Raleigh Topshopper

Topshop’s in on the act. Cycling’s cool – with petrol at £1.25 a litre it’s better for today’s fashion-conscious woman to give up her car than stop buying clothes. In fact Topshop are keen for you to buy more clothes because no self respecting lady is going to get on a bike wearing what Evans has to offer.

Their website’s got a little video showing girls in short skirts weaving around London’s backstreets riding Pashley bikes. For visitors to their website, Topshop offers some routes for young women in short skirts and hotpants.

As ever – more people cycling is a good thing. I find it interesting and slightly disappointing when big business and retailers latch onto cycling as the “next big thing” for their own ends.

Form follows Finland

Having just returned from a very enjoyable holiday in Finland, I was impressed by the variety of bikes being ridden out there. Of course it’s easy to be envious of the miles of segregated bike lanes, covered parking facilities etc

What really impressed me was the Jopo bike - something that looks like the mongrel offspring of a Raleigh Chopper and a Raleigh Shopper. These it turns out are perfectly suited to the Finnish climate. Sensible mudguards for the rain, pedal back brakes to avoid the salt munching through the rims, plenty of clearance to allow for snow tyres. Also they’ve got an integral rack, kick stand and wheel lock.

They were originally designed in the 60's with the objective of being suitable for any rider - can't really imagine a bike manufacturer aspiring to such an idea these days. The design's been resurrected and they're back in the shops - read all about it and buy one if the sterling:euro exchange rate goes up.

It must be all those long winter evenings and sitting around in saunas that make the Scandinavians so good at design – they’ve simply got more time to think.

The Old Man And The Bicycle

Just finished reading Hemingway’s “Fiesta” (a.k.a. “The Sun Also Rises”) and like most of his books I finished it feeling like someone who’d arrived late at the theatre and never really caught up with the plot.

The book is mainly about a week long bull fighting fiesta in Pamplona. In the third and final part of the book, after leaving for San Sebastian, the main character stays in a hotel where a team of professional cyclists also spend a night on the Tour of the Basque Country. This felt like the only part of the book I could really get a handle on. Both sports are all about glory and suffering, they involve brain and brawn and they are popular in Catholic countries.

Hemingway seemed like cycling, saying once “it is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and coast down them”. That said, I can’t imagine the photos in his album of Papa cycling next to those of him game fishing, big game hunting, running bulls and all the other stuff he got up to.

Matadors and cyclists have plenty in common beyond their whippet-like figures. Bull fighting, much as I dislike it follows a strict hierarchy, with different skills being brought into play at different stages of the bull’s death. The peleton has its own hierarchy climbers, sprinters, rouleurs, domestiques, super domestiques and team leaders all attempting to complete the course yet in complex plots and sub-plots within the team structure.

There’s also the fact that most professional cyclists live on the edge of death, whether it be through the use of blood thickening, heart slowing EPO, descending alpine cols at 70kph or simply by reducing their body fat down to the point that their rids are visible through their lycra tops. Like Pedro Romero, Hemingway’s matador, professional cyclists live a life that is close to the edge.

Electric bagpipes

The other evening I was driving round Winchester's snaking one-way system when I passed a guy cycling along with a vacuum cleaner poking out of his rucsac. Not something you see everyday but it reminded me of a time I stayed in Edinburgh with a group of students who’d developed a set of electric bagpipes. These were constructed out of a vacuum cleaner (see there’s the link) a large plastic rubbish sack and some pipes. Combined with the noise from the vacuum their bagpipes were louder than their manual equivalent but sounded just as bad. Like Marmite, pipe music is an acquired taste.

So it doesn’t always make sense to “electrify” everything – including gears on bikes. “Spy” photos of the latest Campag and Shimano offerings on the pro team bikes show they have grown ugly battery packs and little numeric indicators on the brake shifters. I’m not some kind of Luddite, wasn’t-it-better-in-the-old-days attitude person. I don’t believe that everything needs to be continuously improved. Like the bagpipes (there’s the next link) I’m left thinking “OK, so it can be done, but why bother?”

I can see that in the world of photo finishes, pros will use every advantage to gain a fraction of a second over the next man. What’s frustrating is that the manufacturers who have a penchant for designed obsolescence will be pushing on the buying public as essential. What’s even more frustrating is that there’ll be suckers out there willing to buy these.

Lance Armstrong once said that most bikes offered a level of technical refinement that wouldn’t benefit the average rider. Just look at the next mug bouncing down a completely smooth tarmac road on a full suspension mountain bike.
So, like the electric bagpipes, electronic shifting should have a limited audience. Unlike electric bagpipes, electronic shifting will probably be the next must-have upgrade.

Dayglo scarecrow

A couple of weeks ago when it was really windy all the high tech bird scarers in one of the fields my train passes got blown over and birds were freely pecking at the seeds. Even though bird scaring technology has moved on from the scarecrow, the new breed still doesn’t seem that effective. These consist of large, highly polished propeller blades that presumably work by reflecting sunlight to catch the bird’s attention.

I spotted an effective and brilliantly simple homemade device that a cyclist had placed on his bike. A small piece of laminated card, about half the area of a business card, green on one side and orange on the other had been attached by string to the rails of the saddle. As he cycled, this flicked in the breeze, drawing attention to him.

I’m a firm believer that with all the visual “noise” in large cities, riding around in dayglo clothing is not that effective. Plus, as soon as you get off the bike you look daft. I heard that people in Scandanavian countries wear small reflectors which dangle from their coats to alert drivers to their presence - which sounds like a great idea, presumably working on a similar principle.

Style over sense

I know it's not new news, but I saw the Chanel bike again on a post that linked to an article in the Telegraph. So Chanel bring out a bike for £6900. This is the same money as you could by two eye-wateringly expensive Condor Diamantes with Campag Record and still have some change for an energy drink - or whatever Diamante owners go for. Alternatively you could buy 12 Bromptons and have change for a whole wardrobe of dayglo jackets - or whatever Brompton owners go for.

I notice that like all highly exclusive (read expensive) products, the Chanel bike is a limited edition. Limited presumably because the manufacturers have to stop work every half an hour with giggling fits over the fact nobody noticed the extra zero they added to the end of the retail price. This is essentially a nicely spec'd £500 roadster with a fancy paint job and two girls handbags attached to the rear rack. Most of the population of Copenhagen ride something similar for 10% of the price tag.

I just don't get why when a fashion house conducts a branding exercise, whatever was the lucky recipient becomes fashionable. Fine if it's Timothy Everest smartening up M&S's suits - they both know something about the rag trade. Or Linda Barker desperately attempting to take the chav out of dfs sofa range (has anyone ever paid full price for one of their sofas?) But Chanel and cycling just don't seem good bedfellows.

Hand shadows

I was back on the bike yesterday which felt great. I got home late thanks to SWTrains deciding to stop all the trains running through my station. This meant a taxi ride with the bike (who ever designed London's black cab was a cyclist - just open the door, turn the bars and you can sit with your bike) followed by six miles of cycling through crisp, moonlight woodlands.

When I wasn't being blinded by oncoming motorists, I noticed that the new bike light I'd bought created a great shadow on the tarmac. The brake lever and drop of the bar looked just like a kneeling elephant.