– CYCLOGEOGRAPHY –

journey while working as a courier. Not long after I returned from the Quantocks I gave up the job. It was never, for me, a long-term proposition. Many of the riders I knew over thirty began to regret it. After three years, they warned me, you can’t get away. You forget you ever knew how to do anything else. ‘Leave while you still can.’ It was a warning written on their bodies. Some of the older riders looked as though they were falling to pieces. The work had taken its toll. Knees start to creak, legs seize up. Skin, weathered by the city’s mercilessness, tightens about the skull. After a while it seemed as if their bicycles were the only things keeping these riders together. Their bikes were functioning as prostheses, as mineral skeletons, ensuring that their legs kept spinning and their arms continued their twitching dance over the tarmac. It was a future which frightened me. I didn’t want to become a donkey, a long-term career courier, and so, that Spring, on returning from the Quantocks, I gave up my life on the road.

I still dream of the job, for it taught me a lot. In his memoir The Bicycle Rider in Beverly Hills, William Saroyan describes his early love affair with the bicycle as a form of literary and moral education. ‘On the way,’ he writes:

I found out all the things without which I could never be the writer I am. I was not yet sixteen when I understood a great deal, from having ridden bicycles for so long, about style, speed, grace, purpose, value, form, integrity, health, humor,

156