Looking Back

You never forget how to ride a bike

Well yes, but if you had taken 15-year-old me, cycling around the 'Fen Lanes' of Leicestershire on my trusty old tourer, with a transistor radio in the saddle-bag, and surreptitiously swapped it for this one, I might have taken a moment or two to reorient

The essence of the 'safety bicycle', as this design was then called - to distinguish it from the lethal 'original' penny-farthing - has not changed since its invention in the 1870s. Equal-sized wheels, chain, cogs, pedals, handlebars, saddle, tubular frame - roughly diamond-shaped - to which all this is attached - all were present from the beginning, and development since then has been just a matter of refinement of an idea that was almost perfect in its first edition. A nineteenth century cyclist would have felt instantly comfortable on my 1970s model

There have, however, been a few changes since then that would have made both of us pause for thought. A gear-shift mechanism mounted on the handlebars, operated just by a thumb-push - neither of us have ever seen that! A smart-phone, of course, would be unknown (the secure handle-bar attachment was my birthday present, getting its first road-test today - 10/10). A telephone communicating with a bicycle - sci-fi nonsense

My outings in the unlit Leicestershire lanes often featured failing batteries with precarious connections to pathetically dim incandescent light bulbs. A tiny LED lamp producing a blinding beam of light from an unseen rechargeable battery would have brought gasps of delight. And a thumb-operated control that manages a battery hidden in the frame, and a motor hidden in the rear axle - even today, part of me still finds that more than a little magical

My Victorian friend, my childhood self and me today are all equally comfortable with a simple bell - though all three of us are equally surprised how many bikes no longer have one fitted 

The convex mirror is on a corner that I pass quite often. I can seldom resist a silly picture