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– 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
page 167
– 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. 157

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– 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

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