tea and pedal grease

A few years ago I was living with a wonderful woman. She was a performance artist. She believed in process. Indeed, process became this all enveloping idea in her life, as she lurched from project to project, sinking deeper and deeper into emotions and relationships with the people she made art with: children, other artists, her mother. The end result, the performance, was normally radically different from the place she started in. Living with this woman, feeling her processes, I am sure I watched very different performances to the ones others saw.

Later, a good friend of mine was renovating his cottage. Over a peculiarly savage winter, camping in his stone shell, we learnt together plumbing, electrician-ing, plastering, bacon butty-ing. We spent lots of time pondering: considering how to bend copper piping just so; how to cut a hole in a ceiling; how to break up with a woman you love. We drank a lot of tea. The build inched along, ponderously. But we discovered that the important bit, as ever, was the process.

Waiting for the kettle on the old rayburn, looking out over frozen Herefordshire, out across Wales, we discussed process time and time again, for every task. It was a slow, and very beautiful thing.

I’m sure now that the focus on process can save any experience. It draws you into the present. And presence will allow you to feel the rhythm of the singletrack, to see the obvious mistake when you can’t get the bike working. Forgetting the process, by concentrating on speed or the end result, leads only to jerky riding, rough living . The process is rhythm and flow and style, and it’s far more important than mere pace. The process is slowly lacing up new wheels with jazz and a cup of tea. It is a joy that makes mechanical jobs sure and peaceful.

Process is all. 

The whole world is going nuts.

Greece is swarmed with fascists. People get sent to jail for writing a hundred and forty characters on the internet. A US whitstleblower sent word from the front: the whole continent is being spied upon and tracked. 

There seems so much less safe ground to stand on nowadays.

The MTB industry, of course, had to join in. The devilry of 650B is seeping into our lives.

A fair few riders are up in arms about the imposition of 650B bikes on the mountain bike proletariat. The ruling classes have largely decreed that 26” is passé and shit, and that only the new fangled wagon wheels are acceptable. Whole ranges are being converted over to these 29” and so-called 27.5” wheels. 650B wheels are just fractionally bigger than 26”. Just big enough to fuck up tyre clearances and geometry.

Some Santa Cruz designer, who I won’t deign to link to, insists that we will barely notice the difference, so what’s the problem? This is similar to the response against state surveillance: if you have nothing to hide, why are you worried? But as ever, the question is phrased wrong. The onus should be on the bike manufacturers to tell us why 650B is going to be better enough to sacrifice decades of cross compatibility. If we won’t notice the difference, what’s the point?

And better doesn’t mean faster. Even Nico Voullioz, fucking Nico! says that 650B is only worth three seconds every one minute. No, better isn’t about speed. Better means stronger for the same weight, more durable, more manoeuvrable. Better means more fun. Because nobody really gives a shit about speed.

People may ask why the angry riding proletariat care so much. We care because we love mountain biking. We care because we have sheds full of spare parts and no money. We care because we slowly upgrade our bikes. We care because we love mountain biking, not selling stuff. 

Let’s call out the manufacturers on this (et tu, Orange, et tu?)

Don’t buy their stuff, fuck ‘em.

I believe in stories: myths that point out routes forward, fairy tales that make us dream, and life histories told through scars and wrinkles. 

I’m not alone in this belief, this joy. The story tellers are held up high still, carried on our shoulders, right as they carry us with their words. Everyone, whether reading the latest turgid literary novel, or slavering over Game of Thrones, is in thrall of stories. But I’m fairly sure that Chris Price favours tales a little closer to my own heart. Firstly, he drinks tea, of that much I’m certain. So he’s a good man, and already aligned along the particular biases of this blog. He is the artist behind Every Bike in Bristol, and is in the depths of a project to tell the stories of the bikes of the city. Because every object, every bicycle, is shaped by a human, and every human has a tale. So he seems like a kindred spirit.

Through the crowdfunding of Roll For The Soul, I had the privilege of having my bicycle drawn by Chris. My bike tells stories of car crashes and broken relationships, of lonely meanderings in Spanish winters, of joyous hauling, and flying with a lover clinging to my back on the rack. This bicycle is mine.

Look to the bike racks of the city, and listen for the stories.

Because my god, there are some tales to tell!

 ”The bicycle, the bicycle surely, should always be the vehicle of novelists and poets.”

- Christopher Morely

There are those who reduce the bicycle to mere engineering. They see angles and tube thicknesses, geometry and structural integrity. These reductionists steal the magic from before our eyes, measuring infinity and spirit in grams and millimetres.

To do so is to miss that the very meaning of cycling is rhythm. And, looking at the work of Ezra Caldwell, creator of Fast Boy Cycles, I would say that maybe a dancer can get closer to the spirit of cycling than an engineer.

Dreaming up bikes from blurry black and white photos, fighting cancer one inventive cycle at a time, gifting a touring bike to a lover and building a mating pair, melding tales of fabricating a child’s bike with the wildness of youth and the pain of age. This raw process is considered and documented, choreographed in conversations with clients, laid bare before us.

I know that we need the engineers and the industrialists. The jig has to be precise and measured, the dimensions true, the welds solid and clean: Caldwell is obviously a fastidious craftsman. But when it gets down to it, the critical thing is the rhythm: the flow, the heaving beat breathed out in gasps up the hillside, the meandering thoughts from the saddle. The love.

If you see bicycles as a physical image their riders’ selves, as I do, then Fast Boy Cycles will have you enthralled. 

George W Bush II famously rides a Trek mountain bike.

There’s nothing wrong with that, I suppose. I have friends who ride Treks, I don’t hold that against them. Unfortunately, Bush also launched crazy wars, made the rich richer, the poor poorer and attacked sexual health education across the country. He was a nutter, that much is clear. He and his policies are castigated by almost everyone in almost every country in the world. And he rode a Trek. That doesn’t prove anything, of course, but I’m just saying…

But there’s another cycling ex-prez.

Jimmy Carter, President Jimmy Carter, rides a fucking Rivendell.

Who knew?

Rivendell’s are a practical kind of bike. They have fat tyres and upright bars and baskets and racks and mudguards and shellacked grip tape and all the old-timey goodness of thumb shifters and leather saddles. Supposedly Jimmy and his wife Rosalynn cruise around Georgia on their bikes most days of the week, doing whatever kind of errands ex-Presidents do when they’re not teaching Keanu Reeves to surf.  And they do it on hand-welded, lugged steel Californian exotica, made by cycling radicals, and touched by the insistent common-sense advocacy of Grant Peterson. 

Obviously, the Dutch royal family still do everyday cycling better, but any head of state who rides a Riv surely can’t be bad. “Less Trek, more Riv” ; now there’s a motto to shout over the loudhailer on the soapbox.

Well done Jimmy. 

I can’t really remember exactly when I first got the idea that I wanted a front rack on my bike. But I’m sure I was living in Glasgow at this point and living a fairly urban existence. I do remember that there were a few months of meandering research into fork trail, porteur racks and mounting points, the arcane minutiae of front load cargo bikes.

Bizarrely, in my view, front cargo carrying seems to be a fairly rare thing in the Anglo-American cycling world. So, I found myself looking at handmade exotica, all lugged and integrated and pricetags to make a man weep. Beautiful though. And with my desire to support local artisans and craftsmanship, I wouldn’t rule out commissioning one of those the very day after I win the lottery. Sadly, I was left with more prosaic options.

So it was that I bolted an Old Man Mountain rack onto my normal bike, nicked a basket from Lidl, and zip-tied that onto the rack platform. And with that simple gear, I was left with the most delightfully utilitarian, disgustingly ugly front basket setup you can imagine. Over time, it’s been modded to the max: adorned with signs; drilled out to accept a dynamo lamp and a mudguard mount. It’s carried bags of compost, half a garden centre of plants, a huge terracotta plant pot, stacks of shopping, sheets of cardboard, barbecues, microwaves, a Brompton, and all the rest. There are just so many things that are amazing about my basket:

• When I set off to ride, I can just dump my lock and normal bag into the basket and go.
• There is no awkward pannier to carry around when I’m off the bike, no silly bracket to clip my D-lock to when I set off.
• When a motorist tries to kill me I can just grab the lock out of the basket and smash their wing mirror off.  
• When I need to put my coat on, I can reach it from my bag and put it on as I ride, and take it off and away again when I don’t need it anymore.
• I can put a packet of crisps in there and munch as I ride along.

My basket is basically the best thing about my bike, and I challenge the world to come up with a more convenient carrying setup for a bicycle than a front mounted basket.

Baskets are awesome.

A little while ago, I went slacklining for the first time. It was a softly grey evening, after work, while the chillie was simmering on the hob. My flat mate Arth and I rolled down the hill to the park. Arth set up this simple webbing line between two trees.

He proceeded to show me another way to see the world.

The slackline is a universe bender, a delicate wobbling body focuser, a machine for balance indoctrination and giggling leg jives.

With arms up by your ears and a leg flayed out for counterweighting, you pace down the line, pausing for moments or minutes when you lose momentum and balance, when you can’t quite place yourself in the ever shifting 3cm wide line world you’ve now created for yourself. With your gaze fixed midway down the line, the park blurs out. We both hooted with wild glee when I finally stuck my first crossing.

Arth told me that it was a few summers past that he got into the delicate wobble and slide of the slackline. As we pedalled back up the hill home, nonchalant in the quiet back lanes of Horfield, he told me that after starting to slackline, he began to see the world in a whole new way. Arth now scans the parks of the city for new setups, new spots to throw up the line and meander down it. He sees potential rigging points where others see oaks, sees joyful crash pads in rivers and soft pillowing field grass. 

And I realised that so much of cycling is just that too: a world bender. Things look different once you ride BMX, spotting transitions and smiling at tyre marks on walls. Your eye catches every little hint of a singletrack entrance when you go mountain biking, tingling neck hairs with excitement. And you can dream with your eyes open when you shift into that meditative long distance spin on the road.

Bikes and lines are nothing less than machines to change the very world.

Ahh.

A few days of summer, and remembering what dust sticking to your sweaty body feels like.

The trails are running really fast, and super loose. 

I’m glad I got a ride in last night before the rain started today. Get ‘em while you can kids! 

Where was that made?

Who made it?

How?

These are questions loaded with judgement, and they have been for all time. Branding as we would recognise it today has only really been around for a few hundred years, but the notion of knowing the creator of bought goods goes back far further. Apparently, there was a thriving neolithic trade of basic goods: hand axes and grain and precious stones. Ancient people’s recognised specialities and higher craft, and were willing to trade for it. Identification has always been important.

Branding has become our widely accepted identifier of quality. Companies spend millions crafting their identities and building reputations. And with this, we have a sense that we know where a product is made. But of course, that’s a little deceiving. When factories in Bangladesh collapse, we’re shown that our lovable high street brands ain’t as fluffy as they seem. When unidentified horse meat turns up in somebody’s burger, Sainsbury’s don’t seem quite so much like your local greengrocer. And when your Specialized snaps in half…

The bike world has been spammed this week by a Specialized stooge insisting the danger of ‘fake’ bikes is costing the industry millions. Supposedly, factories in Asia are making copies of other frames made in factories in Asia. Supposedly the fakes are dangerously crap, and are putting lives at risk from de-bonded head tubes and the like. The Specialized stooge has assured us that the fakes are failing the secret in-house fatigue tests they put their own bikes through.

Tellingly, I’ve never seen mainstream cycling media tests of unbranded Taiwanese carbon knock off frames. But I know plenty of riders who have been riding them for years with no problems. No doubt the stooge is trying to prompt an industry wide crackdown on renegade factories selling un-branded frames direct to consumers without their branded mark-up. But what the stooge is really doing is showing fear.

Decades of outsourced manufacturing, with outsourced employment rights and huge profit margins, might be about to blow back in the large companies’ faces. Global recession, direct internet sales, and an inexorable diminishing of the mystique of the mega-marques could all see a major change in the industry.

Here’s hoping.

I spin through Bristol’s streets almost every day. I’m not alone in this, a few thousand probably do too. There’s a reputation, that this old ‘cycling city’ is filled to the brim with cyclists, with a flourishing scene and culture that embraces urban cycling.

Unfortunately, it’s a funny sort of half-truth. There are lots of cyclists, but really, the numbers of leg spinners, commuters and Brompton-eers in their suits pale next to the automotive swarm. We’re flies, gassed out and swatted aside. Bristol bus drivers have been convicted for purposefully running people on bikes off the road. Cyclists die; are maimed, threatened and intimidated.

It pains me greatly that the bicycle, one of the greatest gifts to urbanism, has to be advocated for by people shaking charity tins out to the internet public, but that’s where we are.

Bristol Cycling Campaign has a small crowd funding bid in place to help fund the publicising of their Cycling Manifesto. They want Bristol to become a real cycling city, with segregated cycle paths, improved pedestrian and cycle access and lower speed limits. They want what the Dutch and Danes have had for a generation, and all the wonderful cycling citizens that come out when these sort of infrastructural changes are implemented.

Every time a motorist scares you half to death, inches from your bars, every time you fear for a loved one pedalling home from school, every time you hear someone say “It’s far too dangerous to cycle, are you mad?!” think of wonderful folk like the Bristol Cycling Campaign. And consider chipping in a few quid.

I’ve spent the past few weeks in Ireland, with two friends, road tripping round the west coast in Brucie the van.

But there was no cycling.

No lung tearing hills or adrenal descents, no fiddling with cable tension and listening for creaks. There were no muddy smiles or chainring tattoos.

There was just two weeks of solid surfing.

Surfing cleans you out: it works your arms and chest and leaves a cold neoprene hood tan line round your face. There’s the post surf inner warmth and huddling for a cuppa afterwards that is just so much more intense than any cycle. Surfing is just incredible, unique.

But we three are mountain bikers too, we’re cyclists. So of course there was much chat still about bikes and riding. The west coast of Ireland is a wild place, thick with rolling hills and heavy with boulders and rocks. There are jagged Kerry landscapes and softer boglands, lonely peninsulas and empty coves. Throughout the coast there are small outposts of people, villages and towns clustered round fishing ports and rivers, dotted along rough minor roads.

The whole trip was filled with a clear theme: Ireland would be amazing for two particular kinds of pedalling fun.

All the wild little roads are potholed and winding, with rough surfaces and barely any vehicles. They meander along the coast, with big old views and heaving passes. Wild camping spots are everywhere. The coastline is just begging to be explored on a long slow tour. We talked about stopping at all the little fish restaurants, evening pub grub and boiling icy clear sea water on the Trangia for the pasta, sheltering from the wind.

On a surf trip, you spend a good chunk of time straining your neck out of the window, looking for waves, desperate to see over the rise of a hill or around a corner, scanning for setups, coves, beaches, points. But, as riders, we scanned the hillsides too. Now and again someone would say “Look” and draw a path with a hand to show a trail on a hillside, a line down a rock chute or a trail on a ridgeline. But there didn’t seem to be a whole lot of trails into the hills. Land access in Ireland isn’t quite where it is in England and Wales, let alone Scotland. And so, inevitably, to fat bikes! No trail? Pfft! Bloody eight PSI and four inches wide and you’re unstoppable! So we gave it all the chat and imagined the rides out into those barren hills on the stooopid fatties.

More bikes required, and definitely another ferry ticket for an adventure or two, that’s for sure.

Should we care if non-skaters are allowed to hold powerful positions in our culture? Should we care if skaters associate with these people and buy their products? Will it change how we skateboard, how we view ourselves, and how we view the world?

-Lurper, for Jenkem Mag

There is a renewed realisation of the threat posed by ever encroaching capitalism. All over the world, in every nook of human culture, there are people asking similar questions of themselves, of their lives and activities. 

But mountain bikers, well, they don’t seem to be.

Trek, Giant, fucking Specialized. Hmm.

Maybe we should take a long hard look at ourselves, and ask if we care that non-riders are allowed to hold powerful positions in our culture?

There was a bonfire in a baker’s bicycle rack. Thats almost all you need to know.

But of course there’s more.

The inimitable Boneshaker boyos hosted what must surely have been the social highlight of the Bristol cycling scene so far this year. The Bike Project workshop was dreamed into a candlelit cinema art space to celebrate the launch of issue #11.

Human-high bike part figures hid behind the yard trees, quill stem fingers laced around branches, emerging through the woodsmoke. There were bikes chained to walls and organic apple juice. I’m sure there was free range beer too, but whatever. Prints and t-shirts, badges and zines, elderflower cordial and a huge projector screen.

Clearly though, this wasn’t a bloody Odeon. Old sofas, oak benches filled, standing room only and the crowd weren’t shy: heckles and hoots, and high levels of stoke. Hollywood didn’t get a look in here either. Playing were shorts from the Bicycle Film Festival, internet bike culture couture and strange viral videos . But best of all, our impromptu community cinema was powered by carbs. To one side, a polo bike, the tall bike and couple of mtbs were rigged up to a cycletricity generator, and a constantly changing crew were spinning out smooth wattage, powering the laptop, projector, sound system. It was beautiful: slow rhythmic whirring and hot changing riders so everyone could have a go.

People say cinema is passive, picturing popcorn and slouched red velvet chairs. But this was something else. This was raucous human power, this was actively building and reinforcing the community.

Old friends and new ones, beautiful art and bike culture joy.

Welcome to Bristol.