried that this was a kind of re-run of 'The Daffodil Affair' being a story set during the Second World War and involving a disappearing horse.  In fact it is far better being about a plot to divert, even brain wash as leading psychologist so that he cannot reveal the identity of a murderer.  It is written from the psychologist's perspective and is especially well done when he wakes up after having been almost murdered by being pushed in front of a train and begins to try to recapture his identity.  As a European reader, seeing New York portrayed in the early 1940s, so apparently untouched by the war is interesting.  The novel has elements of film noir stories, but with a greater psychological element than even those.  Not a cheerful novel, but well written and engaging all the same.

'The World at Night' by Alan Furst.
Furst is renowned for his spy/intrigue/murder novels set in 1930s and 1940s Europe.  This one was a real disappointment.  It features a Parisian movie producer who is drawn into being a double agent working for SOE and the SD in wartime France and Spain.  In the meantime he tries to make movies during the period of occupation and has lots of affairs before falling in love with an actress living in Lyons, which unlike Paris, lay in the Vichy region of the country.  The whole novel feels like Furst is simply going through the motions.  There is a real lack of tension throughout even in scenes as when the protagonist is escaping from a Gestapo prison.  There is a lack of passion in the numerous sex scenes too.  Furst is pretty good at conjuring up the context and details of the period, but in this case it makes the book as dreary as living in wartime Paris must have been.  Something to engage the reader is really lacking from this book.


'The Astounding Science Fiction Anthology' ed. by John W. Campbell, Jr.
I have no idea where I got this book from but it is one of the best I have read in a long time.  It is a collection of stories from the US science fiction magazine, Astounding Stories, which became Astounding Science Fiction in 1938.  It is still being published, since 1992 under the title Analog Science Fiction and Fact.  The magazine started in 1930 and Campbell was its editor 1937-71.  This anthology published in 1952 includes short stories appearing in the magazine 1940-51, a period that Campbell feels was when science fiction was moving from being just the substance of 'pulp' magazines to becoming a more serious genre.  I will list the short stories below because you will see many familiar names.  I have included one of the stories from the anthology in a posting before: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2010/09/making-english-language-more-logical.html

I certainly think that a lot of contemporary science fiction writers especially those of the overblown, door-stop kind of writing should go back to these stories and see good writing in the genre.  These were clearly the cream of the stories over an 11-year period, but despite their age they stand up well today and I thoroughly enjoyed reading them.  Of course, in 1940 the nuclear bomb was guessed at but had not been created, but already writers were analysing the likely impacts on humans and the struggles of dealing with such power.  Interestingly only in a couple of the stories do you see Cold War sensibilities, and this is really only apparent in the later end of the collection.  Knowledge of the solar system seems a little naive today, with primitive life on the Moon and bases established beneath seas on Venus, but to some extent show writing at that cusp before all the fantasies of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells about our neighbouring bodies were finally dismissed by space travel.  Certainly 'Clash by Night' by Lawrence O'Donnell (1943) portraying battling companies of mercenaries on Venus could stand up beside the 'Dune' series even today. 

As you would expect from science fiction there are stories questioning assured mutual destruction, first contact with aliens, brilliant children and creating immortality through manipulating cells.  Though the language [for example people say 'good-by' rather than 'goodbye'], the clothing and some of the ordinary technology seems very dated now, it added to the charm for me as it gave a window into not only science fiction ideas but those of a mid-20th century US context.  As with all best short stories, these pack stimulating ideas into a small package and often have an excellent pay off, sometimes in the final phrase.

'Blowups Happen' by Robert Heinlein, 1940
About the psychological pressures on men overseeing nuclear weapons.

'Hindsight' by Jack Williamson, 1940
About personal and inter-planetary rivalry in a colonised solar system, involving weaponry firing through time.

'Vault of the Beast' by A.E. van Vogt, 1940
About unleashing a sleeping alien entity.

'The Exalted' by L. Sprague de Camp, 1940
 Rather comic tale of an intelligent bear investigating mischief at a US university.

'Nightfall' by Isaac Asimov, 1941
Great story about how, on a planet which suffers periodic eclipses, myths and cults arise explaining what is happening, with particular consequences.

'When the Bough Breaks' by Lewis Padgett, 1941
Parents' view of raising a genius child desired by a future civilisation, a kind of antidote to 'Terminator' (1984) and its sequels (1991; 2003).

'Clash by Night' by Lawrence O'Donnell, 1943
City-states on Venus use mercenary companies to fight their battles; tactical nuclear weapons are banned.

'Invariant' by John Pierce, 1944
A man has found a way for him and his dog to become immortal, with unexpected consequences.

'First Contact' by Murray Leinster, 1945
A really good exploration of the challenges of encountering new intelligent life on the edge of human space.

'Meihem In Ce Klasrum' by Dolton Edwards, 1946
Clever essay on the ridiculous aspects of English spelling.

'Hobbyist' by Eric Frank Russell, 1947
Lone human space explorer cannot determine why there is only one of each species on a planet.

'E for Effort' by T.L. Sherred, 1947
Really fascinating story of the careers of two men who develop a device which can show images from any time or place in history. A little reminiscent of 'Deja Vu' (2006) though on a far larger scale.

'Child's Play' by William Tenn, 1947
A very 'Twilight Zone' like story in which a man receives a child's kit from the future enabling him to create life.

'Thunder and Roses' by Theodore Sturgeon, 1947
Quite a sentimental story with a real 1940s feel about a female singer touring the USA in the wake of a nuclear war begging for the counter-attacks to cease for the sake of the world.

'Late Night Final' by Eric Frank Russell, 1948
Uptight commander of alien invasion fleet tries to prevent his crews fraternising with the humans.  The character reminds me of Arnold Rimmer in the 'Red Dwarf' comedy science fiction television series (1988-99; 2009).

'Cold War' by Kris Neville, 1949
Very similar to 'Blowups Happen' looking at the psychological pressures on men manning nuclear weapon armed space stations circling the Earth.

'Eternity Lost' by Clifford D. Simak, 1949
About a man who has already had his life extended centuries seeking to have one, last, vital extension.

'The Witches of Karres' by James H. Schmitz, 1949
A playful story, a kind of 'Dances with Wolves' (1990) on the borderlands of a vast space empire with mischievous inhabitants of Karres.

'Over the Top' by Lester del Rey, 1949
An explorer is stranded on the Moon while Earth is on the verge of a nuclear war; reminiscent of parts of 'The Martian Chronicles' by Ray Bradbury (1950).

'Meteor' by William T. Powers, 1950
Nice twist on the usual meteor-threatening-to-crash-into-Earth story; the oldest story I know featuring mining within asteroids.

'Last Enemy' by H. Beam Piper, 1950
About staff who monitor different parallel universes being drawn into exploration of reincarnation on one version of Earth; one of the two stories in the collection with apparent US-side Cold War sensibilities but an interesting portrayal of behaviour in a society in which reincarnation is an established fact.

'Historical Note' by Murray Leinster, 1951
Very much a Cold War spoof exploring the consequences of developing personal flying devices in the USSR.

'Protected Species' by H.B. Fyfe, 1951
Nice consideration of colonial attitudes in space exploration, with excellent final line pay-off.

Non-Fiction
'French Revolutions' by Tim Moore.
An entertaining account of the author cycling around the 2000 route of the Tour de France, which I should have read long ago.  Entertaining as all the best travel books are and especially good if you have enjoyed cycle touring and/or know France.  For the impact had on my perception of myself see the posting: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2010/04/not-as-pathetic-as-i-thought-i-was.html

'The Collapse of the Third Republic' by William L. Shirer
A very good exploration of the fall of France in 1940 and the reasons behind it dating back decades.  Shirer is renowned for his work on Nazi Germany.  As a US journalist he was in France and Germany during the 1930s and into the war period.  The USA being neutral until December 1941 he was pretty free to move around even during the war.  He is excellent on the political aspects in the 1930s and early 1940s.  He tends to get overwhelmed when describing the complexities of the fighting in 1940 and the book could have benefited from more maps at that stage.  His journalistic style makes the book very readable and it is very informative on the period.

Going to Greenwich

This is another of my occasional nostalgic 'memories of' postings.  It takes me back to a time in the mid to late 1990s when I lived in East London.  Thinking about this posting was partly prompted by what I wrote recently about launderettes.  Anyway in the mid-1990s I left Oxford for a better paid job (with far fewer hours) in East London.  First I lived in Poplar which is at the northern end of that southward pointing meander in the River Thames known as the Isle of Dogs (apparently because royal dogs were once kennelled there).  It could have been termed the Isle of Docks because in the first two-thirds of the 20th century it was filled with docks and warehouses unloading ships from around the world bringing food and other materials into London.  This trade began to fade by the 1960s and in the 1980s the docks were closed and Docklands was re-vitalised (in part) by filling some docks, turning others into marinas and putting in office blocks and luxury apartments.  However, alongside these expensive places continued ordinary East End housing, parks and pubs (though many of these clothes), though of course with the work in the docks gone unemployment in the area for ordinary people has always been high.  From Poplar I moved about 3 Km North-West to Mile End but would still often cycle through Poplar and down the Isle of Dogs.

The reason why I would go that way was to get to Greenwich.  This district sits on the southern bank of the River Thames, opposite the southern end of the Isle of Dogs.  Its history has been very different, being a location of a royal palace in the Tudor era and then home to a major naval college.  It is also the location of the historic Royal Observatory on which the Greenwich meridian, i.e. where each stay is deemed to start, runs.  Whist there are districts around Greenwich such as Charlton which are not wealthy, none of the area is as poor as the Isle of Dogs.  It used to strike me when I stood in Island Gardens on the North bank and look over to Greenwich that the divide used to remind me of when I had looked over the West German - East German border in the 1980s, though I must say the difference in wealth was more visible here in London than when I had looked across the Iron Curtain border in rural Hesse.  My trips to Greenwich from the Isle of Dogs generally preceded the extension of the Docklands Light Railway (DLR) under the river to Lewisham which was completed in 1999.  From 1994-9 the DLR (first opened in 1987; extended in 1994) stopped at Island Gardens high above street level, but now it dips down and goes under the river with its next stop in Greenwich.  This changed the dynamic of the journey to Greenwich because up until the 1999 extension, DLR passengers had to get off in Island Gardens and then go through the Greenwich foot tunnel.  Thus in the period 1994-9, the foot tunnel probably had the greatest flow of traffic it had seen in decades.  Now they simply ride on the DLR all the way to Greenwich and beyond.

The DLR is a train service without any driver.  It runs automatically around East London linking the City with Docklands but also now North and South London.  There is usually a ticket inspector on board but a lot of children have fun sitting at the front of the driverless train pretending to drive it.  It winds its way through the large office blocks like a monorail at some World's Fair of the 1960s but also passes by very ordinary streets and allotments.  The sharp contrast between the wealth of big business and pretty poor streets is one thing that always struck me.  Of course, generally I cycled rather than took the DLR.  Once when coming back late one evening from seeing friends in Charlton I carried my bicycle up all the steps and put it on the DLR train at Island Gardens.  Aside from me there was only a ticket inspector and one other passenger.  The floor was covered with vomit but the ticket inspector constantly berated me about why I had brought my bicycle on the train (it was not against rules to do so) as there was a chance oil would get on the train.  Given the rubbish and vomit there already I found it rather alarming that he felt the need to have a go at me.  I told him there was no indication when you bought your ticket that bicycles were not permitted and I was not travelling in the rush hour, quite the opposite, but clearly my action exercised him greatly.  In the end I got off at Poplar and cycled the rest of the way back to Mile End.

Even though you can travel direct to Greenwich, I would suggest if you can getting off at Island Gardens and using the Greenwich Foot Tunnel.  You used to pass a classic 1960s tea rooms in Island Gardens (I do not know if it is still there) with the shape of a teapot outlined in white bricks built into its brick work.  Then you step into a huge circular lift with padded seats around the perimeter.  Bicycles are allowed in, but you are not permitted to cycle in the tunnel and the lift attendants have CCTV cameras so they can see who is breaking the rules.  Steps spiral round the lift if you do not want to wait.  The first time I went through the Greenwich Foot Tunnel (it opened in 1902 and was designed to allow dock workers from South London to cross to the Isle of Dogs easily) I half expected to stumble across some underground Victorian city.  The curve of the walls with their white tiles and the glass domed entrances at either end give it a nice steampunk flavour.  Often (though not at present due to refurbishment until March 2011) there are buskers in there and loads of people.  The bubbling voices make it seem very busy at times.  I have been through there with crowds of people and when it was just me and a guitarist strumming away at the mid-point of the tunnel with absolutely minimal audience.  I have even seen clouds down there from moisture that has gathered.  It curves and you have a sense of going under the ground then back up to the surface.  It is often used as a location for short movies; I saw once as a fake Channel Tunnel and then as a tunnel in which a woman was transformed by going into a poster halfway along and from an uptight businesswoman emerged as a kind of hippie-gypsy character.

Anyway, once through the tunnel you emerge in the shadow of the 'Cutty Sark', the famous clipper that used to sail to India and the far smaller and once as famous 'Gypsy Moth' used for single-handed around the world sailing.  These emphasise the maritime connections of Greenwich and whilst it is on a river, you certainly feel like you are in a seaside town rather than part of London.  Now aside from these sights a lot of what I will refer to now is drawn from my memories of the 1990s and there is no guarantee that these things will still be there.  Perhaps someone can email me and update me about what has come and gone since my time.  The last time I went back was in 2001 and on that occasion to the University of Greenwich for a presentation evening.  Greenwich as I remember it was filled with second hand and remaindered bookshops, one classic junk shop, two sorts of flea market and a more stylish covered market selling gift items like soap and stationery and things.  There were a number of decent pubs.  I remember drinking in one on the market and the 'Trafalgar Tavern' further along the river front which many people miss but it does get crowded.  I never drunk in the 'Gipsy Moth' next to the Cutty Sark ship because it was rather too 'chavvy' in contrast to the 'Trafalgar Tavern' which can be very 'yuppie' at times.  I have never drunk in 'The Auctioneer'  but think I was taken to the 'Greenwich Union' by a friend.  There are numerous cafes from chains like Cafe Rouge to indepedent ones so it is good for 'light lunches'.

Once you pass beyond the area of shops and markets in nice period buildings, interspersed with the occasional shop selling seascape paintings or even maritime supplies you begin to get to the historic buildings.  Greenwich has been visited twice by the archaeological programme 'Time Team' who have uncovered Roman remains on the hill and then remains of Henry VIII's jousting arena in the grounds of the former Naval College. The college sits to the East of the district centre and is now primarily owned by the University of Greenwich.  Its long pillared arcades often feature in television dramas (the whole area also features in the movie 'Blow Up' (1966); the tennis courts where the hero inadvertently photographs a dead body are still there, just East of there near Charlton/Kidbrooke).  There is a decent museum in the Naval College too.

Then there is Greenwich Park rising up to the Royal Observatory at the top of the hill.  The park is very pleasant and gives you good views over East London.  I have photographs that I should find out and scan in to illustrate.  The Royal Observatory is a nice small museum in the historic building with information on chronometers.  In its grounds you can stand astride the meridian line and so have one foot in the western hemisphere and one in the eastern hemisphere.  Fascinatingly in the park there is a service road and at some time a diagonal white line was roughly painted across it.  It actually runs North-West to South-East rather than North-South like the real meridian line, but it is in an area you do not have to pay to enter and so there must be thousands, possibly even millions of people around the world who have had themselves photographed straddling this random line thinking they are on the meridian.  You see them in their scores and never want to disappoint them by revealing the truth.

For me Greenwich is always in a bubble of a wonderful summer's day taken up with looking at some history, having a pleasant lunch, browsing for second hand books and dozing on the grass of the park.  For people who live in the packed streets of East London which ironically at weekends in certain areas seem devoid of live, it is a lovely escape to get over to Greenwich which has such vibrancy compared to the run-down shopping streets and closed pubs of the Isle of Dogs.  The fact you can look over from one to another I think heightens the poignancy of it all.  However, I found being able to get away from my single room in Mile End living above a chip shop with a bathroom shared by seven people to a place that was like going to the seaside was a great pick-me-up and even though I live (for the moment) in far better conditions I do miss the opportunity whenever I fancied to quickly go to Greenwich.

Not As Pathetic As I Thought I Was

As anyone who has read this blog over the last couple of years or so, or has more recently dipped into my accounts of cycling in northern France will, know, I have felt that I was a real failure as a touring cyclist.  Despite covering 60-100 Km per day I seemed to be incredibly slow, averaging only 13-14.5 kph compared to the 24 kph that my local cycling club expected people to maintain over 80 Km.  I remember too vividly the days I would set off from my hotel or hostel only to find myself slumping in a bus shelter an hour later feeling exhausted and the number of times I had to get off and push my bicycle up the middle part of hills, much to the derision of the local young people.  I also remember regularly being overtaken by men who were 40-50 years older than me out for local club runs and moving at a pace that I could not hope to match.  One reason why I gave up such cycling holidays (and a lot of bad luck was an additional factor, such as getting lost, finding all the hotels full, being robbed and confusions over ferry times) was that I felt I would never be fit enough to be convincing as a touring cyclist.

Having just read 'French Revolutions' by Tim Moore (2001), I realised that I had done myself a real disservice by not having read it nine years ago when I first bought it (I have a shed full of novels to read, most from charity shops, but with the occasional 'new' book, i.e. bought in the year it was published).  Moore's efforts put my completely into the shade.  In the summer of 2000 he went around the entire route of that year's Tour de France three weeks before the race was run.  His climbs of Alps and Pyrenees was in a completely different league to anything I did and I probably never topped 120-140 Km in a single day and quite often it was nearer 80 Km, whereas he managed over 250 Km on one occasion.  I remember a tourist office official in Amiens telling me explicitly that 96 Km in five hours thirty minutes was nothing to be proud of.  What is striking is how many of the same things we encountered, including dogs leaping out at you suddenly as you rode through villages; wildlife, in my case, two deer, crashing on to the road right in front of you; elderly men overtaking you on bicycles that looked like they had been involved in the First World War; very positive and very dismissive responses from different hoteliers when you turn up in cycling garb; getting lost on ring roads, drawn towards motorways and lost in housing estates; staying in hotels that could be used in an episode of 'Maigret' with no need to adapt anything and above all the physical impact.

What I did not realise at the time was how poorly prepared I was for cycle touring in terms of my health.  I had the creams to rub on sore parts of my body.  I made sure I bought bottled water rather than relying on bidons which often become the home to lots of bugs.  I made sure I had regular meal breaks with a decent amount of carbohydrate (and lugging a huge pack of custard creams - the biscuits containing most energy in a single biscuit around with me, just in case) and between these Orangina breaks to keep me from dehydration and fuel me with more natural sugar. I was ready for the diahorrea common for cyclists and the general 'windiness' coming from having your stomach crunched up over the crossbar for hours on end. I got to bed early and showered every day.  However, and this probably stems from being excluded from the cycle club and not mixing with other more experienced tourers I neglected other aspects of the necessary health regime.  Foolishly too, I pored over maps and read acommodation guides and downloaded guidance on navigating various routes from the CTC (Cyclists' Touring Club) but overlooked any health advice and also failed to pick up a single account of a tourer's journey.  I suppose this was because I was used to setting off on a Sunday for a decent 65-80 Km run without too much difficulty.  I made sure I ate well and was protected from the sun and seemed to assumed that with regular breaks and rest days that a cycling holiday in France would be like a series of Sundays (and now I remember that in itself caused fear as I was worried that I would arrive in a town on a Sunday and find everything closed.  Being in a locked youth hostel in Dunkerque at night with no water in the taps and having to drink from the toilet as the only way to slake my thirst at that time of night because I had finished my last bottle earlier, probably added to that phobia).

What I realise now is that I had totally underestimated the cumulative impact on my body.  Unlike professional cyclists, my muscles were not receiving any massage at night and I had not even done any of the stretching exercises that Chris Boardman's books recommended and that Moore followed pretty religiously.  No wonder my muscles complained the next day. At school I had always been told that I would never be a sportsman and given my slowness compared to other cyclists I never even considered myself in that category even as the most amateur of amateurs.  However, that meant I did not read the advice for sportsmen or engage with the kinds of activities they do to make their efforts less of a challenge.  Even if you are cycling for a day in your local area, you need to think of yourself as doing sport and thus, a sportsperson, however minor.  To ignore that fact can lead you into the kind of difficulties I encountered which reduced my holiday's potential for enjoyment.

The second thing was that I had made wrong assumptions about my medical condition, diabetes.  I knew from reading and experience that a hazard for a diabetic when doing physical exercise is that the insulin they have injected earlier (diabetes is caused by the body losing the ability naturally to produce insulin which is what breaks down the sugars coming into your body so they can become energy) you would get a 'hypo', i.e. not have enough energy to continue.  This happens even to people without diabetes and in cycling is called the 'bonk' which Moore suffered a few times.  Being diabetic I was more familiar with this risk, hence, keeping up both the slow and fast burning carbohydrates coming into my system.  What I did not do though was have things like the fruit, e.g. raisins and bananas, that are going dripfeed carbohydrates along the way.

Most importantly, it was not until I attended a course in 2008, that I realised a huge blunder that I had been making, in that it is as bad when doing physical exercise not to have enough insulin in your body as then your the sugar is trying to float around in your body as that, sugar, rather than energy your body can use.  Suddenly, this explained a lot of the discomfort I had felt day-to-day.  It is clear now that fearful of a hypo I was not taking enough insulin and so in fact was wasting a lot of the carbohydrate because my body could not process it and was simply urinating it back out again.

Another factor that I neglected to take into consideration when chasitising myself for my pathetic performance on my tours was the weight of the luggage I was carrying.  As I stayed in hostels, bars and hotels I did not have the weight of a tent and like Moore I had only one change of clothes aside from my cycling kit and a minimal number of books to find my way around primarily and keep myself entertained when passing my evenings alone in a hotel in the middle of nowhere (I am absolutely useless at making acquaintances when away from home even when in the UK, let alone when abroad; my language skills are terrible and my social skills even worse).  However, with the waterproofs, the cold weather arms and leggings and particularly the tools and spare inner tubes, etc. which did prove extremely useful, as you will get punctures, I estimate now it added up to something like 20-25 Kg.  To put this in context the 8-year old boy who lives in my house weighs 26.5 Kg, so it was as if I had a child riding around on the back of the bicycle, weighing over a quarter of my body weight of the time.  Of course, this was a big difference to the cycling I had done on Sundays in the UK when I would have a pair of waterproofs, a drink and my camera.  Moore notes how much faster he was able to move when he was able to leave his luggage with his family, and I guess I would have been the same.  Instead I had to carry everything I had with me, on my bicycle up and down whatever inclines I encountered.  If I had had more French I would have given this context to the hoteliers and others who thought my efforts were poor. 

It also explains for me, as it did for Moore, why we could not overtake the elderly men no matter how aged their bicycles were.  It is not only that you have to exert more energy to move that weight, but it is constantly slowing you down so you have to overcome the friction element.  In addition, Moore was riding something a lot racier than my road-mountain hybrid, however light it might be (and great over roads needing resurfacing).  This was outlined in Moore's book when a friend of his, riding something like my bicycle, came to cycle with him in Switzerland.  Of course, a lot of commentators by the road side, even in France, just see 'man on bicycle' and do not appreciate how many variants there actually are.

The need for approval is a strange aspect which impinged on Moore as much as it did no me.  I have not achieved anything great in my life and could never afford to travel to exotic locations, so doing something that marked me out even just a little from the kind of people I mixed with, had an important aspect in my self-esteem.  Giving that I set off on my first cycling trip from the single room above a chipshop on the Mile End Road, with a bathroom that I shared with seven other residents, getting some self-esteem was important.  The fact that I can see the face of the woman in the Amiens tourist office to this day with her sneering comment, is probably not healthy.  However, people touring are looking for recognition of what they have achieved and I am sure the same happens for hikers and mountaineers.  I loved the fact that I felt I was part of a 'club', that cafe owners truly expected me to come back again in the future (especially on the routes frequented by numerous cyclists, there are favoured parts, inland from Dunkerque was one and there was another such area in eastern Normandy), and other cyclists nodding to me or helping out with the map.  I found the camaraderie that I was later not to find in the local cycling club in the UK, and, in fact, more than that, the acceptance that even if I was nowhere near the quality of a Tour de France racer or even a local race racer, I was a cyclist going about his business which deserved respect rather if not acclaim.

Having read Moore's account and his difficulties that, despite, far greater preparation, far better equipment and far more support, were very similar to my own, I am beginning to feel a little better about my efforts.  Of course, these days I am not fit enough to run to the end of my road let alone cycle 20 Km, but perhaps if I had come to Moore's book in, say 2002, I can envisage I would have far more cycling trips to recount here and probably a bit more self-respect.  I have to remember the morning when a whole class of French school children, probably aged 9 or 10, all dressed in matching cycle helmets, were pulled to the side of the road to let me pass up a hill with their teacher pointing out how properly I was attired in my cycle helmet and bright cycling strip (that year bright yellow) so visible to motorists.  Though I struggled up the hill, I dared not get off or slow until I was out of sight.  I should also remember stepping into a pristine bar at the top of a hill that was run by a man who clearly (from the numerous black and white photographs around the wall) had been in the paratroopers and asked for two Oranginas and a single glass.  I never drank from the bottle for some reason.  He knew the steepness of his local hill and seemed please that I had chosen to stop at his bar and sent me off with a real rousing encouragement.  I recommend Moore's book to anyone who has battled on a cycling trip.  It has made me feel that my efforts were not wasted and that I was fighting against the odds, partly due to lack of the right sort of preparation, but even so, not things that other people had not encountered themselves.

Pavement/Road; Road/Pavement?

When I was a boy back in the 1970s it was clear that the only people allowed to ride a bicycle on the pavement was the postman and even he was not permitted to pedal the bicycle, he had to stand on one pedal and freewheel. Back then you were not allowed to cycle on the road until you had passed your cycling proficiency test which was usually taken around the age of 8-10 years old. So there was a period when you had outgrown the pull-along tricycle of a toddler and were on a 'proper' bicycle and yet could only ride in the park or ironically in car parks. I remember being 10 and having cycled along the canal path to the neighbouring town with some friends. We decided to cycle back through a housing estate, but not having passed my cycling proficiency test yet (I think I did it the following Autumn when I returned to school) I was apprehensive about cycling on the road and so while my more daredevil friends cycled down what were in fact very quiet roads leading simply to housing, I cycled on the pavement. We had barely entered the estate when a man probably in his 30s called us to him and questioned me at length about why I was cycling on the pavement and when I explained about the cycling proficiency test he told us we had to leave the estate and go back along the canal and that I should not think about coming to that town until I had passed my test. Highly embarrassed, we complied with what he said.

The criticism of cyclists daring to cycle on the pavement could even extend to crossing less than a metre of pavement. My parents' house like many in their street stands a metre or so above the level of the road, which for some historic reason is 'sunken' for quite a lot of its length. To access the house, you drive up a ramp about as long as single car, across the pavement and on to their driveway, which again, is about the length of a single car. Of course most people who park their cars in garages or porches or driveways next to their house have to cross the pavement when leaving and entering. Pedestrians can get upset about waiting for the car to get clear but generally make no complaint. For bicycles doing the same, certainly when I was a teenager, it was deemed to be sufficient to shout at the cyclist.

A few years after the above incident when I was a teenager with my cycling proficiency under my belt. I left the garage, got on my bicycle, cycled along the stretch of drive and crossed less than a metre of pavement on to the ramp intending to go on to the road. However, because I cycled across those centimetres of pavement a middle-aged couple a short distance away bellowed at me for cycling on the pavement. They expected me to get off and push my bicycle over that short stretch, in fact less than the length of the bicycle itself. I did not run them down or even cycle near them but they were indignant that I had dared cycle across that small piece of pavement. These days they would probably be terrified that a teenager would knife them, I suppose. My elderly next door neighbour was marginally more tolerant, but sitting in my bedroom (at the front of the house) my reading on summer days would be disrupted by him shouting that he was going to summon the police as pre-teenage children cycled past him on the pavement. While I feel young people should be challenged on their behaviour the target of the criticism seems poorly decided upon.

Even as recent as the mid-1990s I was staying in a town and read in a local newspaper that a man had been fined £25 for cycling across a market place in the evening when the market was closed. I went passed that market on a number of occasions and aside from a few official buildings in the centre there were very few structures there when the market was closed and it was empty of people, a cyclist could proceed without hitting anyone or anything, yet that was not the point, he had broken the law and was fined for it. Of course, the man could have wheeled his bicycle across the market place; going by the road meant going through a four-lane one way system that cars hared around. He must have crossed the market in a matter of seconds and there was no-one there, except I presume the police officer who arrested him (there were no on-the-spot fines in those days). Subsequently on a couple of occasions I rode around the market place at night time almost as a dare for someone to come and arrest me. I have cycled a great deal in my life and wherever I have gone I have taken safety of myself and other road users as the prime concern.

These days things are very different and it seems the dividing line between vehicles on the road and those on the pavements has become muddied. I was almost mowed down by a cyclist, a fully grown man, hurtling down the pavement outside a row of shops this morning, seemingly challenging people to get out the way. Conversely on two occasions I have been driving in a queue of cars tailing elderly people on four-wheeled electric vehicles as they make their way slowly along the road. On the other hand in Milton Keynes in the early 2000s I remember there was uproar from the council (who had the oddest attitudes of any council I have lived under and that is saying something) about 'speeding' electric buggies in the shopping centre. These vehicles can reach a top speed of almost 13kph (8mph), twice the speed most people walk at and apparently the honest shoppers of Milton Keynes felt intimidated by them. These buggies are driven by elderly and disabled people, to me it only seems just that they should have a little power over these indignitaries who power around at dangerous speeds in their 4x4s (especially in Milton Keynes where most main roads have a speed limit of 70mph, the highest of any urban roads in Europe). Speed limits and fines were being introduced for electric buggies when car drivers were hurtling about.

I can understand the challenge for people on bicycles and on electric buggies. With the speeds many people are doing even on residential roads (my road is 30mph, but cars often do 50mph+ with impunity) you can understand why cyclists stay on the pavements. Most car drivers do not understand cyclists' signals and certainly do not understand that on a multi-laned road or at a roundabout, a cyclist should be in the right-hand lane to turn right. Cyclists are hooted and even pushed off by car drivers who resent their presence. Twice on my bicycle I have had people get out of cars and come to attack me because they felt I had got in their way. There is a whole liberal middle class vs. bigoted lower middle/working class thing going on here too. In the old days workers cycled to work but now they tend to drive or take public transport and cycling is seen as simply something that woolly-headed liberals who let in immigrants do. A lot of the abuse you get shouted from cars comes from this, that 'real' men do not cycle it is left to the 'poofs' (i.e. effeminate men) or the 'dykes' (lesbians, particularly butch ones). In these car drivers' views 'proper' people need the biggest car they can afford, to be obese and to drink and drive. Contrast this to neighbouring countries, for example in France where the average truck driver is out with the cycling club on a Sunday and cheers along cyclists he passes, giving them lots of space and warning them of his approach. In London, in contrast, lorry drivers are by far the single largest group of cyclist killers.

Some of the cyclists who have been killed over the past few years include Emma Foa, aged 56, crushed by a lorry, the driver Michael Thorn, aged 54, of Headley Down, Surrey was fined £300 and allowed to keep his licence. Just this month Chrystelle Brown, aged 26, a fitness instructor and cyclist was killed in Whitechapel right near where a motorist attacked me, she was dragged for 100 metres by the vehicle. This August, Harry Wilmers aged 25, was killed on his bicycle in South Manchester. In 2006 18 cyclists were killed in London by motor vehicles. You do not have to search far to find cases of cyclists pushed off and beaten up by people and of fatalities not just in London but smaller towns too. A drink driver, David Mark Chandler, aged 41, from Arthington Lane, Otley, who killed a cyclist in Pool, Yorkshire had 50% more alcohol in his blood stream at the time he killed Stephen Granger, aged 50, in December 2007. Chandler perverted the course of justice by concealing the evidence of his involvement. He was sentenced to 4.5 years for killing Granger, but in February 2009 this was cut to 3.5 years and his driving ban reduced from 10 years to 5 years! He had drunk at least 6 pints of beer before driving into Granger and did not stop and even look for the body. If he had shot or stabbed or punched Granger to death he would be in prison for at least 14 years if not longer. Cars, vans and lorries are the weapons that you can use with hardly any come back. The killing of cyclists ironically takes the healthiest people who are doing least damage to the environment and lets off those who are most dangerous and damaging. How can we promote healthy lifestyles and reduce the impact of carbon dioxide emissions if we allow cyclists to be killed in such numbers and barely punish the killers? Researching this I found that people get fined for cycling across Smithfield Market in London despite there being a clear thorougfare and the roads around being hazardous.

It is no surprise then that cyclists ride on the pavement. The reason why electric buggy riders go on the road. This is because the pavement is so cluttered. Navigating around the wheelie bins, the cars parked up on the kerb, the bumps left by the cable television and other installations and mothers pushing vast pushchairs, it is very difficult to proceed in a buggy as unlike on a bicycle you cannot get off and wheel it along. In addition, with cyclists not on the road you have them on the pavement to rival with the buggies. I admire elderly and disabled people who take their buggies on the road, they take their lives into their hands and I salute them for their courage. As yet I have not heard of electric buggy riders being mown down by lorries or cars, I suppose because unlike with the cyclists, the drivers can envisage their granny in a buggy and so hang back. I like the fact they slow up the traffic in residential areas, as too many people drive too fast through them (another wall has been demolished close to my house by a car tearing into it at speed). It reminds me of 'The Straight Story' (1999), a movie based on a true story about an elderly man driving a garden tractor from Iowa to Wisconsin in the USA to visit his brother. The tractor cannot exceed more than a few miles per hour and naturally he builds up a trail of cars behind him as many buggy riders do around my way.

So, we have bicycles you would have once only found on the road now being forced to be ridden on the paverment and electric buggies you would expect on the pavement out in the road. I will set aside the occasions when I have had people driving up the pavement as a short cut as happened to me when walking along the Mile End Road in East London one day and right by a primary school at that. I simply stood in front of the car, but the driver dodged round me on the pavement and continued where he insisted on going, road or no road. More common is pedestrians walking in the road. I do not mean in rural areas, I mean in urban areas where there is a perfectly good (if cluttered) pavement. No-one seems to be able to tell me whether this is a cultural thing as the people who I see walking down the road are either Korean or Afro-Caribbean and are generally women. Are there some countries where it is hazardous to walk on the pavement? Is it that women are not supposed to? I do not know and would be grateful if someone would tell me. In my neighbourhood, despite the fast driving cars, many women would rather walk along the side of the road down street after street than ever go on the pavement. I am surprised not more of them are hit by these dangerous drivers who seem incapable of avoiding inanimate objects such as lamp posts, walls and railings.

I suppose overall the rules for new vehicles such as the ever larger and more sophisticated electric buggies are ill-defined and in general most people whether drivers, cyclists or pedestrians are ignorant of the Highway Code. Signalling seems to be something that has died out no matter what vehicle you are on or in (the 7-year old from my house, today commented that a woman cyclist was making signals in the 'old fashioned way' that I do). The other thing is the constant bane of any activity on the roads and that is the bulk of road users think they are the only thing that is important and everyone else should get out their way or suffer the consequences; they believe signs and speed limits do not apply to them because they are particularly 'experienced' or 'skilled'. Using roads is not a solitary activity. The moment you go on a road or even just step on to a pavement you become part of a complex machine in which real people are involved, people who can easily be injured or killed. If more road users saw their journeys in that way and reacted accordingly, with tolerance, patience and attention to detail (or as on a road safety award my brother once received 'Care, Courtesy and Consideration') then the news of tragic deaths we read about and witness would not be on hundreds of websites and impacting on scores of people across the UK.

P.P. Having written this posting, I turned to read 'The Guardian'. As regular readers know, that arse of a columnist, Simon Hoggart infuriates me constantly with his stupidity and gives me fuel for this blog. As I have commented before Hoggart seems determined to do all he can to increase pollution and damage the environment, particularly though his idiotic opposition to wind turbines. This week he has turned again on cyclists who seem to be perceived as a legitimate target for liberal (though I would hardly categorise Hoggart as this) and right-wing writers. He spends two paragraph attacking cyclists using a cycle path. He complains one cyclist in Brighton shouted 'cycle path!' at him which he equates with 'psychopath' and he lumps all cyclists together with those who he argues are always 'aiming for - then just missing - old people, mothers with pushchairs, toddlers ...' as if cyclists actually drive around trying to hit people. He observes these who are a minority do not actually hit any pedestrians, unlike car drivers who killed 13 child pedestrians in London alone in 2008; 8 in 2007.

In total in the UK 572 pedestrians (down 11% on 2007) were killed in 2008, the only good news is that the figure is declining, with a decline of 19,000 deaths on the road over what would have been expected 15 years ago. Cyclist injuries rose 1% 2007-8, though deaths were down at 115; child deaths on the road (this includes children who are passengers in cars) rose from 121 in 2007 to 124 in 2008. Effectively fewer car and lorry drivers are killing each other, they are still killing other more vulnerable people. I suppose I should be grateful because the UK has the lowest number of accidents in the EU, alongside Sweden. However, having cycled in continental Europe this surprises me as I have had far fewer 'incidents' in which I have been hit on a bicycle and certainly none of the physical violence I have faced in the UK.

Hoggart should get off the cyclists' case. There are far more dangerous people out there than people cycling legally in Brighton. However, he is constantly indignant at anyone who wants to move away from dirty fuel consumption to a cleaner, more sustainable approach. Maybe he is financially backed by an oil company because I can see no rational explanation for his attitude, particularly when writing in 'The Guardian' which has vehemently supported the 10:10 campaign on climate change recent weeks.

P.P. 09/10/2009: I guess that it is because I am not driving so much now I have become unemployed, clearly there is a new trend in driving cars that I had underestimated. While I had witnessed someone driving a car on the pavement once in the 6.5 years I lived in London, today both on foot and while in a car myself I have seen three motorists driving for between 10-50 metres down a pavement. Generally they have one pair of wheels still on the road, but in all three cases more than three-quarters of the width of the car was on the pavement. The slowest was doing 20mph, the fastest something over 40mph (actually violating the speed limit for the 'road' they were driving down, anyway). When did such behaviour become acceptable? Is this the impact of motor-racing console games or car-based criminal games like 'Grand Theft Auto'? It is hazardous enough being a pedestrian in the UK but now it seems that car drivers are not even going to let you keep to the pavement. I suppose this is the ultimate manifestation of the common expectation among drivers that everyone else should simply disappear.