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Autumn and the lanes are draped with crimson caparisons. Fleeting as it is, my favourite time of the year to cycle. Larkin the Buddhist, living in the present: Where can we live but days? Of course, Larkin being Larkin, they are to be happy in, is most likely ironic, and the coming of the priest and doctor a
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I once went to a reading by Michael Rosen of the book of poetry he had just released. One poem concerned loving your children for who they are, not what you want them to be. The Black Bike, I’m talking to you. Some years ago, while riding a predecessor of The Black Bike on a
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The back garden. Around the centre of the picture there’s a gap between two rows of purple beech hedging. Pass through it and the section of the garden beyond was once lined with box. Perhaps 20 shrubs in total that I grew from tip cuttings some 15 or so years ago. As they grew, they
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70 miles, they said. 70 of the finest Anglo-Welsh miles. On a clear day, I assume. Something in the region of 7 today, perhaps 17, was all I could see. The Welsh Marches, largely rolling green farmland, that green coming from the liquid that falls from above, the liquid packaged in clouds. The heatwave had
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The solace of interiority, Geoff Dyer’s description of reading. I’m claiming it for cycling. An act of journeying outward that journeys inwards. Hours alone in one’s head. Rarely a bad thing when out there – is it the forgetting, the escape from what dwells in other circumstances? Familiar sites of late – Edstone Aqueduct (England’s longest
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May and one of the driest on record. Weather for lifting the dust sheet and taking The Green Bike off the garage wall. It may have mudguards but the filth of winter roads have to be long gone before it’s ridden. Back when the bike was built, the handlebar tape started off yellow and it
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The spray can said burgundy. It’s not, is it? Not enough red, right? Some sort of purple – Aubergine? Plum? Queen of Night Tulip? Maybe not that deep a purple. They are out in force in the garden. Late April, through into May, my favourite time for the garden – pre-summer-slouch-verdancy to the fore. My
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In this article, acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton describes silence as “…not the absence of something but the presence of everything”. On a daily basis I encounter plenty of noise that drowns out everything – a classroom full of pupils, a commute that takes in a busy stretch of motorway. I sometimes wonder how I got here,
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At the start of ‘Braiding Sweetgrass’, Robin Wall Kimmerer speaks of a conflict. The one when the children of Eve met the children of Atahensic. Eve, banished for eating a product of the land, came to see the natural world as alien, something passed through before reaching heaven, her true home. In contrast, the natural
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Wireless electronic derailleurs. Ugly. Modern cranksets. Ugly. Fat forks to accommodate the breaking force being so close to the hub. Ugly. Full suspension mountain bikes. Ugly. Add a motor and are they even bicycles? In fact, forget the motor and they still look closer to a motorbike. The Black Bike has a modern crankset and
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Cyclokairos 