An Earlier Broadsheet Ode to the Joy of Cycling

We have The Times' marvellous campaign at the moment - Cities Fit For Cycling. Sadly the campaign is built on tragedy, but this single trigger event is blooming positive change.

Going through my files I re-discovered this joie de vivre piece of prose to cycling written by Tarquin Cooper (a serious adventurer currently relocated to the Austrian mountains - http://tarquincooper.wordpress.com ) that appeared in The Daily Telegraph almost two years ago.

I hope neither will object to me sharing this joyous piece with you.

It is the prescription for happiness, the panacea for illness, the solution to global warming and the greatest invention of all time. Listen to any cycling buff and you can be forgiven for thinking you have stumbled upon the secret elixir of life, like a character from The Da Vinci Code.

Of course you would be right, for the humble bicycle is not only the finest and most enjoyable means of transport on the planet, it has the power, literally, to revolutionise your life. Forget the financial and health benefits, it has the ability to liberate the soul.

 "When the spirits are low," wrote Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, "just mount a bicycle and take a spin without thought on anything but the ride you are taking."

Its devotees range from Zen Buddhists to George W Bush. Iris Murdoch called it the most "civilised conveyance known to man" while celebrities from Brad Pitt to Boris Johnson attest to its enduring appeal.

Learning to ride is also a cherished landmark in childhood. Pushing my son down a hill recently, I witnessed that life-changing transition from ungainly wobble to freewheeling flight and recalled my own father's hand on my back some 25 years earlier doing exactly the same. I don't know who was more proud when the cry came back, "I did it, dad!"

Forget football. Cycling should be our national sport. It brought us success in the Beijing Olympics and gave us sporting heroes we can look up to. As the credit crunch bites, more and more of us are rediscovering the simple joys of cycling, whether to burn off the calories or to provide an excuse to consume them.

With National Bike Week under way and the National Cycle Network now clocking more than a million journeys a day, there really is no better time to join the cycling revolution. Remember, it was while cycling that Albert Einstein came up with the theory of relativity.

What will it do for you?

There are many reasons to explain cycling’s new-found popularity; fitness, fashion, affordability and our increasing eco awareness all play their part. But riding a bike is just one of those fundamentally enjoyable life experiences and one that can be shared by everyone from the smallest toddler to the most bandy-legged veteran.

So why not get on your bike and discover the buzz of the chain gang?

And here is joy:

Oil, Money, Society and Happiness

OK. I'm generally a happy chap. Cycling makes you happy. It makes you feel good and keeps you nice and healthy.

That's a very good reason to cycle. Another good reason is environmental. Cycling really is a good way at reducing your carbon footprint. However, that reason seems completely eclipsed when something like the Mexican Gulf oil spill happens. There's more oil coming out of that broken pipe everyday than I will ever consume in a whole lifetime.

A recent piece in the right wing newspaper the Daily Telegraph was headlined "Don't Blame BP".

Hmm!

It's general thrust was that we as a society, especially in the US, demand so much oil that BP were just serving society and this accident was inevitable because we are so demanding.

It is actually a good point. But BP were responsible for this particular tragedy and so they really are to blame.

In the same vein, we as a society were responsible for the economic crisis. During the Thatcher years we were transformed into a greed ridden consumer society.

We want more.

We are never satisfied.

This greed requires money. Banks were our sources of a never ending flow of cash to feed our consumerism. And like our oil companies who have to get oil from more difficult places and even from sand, banks had to develop more and more experimental techniques to keep that flow of money going. So it was inevitable that there would be a financial disaster. We are to blame. We have built a consumer society with advertisers fueling our addiction, manufacturers constantly creating new versions of things we already have but somehow the new one is the one we must have and banks supplying the money so we can get it. Perhaps a free market driven society isn't so good for us after all? We need to develop a new economic model for society that isn't based on consumerism.

With what money our nations still have, can we get our best brains working on this? If we can, we will get to a point where we won't demand so much oil, we won't demand so many things, we won't consume all our natural resources.

If we can develop this model quickly we may even reduce the impact of global warming.

In the meantime, I'm going to get back on my bike to cheer myself up.

Telegraph promotes cycling

As Bike Week gets underway here in the UK, The Daily Telegraph, one of the most popular broadsheet newspapers, is promoting cycling.

Whilst I'm not aligned with the paper's political views, at least they are doing something positive to help get more people cycling. They kicked off their campaign yesterday with a wonderfully positive article about cycling including this paean to cycling from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle:

“When the spirits are low, when the day appears dark, when work becomes monotonous, when hope hardly seems worth having, just mount a bicycle and go out for a spin down the road, without thought on anything but the ride you are taking.”