I was beginning to realise that it was a paradox at the heart of my attitude to cycling. I wanted my bike for leisure, not for sport, or so I thought. But there is an eager small man in me who accepts physical challenges, presumably to counter a fear that he is less of a man than those closer to average height or above it.
When I am, say, helping out with other men, lifting boxes or suitcases, I always pick the heaviest one to pre-empt anyone tempted to suggest I couldn't manage.
Not that I am actually a strong man; I am not.
And if I had been dedicated to proving myself physically equal to those bigger than me, I would have trained hard and maintained my strength. The whole pattern of my life, with occasional flurries of enthusiasm for health and exercise against the general background of aging, slackening and fattening, betrays a slothful indulgent core. Indeed, maybe this new commitment to cycling fitted that pattern rather than any new resolve to be a fitter man.
I had provided myself with a narrative to explain my cycling and it included a desire to enjoy it in a casual way. I wanted to carouse on a bike. I wanted to roll along country and coastal roads, breathing fine air and enjoying the surroundings.
I knew that I was not yet fit enough to do this. So, the paradox was that I would have to become strong enough to cycle at ease. And how was I to do that? By cycling hard. But would I enjoy that?
My brother-in-law Mel told me one evening that he was training for a triathlon that included a 20 km cycle race. He would be going out that evening for a spin on the bike. Perhaps I might join him? But I said I wasn't into speed. My cycling was easy, natural, go-out-and-enjoy-yourself cycling. That was fine, he said; he wasn't into speed either. Except that, in my terms, he was.
I cycled over to his house that evening, close to the Comber Greenway and we said we'd just do the length of it and come back. Even to me, that seemed now a slight challenge.
When we got onto the main path we found our way obstructed by about 20 youngsters on a sunny evening club outing of some sort, and they were so spread out -- the wee hard competitive ones I understood so well, pushing ahead -- that it took us a mile to get well clear of them. Then Mel bolted and I raised myself off my saddle for a bit more push on high gear to keep up with him.
He moved like a real racer. He was riding the horrid wee bike I had borrowed from him at the start of my exploration, but he was banking on bends and weaving round obstacles, like the gates at intersections, and planning ahead to be in low gear before he reached steep hills. He was great and when the strain told on me I reasoned with myself that this wasn't really what I wanted to do. The Greenway had never seemed so short.
On the way back I stopped to talk to a photographer who told me he had found 14 Black Caps breeding in that area. You saw all sorts of things on the Greenway if you took the time to look around. I was all for that. Once I saw group of women in a field practising their line dancing steps.
But Mel was waiting for me and when I caught up with him he shot off again, setting a pace that would make us breathless, since training is no use unless it gets the heart rate up and if you only have an hour for it on the Greenway, then it makes sense to go as fast as you can.
'Well, he does have 20 years on you,' said Maureen when I got home.
Then, next day I talked Maureen into coming out on her bike along the cycle path to Whiteabbey and this time I was conscientiously going slower for her and realising that finding a partner whose natural pace was the same as my own might be difficult.
Matt Seaton describes in his book, The Escape Artist, how meeting Mick, who raced at the same speed as himself, was a breakthrough in his own development.
But even for a slow casual cyclist, speed is important. You have a pace that is natural to you. And if you're a wee man trying to be a big man then you're always tempted to go faster.
And even if you are just a sane mature person getting fitter, you will become an abler and stronger biker.
It was time now to try a longer trip, comparable to the ones I had made with Tony on Saturday afternoons in the 1980s.
I would wear my padded undies and my cycling shoes with cleats and try 50 miles, up to the Carryduff roundabout the hard way then south to Downpatrick and home through Killyleagh, Comber and the Greenway.
I stuffed my pockets with cashew nuts and sunflower seeds for nutrition and left the pannier at home. Puffing up the hill, I used the side of the pedal without the cleat device, not feeling confident yet about using them in city traffic.
I was soon so hot that I regretted wearing my leather jacket but I had nowhere to put it so I kept it on.
The road to Carryduff is mostly struggle, 5 miles of stepped incline with fast traffic on it and no cycle lane for the first couple of miles.
But it felt shorter now than before, just as the Greenway with Mel had.
I stopped at the roundabout and gorged down some nuts and about a pint of water. I was aching in the thighs but I was going to stretch myself on this trip. I would get to Downpatrick even if the effort wrecked me, and then I would get back at whatever pace I could manage for I would have no alternative.
On the road to Saintfield I slipped into the cleats and pedalled hard downhill. This felt great. Now I was wearing the bike; it was an extension of my own body. It was my shoes.
I reminded myself to remember to disengage the cleats before stopping, so that I wouldn't fall over. Then I forgot. I had already developed reflexes for stopping and dismounting and these stayed in play.
I realised too late that I was falling over onto the footpath. My feet were attached to the bike and my spontaneous efforts to break my fall achieved nothing. I clumped over like dead weight with nothing but hope to protect me. I grazed my left knee and lay there, entangled with the bike as with a lover, caught out. I had to plan my extrication then examine myself and the bike for damage. By a pleasant surprise we were both fine. The leather jacket I had wished I had left behind had saved my elbow and shoulder. It was as if the one who had caught me entangled enjoyed the joke.
She was saying, 'you won't be so lucky next time.'
Next time was just a mile down the road, approaching the traffic lights in Saintfield.
This time I tried harder to apply reason to an activity which was already automated in my unconscious. Step one was to detach the cleat on my left. I would do that by twisting my heel away from the bicycle. Unfortunately that foot seemed able only to free itself at the bottom of the turn. Okay, I was rolling; I'd free the right. It was out. No trouble. Now I had to flip that pedal over to use the plain side of it, lower the left and then jerk my left heel. It was all too much, simple as it sounds. The fact is a my brain had already assimilated a routine for stopping the bike and needed another automated routine to be more deeply embedded still before it could allow it to be overridden. Reason wasn't going to work. Forward planning availed of nothing. Only a lot of practice would get me to the stage where I could trust cleats. So I stopped at the kerb, yelled, 'fuck!' And fell over again.
And again I was mercifully undamaged.
As I was leaving Saintfield I was overtaken by a young woman on a bike I studied her heels to see how she managed. She was using toe clips and kept them down until she was clear of the town then flicked her pedals over and tucked her feet into them as lightly as she might have stepped into slippers from the bath. I wondered if she had to think through that movement or if it was now encoded in her reflexes.
I used the cleats for most of the rest of the journey, getting my feet free at Crossgar until through the town and locked back in afterwards without falling over.
I was beginning to feel the strain of my exertion and decided to stop in Downpatrick. There were a couple of big hills to climb first and to whiz down the other side of. As soon as I saw the church at the end of the road I disengaged the cleats.
I would call my friend the photographer Bobbie Hanvey, and if he wasn't home I would go to a chippy or the Arts Centre.
Bobbie was home and brought me in and fed me a boiled egg and toast and took my photograph with the bicycle in his backyard.
I stayed about an hour with him and he showed me his new Leica and his study and then he waved me off and urged me to be careful.
'Och, drivers have their own good reasons not to run over cyclists', I said.
'Aye, until you meet some mad bastard who's just had a row with his missus and isn't thinking straight.'
I promised to be wary of mad bastards and turn towards Killyleagh where some of the roads were marked as cycling routes and there were even signs up urging motorists to watch out for us.
It was at this stage of the journey but I lost the clarity of my distinction between leisure and sport, between casual cycling and the physical challenge.
It was about two o'clock on a sunny Saturday afternoon in June. I had all day. I could have stopped anywhere by the side of the road and chewed on a bit of grass or made a couple of phone calls.
I could have stopped at Balloo House and enjoyed a piece of smoked haddock with a runny poached egg, though a little less of the sauce if you don't mind. I had options and I reacted as if I had none but was simply compelled to cycle as hard as I could and get home as soon as possible.
And I was aware of that. I was asking myself why I was behaving like this, what momentum was driving me on.
Sometimes it just seemed to be the lay of the land. If I was going to stop, then I wouldn't do it at the bottom of a hill and have to start off again on a struggle to the top. If I was at the top of a hill, I wasn't going to stop and enjoy the view because I had gravity to take me further, and that would bring me more joy.
But the real problem was fixity of mind on my destination, sharpened by a doubt that I might make it. The only pleasure now was in seeing by the signposts how much closer I was to completing my challenge to myself.
But what sense was there in this challenge? I wasn't training to race. I was getting myself fit to enjoy using my nice new bicycle as a vehicle on which I might cruise along the coast and savour the smell of kelp on the breeze.
If I stayed in this frame of mind there would be little joy in my cycling beyond the sense of accomplishment at the end of each day. I was focusing too much on arriving, not on going. Was I to end each journey rubbing sore muscles and feeling like a real man who had defeated age and short legs or was I to derive pleasure from the business of cycling? Could I not be happy with where I was without fretting about whether I'd get to somewhere else? It seemed almost a question about all of life and not just a jaunt through County Down.
I passed through Killyleagh were a group of young people loitered on a corner as if waiting for life to start. I passed Balloo House where I could have had a beer or a feast and had neither.
A little further on I was spotted by two languorous boxer dogs who took offence at the sight of me and barked from deep within their cavernous lungs but decided not to chase me.
And I didn't stop until I reached the Comber Greenway where I sat down and ate more sunflower seeds. There I took my time to uncleat myself before stopping and landed safely. But I was tired and knew that my judgement was poor and I was like this.
There are several intersections across the Greenway path and I would have plenty of practice getting out of my cleats in time before each of them. And this worked well.
Cyclists coming the other way smiled and waved at me, perhaps recognizing the pain and fatigue on my face, the smirk of delirium maybe.
I had only one more cleat accident. I'd come out of them for an intersection, crossed the road onto a little hill and found myself in too high a gear. So I raised myself off the saddle and put my whole weight on the wrong side of the right pedal and slipped into the cleat.
After one turn of the pedal I stalled, but my right foot was on a high position and I couldn't extricate it and keeled over again, but blithely accepting now that I didn't hurt myself when I fell. My foolish brain was learning the wrong lesson from these accidents.
But in time I would learn to come out of the cleat in advance of danger and to find the right side of the pedal without thinking about it.
Whether I would ever learn to enjoy cycling without over exertion seen the fundamental question of my life, the balance between being and doing.
I expect I'll be working on that one right to the end.
Friday, 24 June 2011
Tootling
I decided that it was time for a more determined effort to crack the art of tootling, conscious, at the same time, that determination and tootling belong to opposite attitudinal poles.
I would have to be a bit more Zen-like about this.
Tootling is relaxed cycling. As one tootles, one is not in a hurry to get anywhere. This is not a race against another cyclist, against one's own past performance, against time. It is not a challenge; though I was confronted by the fact that I had to learn to do it, that I habitually failed in it.
I would only discover the essential ingredients of tootling by doing and learning but it seemed that the first important step was not to have a clear destination.
I should set out with no other resolve than to enjoy my cycling, not leaning ahead into the future or panting to be elsewhere.
So I might have a general direction to aim at but no resolution to arrive anywhere. I might go 10 miles or 80 miles. I would decide as I tootled, not plan in advance.
Of course you can not even tootle without some preparation. You need a bike. I put on my padded underpants and put a raincoat in my pannier and filled my water bottle. I had cash so if I was hungry I could buy a sandwich in a garage or stop and have a pub lunch or a bag of crisps. No problem.
I tootled - that is, I rode casually - out onto the cycle lane down the Ormeau Road. I caught myself thrusting forward when the way ahead was clear and told myself not to do that. 'You're not going anywhere.'
That meant I had no need to pedal downhill if the momentum and gravity were carrying me along at a pleasant pace. I turned left along the river where I saw a boat race. I stopped and looked. You can do that when you're tootling.
Lots of fit young people were milling about in tight shorts and vests - rather like cyclists themselves. I thought that the boating equivalent of tootling would be 'messing about on the river.'
These were all trim and competitive people, and the club had set out white plastic chairs so that their parents, dressed for the occasion, might sit and admire them and urge them on. Men in pressed jeans and cravats shared their admiration for their children with women in big hats drinking white wine from fluted glasses.
I wondered if any of these boaters ever just played. It seemed there was no messing here.
Then I saw Andy and Fiona and their son. The boy was about 10 years old and I asked him if he had a bicycle himself. He said he had and that it had six gears. I told them at mine had 27 then quickly corrected myself to say, 'but you only ever use about six of them.'
Andy said he was thinking of taking up cycling himself.
From there I got on to the towpath along the River Lagan. This was a perfect route for tootling. You can not travel at speed here because you frequently have to stop to let children and dogs have time to notice you. You often meet cyclists coming the other way, and often, on bends on the towpath, you skirt the very edge of the river and if you skidded or collided you would go straight in to the water or, as an occasional alternative, plunge into a bed of nettles.
There were some sleek racing types out on the towpath but they must have found it frustrating not to be able to build speed.
I passed the famous lock keeper's cottage, where families sat out munching stodgy tart.
On a footbridge, a little girl with her pink bike, huddled close to the barrier to let me pass. I don't know why she was frightened of me; perhaps she is frightened of everyone.
The route then passes through Barnett's Park and the path is divided by a white line here to separate pedestrians from cyclists, though it seemed to me that cyclists were more conscious of this than pedestrians were.
I stopped again to talk to my neighbour Jan who was out walking with a woman friend.
This was proper tootling, I told myself, not going anywhere in particular, not being driven by determination to reach any particular place by any time. 'Nice sort of day', I said. 'I was expecting rain.'
'Lovely', said Jan.
Then there was a little commotion. Three speed cyclists coming one way converged near us with tootlers coming the other and each had to veer off the cycling path because I was blocking it.
It was a tootling man who had a flash of temper with the speed boys, 'It's not meant to be a race track, you know.'
At Shaw's Bridge, more canoeists were packing up their kit into vans and changing, and I had to weave through them but one, a young woman, came out of the group and opened a wooden bar gate for me.
And the rest of the path was quiet, though narrow in places. Surely some people must fall into the water here. Out towards Edenderry I lost the path, having taken a wrong turning. There are big iron signposts like totem poles painted black, but you need to know where you're going if you're to read instructions on how to get there.
I thought I was getting back onto the path by crossing the main road and bridge, forgetting that I had already crossed the river on a little footbridge. I was walking down a wet incline with my bike to the river on my cycling shoes and discovered then that they had no grip and I skidded and then found I had nothing to hold onto but a bicycle that was depending on me to keep it upright. Back on the bike and tootling ahead, I noticed that some of the people and dogs I passed were familiar.
One was a man with four little copper haired dogs that scurried around in his train while he spoke to his bookie on the phone.
You can pick up a lot from people's conversations just by tootling past them.
But the logic pressed in on me that the only way I could be overtaking people I had met before was if I was going back the way I had come so I turned round again.
You can do that without fretting when you're tootling. This wasn't lost time on a planned journey; it was a tootle.
Following the river I could get some sense of the area I was passing through from the sounds that drifted to me, an ice cream van or church bells, and from the litter and graffiti.
There were poop bags hanging from a fence in one place and another display that seemed to be the remnants of the sort of floral bouquets that people leave at the scene of a road death, though it was hard to imagine how someone might have died in such a quiet place.
This path took me into Lisburn at the Island Centre.
Trying to recover at the path - though hopefully still in the spirit of tootling -I met another cyclist, on a tourer laden with front and back panniers.
'Have you come far?'
'Just from the ferry.' He was trying to work out the best way to get to the campsite in Banbridge.
'The nearest way is just to take the A1.'
He was going to spend the next two weeks cycling in Ireland and had covered much of the country before.
I waved goodbye, half regretting that I had not urged to head for the west.
I found the last stage of the towpath and then had to choose which direction to take.
The A1 was a right turn just to my left. I was back in traffic and negotiating the Sprucefield roundabout. It was a bit difficult to tootle round that, and then I turned south to Hillsborough.
There I bought a sandwich in the Mace.
One woman at the till was singing to her friend, 'you always hurt the one you love.'
And I took my picnic out the road towards Comber.
The challenge now was to find a nice spot to sit down and eat. And though this was a lovely country road over drumlins, practically every attractive stopping spot was someone's front gate or too close to one for me to sit there and not feel intrusive. Any patch that looked manicured would be private.
And there were lovely views of the sunlit hills and fields around me; there never seemed to be a view I could just sit and enjoy.
I was discovering the drawbacks of the unplanned picnic.
Wherever I stopped, I was going to look like a tramp. People in cars going past would ask themselves, 'Now, why has he stopped there?'
But so long as the spot I chose was visible and out of their way, they wouldn't need to fret or be tempted to disrupt my piece with a horn blast.
I found a scruffy corner by a gravelly path, facing a gap in the hedge on the other side of the road and a valley falling away. I was at the top of a drumlin. I sat down and swallowed half a pint of water and unpicked the cellophane from my sandwich.
So how was I getting on with the tootling? If I had been a racer, I would have had my milometer on the handle bars and I would have been able to calculate the measure of my achievement and compare it with past exertions. But how do you quantify a tootle?
Well, I was relaxed and enjoying my sandwich. I didn't feel as if I was in a hurry to get home. I was now on the return lap with only about 12 miles to go, so there was no need to think of camping anywhere for the night.
The only real threat to my tootle now was that I might be tempted to speed up and get home quickly. There were a few steep hills in front of me and it is hard to climb casually.
No tootler can be blamed for puffing up a hill. But the proper spirit of a casual excursion requires that the descent on the other side be enjoyed as a gentle roll. So long as pride in physical achievement doesn't overwhelm the prospect of enjoying the view and the soft sounds of the countryside; so long as you're still noticing things and even chatting away to yourself, wondering why there are so many evangelical churches in Carryduff, for instance, then you're still tootling. But just once succumb to the thrill of speed or the frustration that makes you want to press on and get home quicker, and this is no longer a tootle but a race or an ordeal.
At the Carryduff roundabout I have many times before felt the relief that my journey was almost over and I have clunked up the gears to fly down the hill, feeling more as if I was moving through wind than over land, exhilarated, looking forward to a pint or a bath.
But this time I held my nerve. I let the bicycle carry me and did not urge it much beyond the speed my own momentum gave it.
I tootled.
Not perfectly, not all the way to the front door; not absorbing all the sights and smells -- who'd want to? -- but more than I had before.
I was getting better at this.
I would have to be a bit more Zen-like about this.
Tootling is relaxed cycling. As one tootles, one is not in a hurry to get anywhere. This is not a race against another cyclist, against one's own past performance, against time. It is not a challenge; though I was confronted by the fact that I had to learn to do it, that I habitually failed in it.
I would only discover the essential ingredients of tootling by doing and learning but it seemed that the first important step was not to have a clear destination.
I should set out with no other resolve than to enjoy my cycling, not leaning ahead into the future or panting to be elsewhere.
So I might have a general direction to aim at but no resolution to arrive anywhere. I might go 10 miles or 80 miles. I would decide as I tootled, not plan in advance.
Of course you can not even tootle without some preparation. You need a bike. I put on my padded underpants and put a raincoat in my pannier and filled my water bottle. I had cash so if I was hungry I could buy a sandwich in a garage or stop and have a pub lunch or a bag of crisps. No problem.
I tootled - that is, I rode casually - out onto the cycle lane down the Ormeau Road. I caught myself thrusting forward when the way ahead was clear and told myself not to do that. 'You're not going anywhere.'
That meant I had no need to pedal downhill if the momentum and gravity were carrying me along at a pleasant pace. I turned left along the river where I saw a boat race. I stopped and looked. You can do that when you're tootling.
Lots of fit young people were milling about in tight shorts and vests - rather like cyclists themselves. I thought that the boating equivalent of tootling would be 'messing about on the river.'
These were all trim and competitive people, and the club had set out white plastic chairs so that their parents, dressed for the occasion, might sit and admire them and urge them on. Men in pressed jeans and cravats shared their admiration for their children with women in big hats drinking white wine from fluted glasses.
I wondered if any of these boaters ever just played. It seemed there was no messing here.
Then I saw Andy and Fiona and their son. The boy was about 10 years old and I asked him if he had a bicycle himself. He said he had and that it had six gears. I told them at mine had 27 then quickly corrected myself to say, 'but you only ever use about six of them.'
Andy said he was thinking of taking up cycling himself.
From there I got on to the towpath along the River Lagan. This was a perfect route for tootling. You can not travel at speed here because you frequently have to stop to let children and dogs have time to notice you. You often meet cyclists coming the other way, and often, on bends on the towpath, you skirt the very edge of the river and if you skidded or collided you would go straight in to the water or, as an occasional alternative, plunge into a bed of nettles.
There were some sleek racing types out on the towpath but they must have found it frustrating not to be able to build speed.
I passed the famous lock keeper's cottage, where families sat out munching stodgy tart.
On a footbridge, a little girl with her pink bike, huddled close to the barrier to let me pass. I don't know why she was frightened of me; perhaps she is frightened of everyone.
The route then passes through Barnett's Park and the path is divided by a white line here to separate pedestrians from cyclists, though it seemed to me that cyclists were more conscious of this than pedestrians were.
I stopped again to talk to my neighbour Jan who was out walking with a woman friend.
This was proper tootling, I told myself, not going anywhere in particular, not being driven by determination to reach any particular place by any time. 'Nice sort of day', I said. 'I was expecting rain.'
'Lovely', said Jan.
Then there was a little commotion. Three speed cyclists coming one way converged near us with tootlers coming the other and each had to veer off the cycling path because I was blocking it.
It was a tootling man who had a flash of temper with the speed boys, 'It's not meant to be a race track, you know.'
At Shaw's Bridge, more canoeists were packing up their kit into vans and changing, and I had to weave through them but one, a young woman, came out of the group and opened a wooden bar gate for me.
And the rest of the path was quiet, though narrow in places. Surely some people must fall into the water here. Out towards Edenderry I lost the path, having taken a wrong turning. There are big iron signposts like totem poles painted black, but you need to know where you're going if you're to read instructions on how to get there.
I thought I was getting back onto the path by crossing the main road and bridge, forgetting that I had already crossed the river on a little footbridge. I was walking down a wet incline with my bike to the river on my cycling shoes and discovered then that they had no grip and I skidded and then found I had nothing to hold onto but a bicycle that was depending on me to keep it upright. Back on the bike and tootling ahead, I noticed that some of the people and dogs I passed were familiar.
One was a man with four little copper haired dogs that scurried around in his train while he spoke to his bookie on the phone.
You can pick up a lot from people's conversations just by tootling past them.
But the logic pressed in on me that the only way I could be overtaking people I had met before was if I was going back the way I had come so I turned round again.
You can do that without fretting when you're tootling. This wasn't lost time on a planned journey; it was a tootle.
Following the river I could get some sense of the area I was passing through from the sounds that drifted to me, an ice cream van or church bells, and from the litter and graffiti.
There were poop bags hanging from a fence in one place and another display that seemed to be the remnants of the sort of floral bouquets that people leave at the scene of a road death, though it was hard to imagine how someone might have died in such a quiet place.
This path took me into Lisburn at the Island Centre.
Trying to recover at the path - though hopefully still in the spirit of tootling -I met another cyclist, on a tourer laden with front and back panniers.
'Have you come far?'
'Just from the ferry.' He was trying to work out the best way to get to the campsite in Banbridge.
'The nearest way is just to take the A1.'
He was going to spend the next two weeks cycling in Ireland and had covered much of the country before.
I waved goodbye, half regretting that I had not urged to head for the west.
I found the last stage of the towpath and then had to choose which direction to take.
The A1 was a right turn just to my left. I was back in traffic and negotiating the Sprucefield roundabout. It was a bit difficult to tootle round that, and then I turned south to Hillsborough.
There I bought a sandwich in the Mace.
One woman at the till was singing to her friend, 'you always hurt the one you love.'
And I took my picnic out the road towards Comber.
The challenge now was to find a nice spot to sit down and eat. And though this was a lovely country road over drumlins, practically every attractive stopping spot was someone's front gate or too close to one for me to sit there and not feel intrusive. Any patch that looked manicured would be private.
And there were lovely views of the sunlit hills and fields around me; there never seemed to be a view I could just sit and enjoy.
I was discovering the drawbacks of the unplanned picnic.
Wherever I stopped, I was going to look like a tramp. People in cars going past would ask themselves, 'Now, why has he stopped there?'
But so long as the spot I chose was visible and out of their way, they wouldn't need to fret or be tempted to disrupt my piece with a horn blast.
I found a scruffy corner by a gravelly path, facing a gap in the hedge on the other side of the road and a valley falling away. I was at the top of a drumlin. I sat down and swallowed half a pint of water and unpicked the cellophane from my sandwich.
So how was I getting on with the tootling? If I had been a racer, I would have had my milometer on the handle bars and I would have been able to calculate the measure of my achievement and compare it with past exertions. But how do you quantify a tootle?
Well, I was relaxed and enjoying my sandwich. I didn't feel as if I was in a hurry to get home. I was now on the return lap with only about 12 miles to go, so there was no need to think of camping anywhere for the night.
The only real threat to my tootle now was that I might be tempted to speed up and get home quickly. There were a few steep hills in front of me and it is hard to climb casually.
No tootler can be blamed for puffing up a hill. But the proper spirit of a casual excursion requires that the descent on the other side be enjoyed as a gentle roll. So long as pride in physical achievement doesn't overwhelm the prospect of enjoying the view and the soft sounds of the countryside; so long as you're still noticing things and even chatting away to yourself, wondering why there are so many evangelical churches in Carryduff, for instance, then you're still tootling. But just once succumb to the thrill of speed or the frustration that makes you want to press on and get home quicker, and this is no longer a tootle but a race or an ordeal.
At the Carryduff roundabout I have many times before felt the relief that my journey was almost over and I have clunked up the gears to fly down the hill, feeling more as if I was moving through wind than over land, exhilarated, looking forward to a pint or a bath.
But this time I held my nerve. I let the bicycle carry me and did not urge it much beyond the speed my own momentum gave it.
I tootled.
Not perfectly, not all the way to the front door; not absorbing all the sights and smells -- who'd want to? -- but more than I had before.
I was getting better at this.
The Greatest Invention Ever
The further application of sprocket mechanisms on a pulley, whereby a rapid small wheel turns a slow big one, is surely an improvement on the original genius.
It is the same sort of trick that was used to lift weights, changing the ratio between distance and effort to make heavy loads manageable - I was taught formulae for describing this in maths classes - but what the bicycle carries is the very person who operates it. It's not like using a pulley to lift dead weight and leaving the worker standing in the same place. The driver is the load. The cyclist is the operator and the cargo. Brilliant!
Indeed, cycling is an improved application of the legs over what nature and devolution devised, for it makes use of the return step.
Previously the only reason to lift the hind foot and put it in front again was to enable another step. On the bicycle the foot produces movement when it is drawing and when it is returning, especially if you were toe-clips or cleats, which no thinking cyclist would leave home without, wanting to enjoy the full marvel of the best machine ever made.
Evolution had no intention of enabling the legs to piston, to produce a circular motion. It had bent the knees to help us walk and climb; it had strengthened them to support the upper body, not to allow us to prop that body in a saddle and divert that force elsewhere. Well, perhaps it equipped us with a downward kick to help us defend ourselves against predators chasing us up trees. Is there a single other instance of a body evolved to one purpose being so deftly put to another? Well, yes; the horse. You can't look on a horse now without wondering at how unfinished it appears without a rider. But a horse isn't a mechanism, a product of human inventiveness. It is an enslaved beast. The food you give it provides no return in your own body and the maintenance costs are huge compared to oiling a bicycle.
The bicycle's only fuel is the food the rider eats. What could be neater than that? It is almost like cheating in the game whereby we biped primates learn to progressively manage the resources of the Earth and take off into space. Only a car driven by expelled breath would approximate to the efficiency of the bicycle.
And when you consider that cycling, that is, burning food to make energy to propel yourself along, simultaneously makes you physically fit, giving the body the best possible advantage of that same food -- surely this compares to stealing fire from the gods? Nothing we did in the ancient world ever so justified the myth.
And yet the bicycle has not had the credit it deserves. The history of the industrial revolution has it that every great leap forward was grounded in the discovery of coal or oil. That was the incentive for people to come off the land and build cities.
But what do we see in the footage from modernising countries today but rivers of people on bicycles flowing over the roads to work? The factories would never have functioned if the bosses had been waiting for workers to get there on horses and donkeys. There should be a statue of the bicycle in the heart of every industrial city.
Yet, for all that the bike is a machine, and, I argue, the quintessential machine, the best machine ever devised, being the one that converts natural human movement into improved locomotion without fuel, it is widely viewed as something else -- a style statement.
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