About 18 months ago, I bought my colleague Helen’s bike (for a ridiculously cheap price, I must say) – she had moved into a new flat and couldn’t carry it upstairs to store it inside, and there was nowhere else safe to park it (one of the problems of being a cyclist in London – we were living with K’s bike as a third housemate for about two years). It took me ages, and rather a lot of money (to be recouped by the money not spent on inordinately expensive tube fares), to get the appropriate gear together, and into a habit of regularly cycling to work, which eventually I did, and was starting to feel great from the exercise and the time outdoors, though the one drawback of not commuting (minor, in the great scheme of having a heathier lifestyle) was having so much less time for reading. The gods were clearly conspiring to get me cycling – every time I felt too lazy to bother, there would be some annoying problem on the tube (which happens about once a week – recently anyway), which made me curse myself for not having cycled that day…
Since we could not live with two bikes in the flat (and K’s bike had been much more expensive than mine!), I had to content myself with locking it up outside our block of flats, at the end of the row of garages, in the one place where there was any space to store bikes. The problem with this little area for leaving bikes is that there is nothing to lock them to – one of our neighbours who cycles everywhere has managed to colonise the only immovable object (an iron bracket in the wall) and she makes her bike look as old and unattractive as possible, which seems to work. A petition a few years to get the managing agents to erect a bike shed had come to nought, and this same neighbour has been trying for about the last ten years to get them to do something about bike storage, even to just put in some simple hoops to lock the bikes to – but they’re crap so they have ignored everyone.
So, no matter how many locks you have on your bike (and I had two), it matters not if someone drives up in a van in the middle of the night and just lifts it. Which is what happened last summer. I always knew that one morning on my way to work, I would round the corner and the bike just wouldn’t be there. And when it eventually happened, I did a double-take and wondered if actually I’d left it at work the evening before … but then I noticed that the tarpaulin lying rejected on the ground was mine, and there was a decided emptiness about the area. The caretaker was wandering about and I told him, “I think my bike’s been stolen” – “That makes five”, he said. Some bastards had just helped themselves. And there was nothing to stop them – at least now a security gate has just finally been installed in the gaping hole at the side of our building which just allowed anyone (including the local prostitutes and their clients, unfortunately) to just wander in off Brixton Hill. But trying to get our managing agents to do anything requires immense patience on the part of our residents’ association (of which K is now treasurer – ha ha!) and waiting a length of time comparable to the geological timescale.
I thought I might get a folding bike, which we could store inside, and arranged to try a friend’s Brompton for a couple of weeks, which are now extremely popular in London – but also really expensive, and I didn’t like the ride at all. There was also no way the tiny little wheels were going to get me up the big hill between Battersea and Clapham that is on my route, and which I had just managed to conquer when my bike was stolen! I wanted a real bike, but given how much I was going to be away at the end of last year, I decided not to think too much about replacing the bike, since there was no change to the problem of storage, the security gate still being a twinkle in everyone’s eye at that point. In the New Year, though, I decided I couldn’t wait for the managing agents to get their act together, and I just had to get a new bike and cross the storage bridge when we came to it. We now have a Ride2Work scheme, which another colleague had used, so I thought I would look into that. A bit like paying for an annual season ticket, your company pays up-front, and you pay them back by “salary sacrifice” (such an odd expression). I worked out the bike I wanted, which accessories I needed to replace and which new ones I wanted, and that my monthly payments for a year would come to £28.99!! In comparison with roughly £80 a month that I spend on travelling by tube! So I decided to go for it! Unfortunately it took Evans Cycles so long to process my voucher, that by the time it arrived I was too busy thinking about clearing my decks and writing my book to spend the time going back over my list and getting order numbers from their website and phoning in my order… But this week I finally took a couple of hours to do all that, and yesterday I collected my bike!
The picture’s at the top of this posting. It looks even grander than that in real life! It has an amazingly comfortable seat, and even has front-wheel suspension which makes London pot-holes a lot easier to cope with! I took it for a practice ride around Clapham Common yesterday afternoon, which was teeming with people since we’ve had a week of beautiful, sunny, spring weather. For old times’ sake, on the way home, I stopped to buy cheese at the deli on Abbeville Road, a really lovely shop- and café-lined street in Clapham, where we often used to cycle together, occasionally getting there in time for the Farmers’ Market – a habit we will have to get back into now that we both have functioning bikes again.
And thanks to another neighbour (one of the things I love about living in this block of flats is that you know your neighbours and they’re generally a really supportive bunch of people… more on that anon), our bike storage problem has been solved – completely unexpectedly – by her offering us part-use of her garage, which she doesn’t use to store all that much, and pretty much stands empty. So a happy ending all round! And tomorrow I will start cycling to work again! I just hope the gorgeous weather holds up…
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