I’d have a post full of interesting* cycling infrastructure to show you from our recent trip to Northern Ireland (actually on the drive down there were some interesting bike lanes on the Ormeau Road that were on the pavement most of the time and then hopped back onto the road across the junctions so they had right of way. I’ve not seen anything like that in the UK – or anywhere, come to think of it – I wonder what Belfast Bike Lanes or NI Greenways have to say about those) (Update – thanks to the excellent NI Greenways for finding the Google Streetview link to the ones I mean).
I have actually written about cycling in Newcastle (Co Down, that is, not the other Newcastle) – but for the first time we had two bikes at our disposal, so we cycled a lot more, including places I had only ever been to by car before. It’s revealing experiencing somewhere you thought you knew by bike for the first time, if only because you discover where all the hills are. We used to holiday in Newcastle all the time when I was growing up (all through the troubles) and I remember the ‘Ulster salute’: one finger lifted off the steering wheel to greet an oncoming driver. That reflected a different age, when cars were rare. Now the place feels very car dominated, and there’s a new kind of Ulster greeting – the squeeeeeze by of a car that needs to overtake a bike when there’s no actual room to do so because there’s another car coming the other way. There’s a nice curve on a busy road between the cottage and the rest of town that, pretty much every time I cycled it, a car passed me despite being unable to see the oncoming traffic, whether I pulled out to ‘take the lane’ or not. The only car that didn’t had Dublin plates and left the other half slightly unnerved as it tailed him all the way along the seafront. Sometimes you get to the point where you’d rather they’d just hurry up and kill you and get it over with.
Despite all this, we saw quite a few bikes – more than I’ve ever noticed in the town before – of all shapes and sizes, about 95% of which (including all the posties) were on the pavement. Indeed, cycling back along a nice straight 60mph road with not even a strip of paint for a bike lane, that included us. I’m all for being a legal cyclist but I’m not that keen on being a dead one. And the only person we met on the pavement was another cyclist going the other way and a chap on a recumbent handcycle. Nobody seemed to mind, one way or the other.
Anyway, a you’ll be pleased to learn that a new battery has restored my phone into something resembling life and so, in lieu of all those interesting* pictures of bike infrastructure, here are some holiday snaps instead.
Hmmm. The slight problem with my exhilarating ride last night? I failed to notice my shiny new phone falling out of my pocket. Or rather I did notice it – I heard the unmistakable (and to me quite familiar) sound of a piece of technology encased in plastic hitting the tarmac – but for some reason I thought ‘oh, my lights must have come off the bike’ and then when I had checked and found both lights still there, I just shrugged, reasoning I’d hit a plastic bottle or something and pedalled on. It was only this morning that I realised I’d no idea where my phone was that I put two and two together.
Regular readers of this blog will know phones and I have a difficult relationship. I bought my first ever mobile phone in 2003 and I kept it for 5 years by which time its casing was a bit cracked from being repeatedly dropped but it was otherwise still working. A friend then gave me an old one of hers, which I dropped in a puddle and had returned, although it was never quite the same since. Another phone got dropped in a car park, picked up by a gang of scrotes and used to make prank calls to people in my address book which was annoying, and then threatening calls to someone else which ended up with me in the police station explaining why I’d never bothered reporting it at the time. The only bright side of that little episode was that there wasn’t much credit on the phone (I always get pay as you go for obvious reasons) and they were having so much fun with it they actually topped it up so when I got the number cut off I ended up about five pounds better off. Shortly after that my sister lent me a supposedly indestructable Nokia in a little rubber suit which I managed to destroy in short order, and then I got a new phone which got either nicked or dropped in London in January.
For those of you wondering why after all that I’d buy a smart phone, however basic, my reasoning was that if it was something I was using regularly I’d be better about not losing it. And for five months that actually seemed to work. Once I’d got over the whole new interface thing, I was quite pleased with my phone and I was regularly using it to check emails, tweet on the go, take pictures and generally become one of those annoying people who spends all the time poking their phones. Which meant I tended to keep track of it and better still look after it. It was only when I came on holiday and – needing to unwind – decided to spend a bit less time tweeting and emailing and generally staring at a screen that I started forgetting where my phone was. Ah, the relief of not always having to keep in touch with the world 24 hours a day! Who cared if a few tweets escaped me? What did it matter if that email went unanswered for an hour or two? I could simply admire the view without photographing it and then sharing it on instagram. My phone? Oh, well it’s around somewhere.
There’s a serious blog entry to be done about my experiences of cycling in Northern Ireland, the bike infrastructure and the attitudes of drivers – and who knows, I may even get around to writing it before I leave. But meanwhile, can I just say that powering along the sea front on a Brompton into a freshening gale with the waves rolling in beside me and the fragrance of a basket full of fish and chips luring me on like the carrot dangled in front of a seaside donkey, is the best use of a Sunday evening that I know.
Just remember to lock your Brompton to something solid while waiting for your fish supper, or it could end up blown half way to the Isle of Man before the chips are done.
… been cycling down to the shops. Cycling everywhere, actually, but we’re enjoying the novelty of having shops in popping out distance. Of course I’m no stranger to cycling to the shops, but an 11-mile round trip to Papershop Village isn’t exactly poppable and the main weekly shop definitely gets done by car. Here, even the out-of-town supermarket is only about 10 minutes away by bike which means that in the three days we’ve been here we’ve actually visited it twice. The local butcher, greengrocer and baker have also been graced with our custom twice in as many days – there must be some sort of law of conservation of shopping momentum which proves that the time spent travelling to the shops is constant. Oh, and we’ve also done the statutory wander round Lidl to see what mad things they’re selling this week. It was only through the sheer good fortune of them being sold out that we’re not currently the proud owners of an electric chainsaw. How anyone lives within regular reach of a Lidl and doesn’t have a house full of random *stuff* I don’t know. Perhaps they don’t.
It’s been a hectic few days weeks – make that months. Even my holidays have been a bit hectic, to be honest. I have had too many places to be, things to do, emails to read, and documents to write. Not an unusual problem, I admit, although if any of you are thinking about quitting your jobs and moving to the country in order to have time to smell the roses and watch the grass grow, I would caution you to only get involved in, say, two cycling campaigns at once if you want to have time to actually cut the grass and prune the roses.
For the last couple of days I’ve been staying with Babymother who, finding herself related to a non-award-winning (but almost…) cycle campaigner, felt compelled this morning to finally tackle the school run on two wheels.
She’s written eloquently before why she’s never cycled to school with her kids – not just the fact that the school is on top of a hill (and this is North London which, unlike the malarial swamplands of South London isn’t all that flat) and the fact that last time she attempted it she had to push the youngest all the way, but because it just doesn’t look all that safe to cycle. It’s not that they don’t cycle, but they cycle in parks and (mostly) along the pavement – it wasn’t until they came up to visit us here that either of them really experienced cycling on an actual road, if you can call them that around us. My sister has even got a tagalong, although she hasn’t yet managed to use it. Today, we decided to do a mixture of on foot and two wheels, with me and my sister walking and the girls pedalling, at least in theory. We also decided to allow a whole hour just in case of disaster, so come 8 am this morning with tyres pumped and book bags assembled and last minute forgotten things remembered we set off in the sunshine on a perfect crisp September morning.
The oldest, on the other hand, was absolutely fine. She was cycling on the pavement, of course, because there was no way she could handle the roads, not without a couple of escorts fore and aft. This is school run time, after all, and the traffic was heavy and drivers distracted, there were parked cars along most of the length of the road which would have meant weaving in and out of the traffic. But she zipped up the hill without much problem despite having to stop at every side road for me to catch up and cross with her. Nobody seemed to mind her being on the pavement despite her rather questionable steering and somewhat cavalier approach to ringing her bell. The only time a driver honked was when a car had stopped at the zebra for us, to let us know we could cross.
It still wasn’t exactly inviting for cycling. Although there is loose talk of forming a peleton of local mums and kids to tackle it together, you really shouldn’t have to be that organised just to get to school – it’s not exactly the sort of carefree, no brainer, joyful way to travel that it ought to be. It certainly shouldn’t be the sort of thing that has people say ‘oh well done you’ to you in the half-admiring half-bemused way that is reserved for impressive but slightly crack-brained acheivements, like pushing a peanut up Everest with your nose. But at least it was a start and I look forward to hearing how they get on for the rest of the term. One day, maybe, that impressive-looking bike shed will have more than a couple of bikes in it on a sunny September morning. One day, maybe, there will be a proper bike track all the way for them to use. Just probably not before they’ve started secondary school, or even got primary-school age kids of their own.
It’s still worth fighting for all the same.
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