– Coda: Breaking Away –

music, breathing and finally and perhaps best, of the relationship between the beginning and the end.

I felt bicycle couriering had given me a similar education. As a courier the ride I loved best was the last of the day, the ride home, when your legs had gone through weariness, stiffness and fatigue, and finally felt unburdened: light and easy. Then you felt like you weren’t riding the bike but being drawn along with it. Once the day was done you got a burst of speed, a home coming rush that willed you on and made you forget your tiredness. Freed of the need to conserve anything for a possible final rush-job, you let yourself go.

I still cycle daily, but I never really get that feeling any more. Now my commute to work – along the Lea Bridge Road (past club riders heading in the opposite direction, escaping London), through Hackney Marshes and Dalston, along the Essex Road and up the side of the Pentonville escarpment by Angel, and then down through the basin of the valley of the river Fleet and onto the Strand – is a meditative one, dulled and deadened by repetition. I have become a gentler cyclist too. I no longer run red lights or buzz pedestrians at crossings. I no longer race in alleycat races. I miss the work, but I’m glad I’m no longer a courier. I’ve heeded the warning of Flann O’Brien’s Atomic Theory, and of Jarry’s contracted racers who rode themselves to death. Though the wheels still turn, I’d learnt enough from the job. I got out while I still could.

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