Read this in parts

F here.  Tigger has gone into the patairi (loft space above the bathroom and is refusing to come down), so I have hijacked his blog.

It's fairly hot here this week and an animal in a fur coat is wilting and looking for cooler places to hang out.  I'm not convinced the patairi is cool (or cooler than say the breezeway), but the contrary animal won't sit/lie/sprawl in a breeze.  He likewise shuns the fan and its cooling effects.

Seeing as he declined to dictate and do the spell checking I've decided to blog about bicycles.  The idea sort of formulated yesterday evening as I was cycling in rush hour traffic from Piraiki to Perama to meet a friend and 'check out' a beach down that way.  A lot of people would describe me as nuts for 1) cycling in rush hour traffic, and 2) cycling in 33 degree heat.

I'm inclined to agree with them on both counts, BUT, I have used a bicycle as one of my main forms of transport (and even my only form of non-perambulatory transport) for most years of my life since I was about 5 years old.  A long time.

When I was 5 we moved from living next door to the Studholme School to a farm at Morven where I needed to cycle 2 miles on a gravel track each morning to catch a school bus (and the same back each evening).  Our farm was on the coast, so it was head-wind both ways: offshore in the morning as I headed towards the hills, and onshore in the afternoon as I plugged my way back towards the coast.

Dad had, with the sort of foresight that parents of a constrained budget might have, bought me a new bicycle that was meant to last me all my primary school years (5-12).  Kids do a lot of growing in those years so you might appreciate this bike was way too big for a 5 year old.  The seat stem had been removed and a seat built directly onto the frame, and the pedals had been built up with blocks.  I hated that bike from day one.  Dad said I was a contrary kid who refused to learn to ride a bike.  I was a little kid with a bike from which my feet did not reach the ground (and would not do so for a few years).  I learned to ride it going up and down the grass sports field of the Studholme school grounds - Dad running behind holding the back of the seat.  Rural school grounds were little more than a paddock from which the grass was cut with a tractor and agricultural mower - just like any other hay paddock - not smooth or 'frictionless'.

The only positive thing about that bike from my point of view was that it had been built in China and turned out to be of particularly poor quality, by the time I was approaching the end of primary school it absolutely had to be replaced, and was replaced with a second hand 'ladies' bike with 3 hub gears.  That bike saw out my high school years and was, I assume resold.  (My siblings learned to ride on a small, fat wheeled, super-cool bike, bought second hand.  One of our shearers remarked one day that it used to be his bike - he knew because the two holes in the front mudguard were where he had mounted a propeller on it.  Guess what went on that bike shortly after that.) 

For a couple of years after I left school I had no bike, living in places where the distances to civilization required full days on a bike, or, something motorized. My work did involve training 'inserts' at Rotorua for a couple of months each year.  We were flown there, so no car, and Rotorua is flat, so in my second year I spent some of my savings on a NEW bike: a Raleigh.  I thought it a rather sporting looking bike, a '10-speed', with derailleur gear changes.  A bike once again became one of my main forms of transport.

The Raleigh stayed with me until a few years  later I took up triathlon sport and realized my 'sporty' bike was anything but.  It graduated to the ownership of a middle-aged female friend who wanted to do more exercise and I bought a second hand men's bike with alloy frame and 12 gears (and a leather racing seat).  I had moved up in the world (quite literally, as the frame was probably too big for me), and I rode that bike, in and out of racing, until I left NZ in 1994 to go to University in Southampton UK.  I left it with a colleague. It was not and never had been a genuine racing bike - just a lighter bike than the one it replaced..

In UK I bought a second hand bike from the ad pages of the local rag, and rode that to and from university and my part-time job.  I think that one was finally abandoned, unlocked, in the university bike stands, when I moved to London.

London in 1997 was not a place where ordinary people rode bikes as a matter of course.  All that began to change and very quickly around 2000.  Bike lanes were being put in across the city as part of a 'millenium' plan, and an influx of people from Eastern European countries had among them a lot of folk who rode bikes for transport.  My then husband and I bought ourselves a couple of 'mountain bikes'.  OK they had wide tyres and straight handle-bars but they were a style rather than a bit of kit you would use to take on a mountain.  And as riding styles went I hated it.  Never-the-less I rode that bike as my only form of transport when we lived in Denmark (2003), a place where cycling for personal transport is a norm, and there are as many styles of bike as there are people who want to create an 'ideal' bike.  I fell in love with Pederson cycles but never managed to own one.  

On my return to London I rode that ghastly mountain bike until I 'acquired' a Dawes Fox - abandoned, caked in dust and grime, tyres eaten off by rats, in a store shed at the back of the carpark at work.  Another man's bike. The shed was being cleaned out and all the old abandoned bikes were heading for a skip.  The Dawes became the London bike, and the ghastly bike returned to the garage at my weekend home on the coast, ridden for outings to the beach, bike days out with friends, and quick supermarket trips until the day I was preparing to 'skip' it and a friend of Mr B claimed it for his adult son who needed a bike.  By that stage it had been replaced as my 'weekend' bike by an altogether more 'individual' creation bought for £10 on fleabay from a woman clearing out her garage.  It had belonged to her late husband.  I have no idea whether it was an original or something he created, but I preferred the idea it had been designed by committee.

The frame was a Dawes - about the size of a boy's bike.  The wheels were wide - mountain bike wide, but bigger than modern mountain bike wheels and replete with seriously knobbly tyres.  It had mudguards of the old-school type, derailleur style gears, a leather seat with springs and a little leather tool kit hanging at the back, leather panniers on a snazzy carrier, and curvy swept up handle bars that gave it an upright riding position.  I felt enormously tall riding that bike - like sitting on a penny-farthing - I guess it was being unaccustomed to sitting upright to ride a bike.  I loved it.  I overhauled it.  I rode it out with the 'art trails group' , and stuffed its panniers with picnics, until the day a Norwegian friend in London told me she was selling her Pashley Princess and wanted £50 for it.  I'd overheard one of my art trail group telling how pleased she was at having secured a second hand Pashley for £600 and did wonder if my friend J knew that.  I wanted to keep her as a friend so mentioned that maybe it was worth more.  She assured me it was not and I have since that day been the happy owner of a Pashley Princess, that is built like, and weighs about as much as, a tank.

'Designed by Committee' was sold in the way it had been bought (for a small profit) to a woman who wanted it for her wife and loved it for all the same reasons I had.

Despite it's weight it is my intention that the PP will be my forever 'old lady' bike - step through, upright riding, basket on the front, carrier on the back, 3 hub gears, and a fold down centre-stand to park it anywhere (and Mr B has even just bought me a new, Brookes, sprung leather saddle for it - like wow!)  I might need to get long flowing dresses and a wide-brimmed hat with flowers on the band to wear when riding it.  The dress will be safe as it has a fully enclosed chainguard; not so sure about a straw helmet.

In 2017, as a charity fund raiser, my employers set up our own London to Brighton bike ride challenge.  I probably rode a bike more regularly and over greater accumulated distances than any of my colleagues, but it was decades since I had ridden a  truly long distance in one day.  So in order to train for it, I joined a Saturday cycling group in Havant - our coastal home town.  That meant needing a suitable bike, so I really splashed out and spent £60 on yet another second hand bike, light, multi-geared, drop handlebars all that stuff, and was slightly mortified the day someone in my group asked another how the 'new girl' was getting on with the cycling to hear the reply "fine. If she ever gets a decent bike, we are all in trouble".  They were talking 21 and 24 gears; I was 'making do' with 7.  And the prices of their frames alone would buy at least 15 of my bike.

I still have that bike.  I was riding it to Perama yesterday afternoon.  It's skinny, and fits through narrow gaps in stationary traffic.  It's light, I can step off it onto the footpath, hoist it onto my shoulder and climb stairs with it.  It has done 1500km in the last couple of months and once I sorted out those poor quality inner tubes hasn't given me a single problem and like all the other bikes I have ever owned, it isn't worth stealing (certainly not for its resale value anyway).  

The Dawes Fox London Bike, by the way, was (before I moved to Greece) donated to a charity that taught homeless people to repair and maintain bikes and set them up with a small mobile business that would go to work places like ours and set up for a day to do any repairs and routine maintenance that bike commuters like me wanted done on our bikes.  The donated bike, once overhauled, would have been given by the charity to another 'in need' person who perhaps could not afford public transport as a means of accessing work.  I think of it as a form of 'paying forward' - passing on the favour it had done for me, to someone else whose life might benefit by it.

So there you have it - a life of cycling, but I freely admit that here in Greece, while I have ventured as far as the other side of Salamina on the bike, it was in a much cooler season.  It is officially too damned hot to be out on a bike around here now.