I Want To Ride My Bicycle...

I cycled six miles last night without leaving my living room. Have to say, I heartily recommend it as a way of getting some extra exercise.

Now, there will be those among you who hear such enthusiasm and go "But Tony...how redundant is that? If you're going to spend all that time pedalling, why not get a real bike, feel the wind in the scalp where your hair used to be, feel healthy and actually get somewhere...."

Number one, I live in London. Any questions? If you do, I suggest you sit down and listen to President Denis Leary ranting about suicidal cyclists in Manhattan, change the geography to Ye Olde London Towne and remember that his mentality is the very same thought process running through the brain of every homicidal maniac in charge of a couple of tonnes of fast-moving steel on the city streets. Then I suggest you stay the Hell indoors or if you have to go out, use every inch of public transport you can get your privileged, oh-excuse-me-let-me-get-chauffered-around-everywhere-I-go ass on, alright? Public transport is a privilege. Private motorised transport is a goddamned luxury, specifically designed so that you don't have to take your life in your hands on a couple of bits of tubing and two wheels in places like London, OK?

Annnd number two...I can't ride a bike. There, OK, I said it.

I tried. As a kid, I'd watch the other kids - the necessarily cooler kids - ride up and down...well, mainly down, cos I grew up in a town in Wales that's basically composed of seven different big-ass hills, and neither gravity nor the energy capacity of a small human being is on your side trying to ride up those sonsofbitches...the streets, some in groups, like in the movie ET. Others, in fairness, in groups like the future-criminals-who-couldn't-afford-getaway-cars-yet they were. I was chased down by a bully on a bike for every last penny of my lunch money (hey, I was a fat kid, chances were it was a heist worth pulling), and as I walked home, snot and liquid humiliation running down my face, I remember distinctly thinking "Gee, it would be so cool to be able to ride a bike right now, so I could not only get away, but also so I wouldn't have to walk all the way back home..."

But the thing is this: by the time I actually got my hands on a bike, I'd grown into an arrogant little ass. It's a thing to which only children are particularly prone - you do things on your own, and you do them your own way, or very often they just don't happen and you sit around with your thumb up your ass until it's time to eat again.

We were never rich enough during my childhood to afford a proper bike, but one year for Christmas, a friend of my mother's sold her her bike - her proper, grown-up, seen many many better years bike. And my mother, being a kindly woman at heart, duly presented it to me on Christmas Day.

Which was fabulous, except number one, it was a proper grown-up bike. I'm 5 ft 6 now, and I hadn't had what I still think of with a bitter chuckle as my 'growth spurt' yet. So the bike was pretty much bigger than I was. Number two, by the time the bike arrived in my life, we'd moved to a first floor flat (or a second floor one, if you're reading this with an American brain), so hauling the bike to the ground was pretty much enough to make the idea of riding around on it seem like taking the whole notion of physical fitness to a dangerous extreme. Number three, we lived on a new and fairly feral council estate, where the kids would, if you gave them reason, probably actually kill you for the fun of it (we were well ahead of the social curve in my area). Number four, everybody kept telling me that I'd soon get the hang of riding a bike "once you've fallen off a couple of times." In case you have a child of your own, or know one, can I just say - DON'T FREAKIN' TELL THEM THAT! Kids are all about the preservation of self unless they think they can get sympathy. If you practically guarantee for them the fact that they're going to fall over and hurt themselves, if they're anything like me, they'll try and find a way around it, rather than embracing the necessity of pain.

And number five...Well, number five is that, as I mentioned, by the time the bike arrived, I'd become an arrogant ass.

So - faced with the idea of hauling the bike down a few flights of stairs (don't ask me how, but we contrived to have two flights of stairs on a first floor flat - it was the 80s, it was a crazy time), definitely falling over and hurting myself, and then in all probability being set upon by a bunch of feral kids who would have eaten those pussies from Lord of the Flies for breakfast, my arrogant-ass brain came up with a much better solution.

I would ride the bike outside, I declared, only once I'd mastered the art of not falling off it - indoors. People tried to tell me that a stupid idea, but I wouldn't be told. My bike, my rules, right?

Now, I'm assuming by this point that we're all familiar with the laws of physics involved in not falling off a bike, and how most of the trick is in the continual motion of the thing. You ever tried to balance on a stationary bike that wasn't in some way nailed to the floor?

I have. 

I was that dumbfuck, desperately trying not to move at all, wedged between our staircase and the wall, frantically counting the seconds before I fell into either one.

Perhaps understandably, I never took the bike outside. Not once. Not ever.

So - I don't ride bikes. Bikes and I - not a good match. Quite apart from anything else, I discovered in later life that I have what might even be described as a special skill for falling over. I mean it - I can fall over just standing in my kitchen. I've fallen over and broken my leg, fallen over and broken my ankle, fallen over and broken it again...Falling over and I are an excellent match, it has to be said. So me and bikes - notsomuch.

So why do I have one in my living-room? Mainly because I don't have the co-ordination to do cross-training - seriously, it's like what would happen if you made a chicken jog up and down stairs while doing calculus, it's just not pretty - and because, when I got the bike, walking was something I could do, out there in the real wind-in-the-hair world. So walking to get home...only to get on a treadmill and walk some more seemed to cross that border between redundant and just plain stoopid! Also, there's something about the name - I don't have an exercise bike, I have a recumbent bike. Recumbent...that's a great word to include in any sales pitch for a piece of gym equipment you want to sell to a fat fuck, it kinda carries the idea of "I'll just take a nap here for half an hour, burn some calories, then go out for pizza..." Besides, as I discovered at the gym, while honing my loathing for the muscular, lycra-clad physical nightmares who actually had to work to feel the burn, the recumbent bike takes a lot of pressure off your back while still allowing you to get some sort of a workout. Plus of course, with the right soundtrack and your eyes closed, you can imagine you're some sort of sweaty Dennis Hopper, cruising down the highways on some sort of Flintstones, pedal-powered Hog.

You've really gotta want to see it...

So enjoy, all you 'real' cyclists, especially all you desperate and terrified businessmen who've taken to jumping on the 'Boris Bikes' and cutting up legitimate traffic on your leg-powered bank adverts. I'll be at home with my iPod on.

Now where was I? Oh yeah...

"Get your motor runnin'..."