persistence of enmity

A couple of weeks ago I chanced upon the online discussions of the office cycling club, an entity I had never joined (but had recently considered investigating now that I'm back regularly cycling to the office) but now never shall, if that's their attitude. I've always been a necessity-plus-practical-leisure cyclist so have never really deeply investigated the various little niches and sub-niches of areas of interest, types of highly-specialised equipment, shop-approval ranking systems or curious snottinesses exhibited by practitioners favouring a particular sub-discipline towards those favouring others.

When I was a child I just had whatever I ended up with, bike-wise. Over five years of doing a paper round I used five different bikes depending on which was in existence or available at the time, including two which were labelled 'racers' (and which I would not know to label 'road' for another few years) though wider-handlebarred and fatter-rimmed models such as my dad's really old welded-drainpipe thing were more suitable when lugging two overstuffed newspaper bags up and down kerbs. My penultimate childhood bicycle was my first drop-bar road bike, bought when it was still relatively normal to use them in a county which was predominantly flat and filled with long straight bits of road. As this was what I had become used to, my teenage quality-bicycle from a proper bicycle-making shop was of the same generic drop-bar thin-frame big-thin-wheel type, though even then (early nineties) the frame was a lucky find as the world (even the flat, non-mountainous Lincolnshire) appeared to be switching over to knobbly-tired cantilever-braked mountain bikes, as they were then known. In Lincolnshire, anyway. Such a thing might have conceivably been useful to ride around freshly-ploughed fields but I intended to ride around roads, particularly the six-mile one between home and school and particularly anything within thirty miles of home, as required.

This was the bike I brought up to Edinburgh, where it was slightly less useful on cobbles and the more-frequently-bus-and-lorry-buggered roads but it still coped with getting me between campuses, to and from shops, to and from work and around and about a bit if I felt like going around and about a bit. It was eventually made slightly more suitable for the city with the addition of a slightly fatter rim and much fatter tyres and was only eventually retired after a slide-off on a big patch of oil at the corner of Bank Street took out a few key components all at the same time. I replaced it with another drop-bar thin-wheel large-frame road bike as it's what I was used to (and this one had slightly fatter rims more suitable for unfriendly surfaces (though, unfortunately, slightly less frame clearance which slightly reduced the degree of armour a tyre could have and still be able to rotate)).

I've occasionally thought of getting something cheap, secondhand and effectively disposable to stop me fretting about theft every time I double-lock it to the sturdiest thing I can find wherever it is it has to be parked but (quite apart from the where-the-hell-would-I-store-a-second-bicycle problem) what I have is the easiest thing for the sort of journey I make. If I can, I avoid cobbles. If I have to ride on cobbles, I go slowly. I now go relatively slowly around all tight corners in the rain after the bail on the mound (next time it might not just be my chin) and I use normal pedals and wear normal shoes; punctures happen, mechanical faults occur, and sometimes a destination involves walking. I know there are MTB shoes designed for walking around trails a bit in but it's far too specific a shoe-type to warrant anyone making one wide enough and they still feel like there are large stones stuck in the tread under the ball of the feet.

I always check to make sure I'm not feeling unnecessarily persecuted when this sort of thing comes up and activates my FFS receptors but there's a definite sneeriness directed at various things. Although I have a road bike I'm not a roadie as such but still react to generic swipings towards the use of tarmac. There's a more tangible mockery (with illustrations) directed towards the use of normal pedals and nonspecific footwear, though there are several occasions when I'd have come off fairly painfully had my feet not been immediately available to steady or right myself and in one case fend off the idiot dog which had just run in front of me from out of the bushes and leapt for my ankles. By the look of people at work who use pedal-clipping systems they make walking fifty metres to the car park a somewhat slow and hobblesome activity, so would presumably make walking much longer distances significantly more slow and greatly more hobblesome. Punctures sometimes exceed the quantity of spare tubes available; chains snap (though obviously using Derailleur gears increases the risk of this, presumably one of the reasons why they are sometimes disparaged too); other mechanical faults occur. Allen keys left in the road can take out large chunks of tyre if you hit them at the right angle (though this is admittedly rare). Having to walk back is a possibility and normal shoes have advantages for this. If the split-second it takes to twist a foot out of a foot-retention system is enough to turn a wobble into a fall it seems reasonable to reduce the risk. I do occasionally think that there's a lot of inertia and gyoscopic effect to overcome when I turn my handlebars at low speed but this makes me more stable at higher speeds and the heavier tyres I use really are quite effective in reducing punctures. Perhaps most importantly, big thin wheels and drop bars make a bicycle unattractive to thieves, especially the casual ned-thieves who never seem able to change out of low gears and aren't organised enough to raise the saddle to the correct height before pedalling frenetically away. There's still some risk of thievery but that's another reason for the normal trainers.

What seems most unfortunate about the seeming lack of discussion of the bicycle as just-a-means-of-getting-about is that there is no discussion of red-light-jumpers, traffic-weavers, illumination-eschewers and people who cycle on the pavement instead of getting off and pushing (again, normal trainers help here) if it looks like pedestrianning across a junction would be quicker than waiting for the lights or if an advanced stop zone cannot be safely approached whilst remaining on the road and only rare mentions of homicidal driving. That's the sort of cyling-based discussion I'd value in an office cycle club but it seems to be much more cycling-as-(extreme)-sport biased than cycling-as-means-of-transport. In just the past couple of months there have been enough incidences of motor vehicles and cycles acting hazardously at each other within spitting distance of the office for me to have noticed but there's more discussion of the facial features of pro cyclists than of the irritating non-cyclist-detecting traffic-light filter which must surely have a greater impact on any club members who cycle to work.