Cycling was something I started at university, but given that it was effectively a pedestrianised town, being on a bike was more like trying to run a marathon through sheep. I didn't think of myself as an urban cyclist until 2000 when I was living in south-east London with some guy. We shared a secondhand red and orange Raleigh and argued a lot about it because one of us always locked it and the other never did. I can't remember which way round it was, but it got nicked one day, which was obviously either entirely his fault, or mine.
After that, we had a bike each, his a cherry and pearlised Trek – very high-school prom – and mine a Fausto Coppi, both with racing tyres and drop handles. You can get a hybrid Trek, but they're ugly as hell.
Fausto Coppi was, of course, the first cyclist to win the Tour de France and the Giro d'Italia in the same year, 1949. He died at 40, alone. I assumed he had committed suicide and said so to the guy in the bike shop on Walworth Road, who furiously shouted back: "Only if he caught malaria on purpose." I couldn't work out why he felt so strongly, whether he had a personal beef with suicide or a hero-worship thing with Coppi or just really hated inaccuracy.
People always ask: "Aren't you frightened of cycling in London?" to which I reply some inane thing ("I've been at it a long time" or "They're frightened of me – I'm a nutter"), but I never have been frightened and I'm not sure I even understand the question. Drivers do get a bit of a kick out of playing up their sociopathy, but for all that they eff and jeff in their cars, miming outrageous sexual insult over some tiny breach of courtesy, they're still within the framework of civilisation. Thank the Highway Code, thank their parents, thank their encompassing interest in preserving social norms – for whatever reason, if they can see you, they won't hit you. Your only danger is invisibility and while I won't say that's no danger, it is controllable. It's true that your chances aren't great against a drunk. But people who don't cycle often seem to think that there are no systems or rules, no natural limits to velocity or violence and that we might all just decide to hurl into one another and let the best-protected win.
You're always in this bind as a cyclist. You don't want to play down the deaths because they happen and they're tragic, but you also don't want to just roll over and say that it's dangerous because that turns the cyclist into a person who deliberately engages in reckless behaviour. All I can tell you is how I feel: as safe as a bollard.
Some time after we got our bikes, this guy and I, we also got a puppy, which is perplexingly engrossing. They have all the requirements of a new baby; you can't really leave them, you're up all night, you fret. It's a much shorter time frame but has almost no recognition in society. He would go cycling and I would stay in with the puppy, and one time in two he'd get a puncture and I'd have to go and pick him up in the car, with the puppy on the passenger seat. To this day, if I brake suddenly, I put one arm out to stop the passenger flying into the footwell.
In my life I haven't had as many punctures as he had in those five months that the puppy was alive. She died from a freak gastric problem, and we split up, and the Fausto Coppi was stolen outside Sainsbury's in Bethnal Green, and he took the Trek to Memphis, where people driving past would wind down their window and shout, "Dude, you're gonna DIE", then wind it back up in a satisfied way, as if they'd just performed a valuable civic duty.
I don't think cycling is a very coupley hobby, although I know there are a lot of exceptions – most of the really serious cyclists I know have a spouse or girl or boyfriend who absolutely hates it. Couples who both cycle at a medium-level of interest are always sabotaging each other; I know a pair of divorcees who are still slagging each other off about who had to cycle with the child seat.
I'm toying with the idea that it's the self-sufficiency of it: a human is one thing, but a human on wheels, fuelless wheels – that's a different proposition. They can go anywhere, they have no need of anyone. And that appeals to a certain sort of person, someone who can't ask for help and who dreams about escape; then, having found a pursuit to match their character, they express those shiftless instincts every time they slip into their Lycra tights. It works on paper, but I'm not like that at all. I'm as predictable as an advert, as interdependent as an ant. I cycle because it's so handy; there's no ulterior purpose.
But that's not all I like about it, even though the convenience still astounds me. I like the connection it gives you to your own physicality, the way you can tell that you're tired by how long a bridge feels and that you're not tired when you feel like you're sailing.
I like the phantom of athleticism: when you're drunk you think you can dance. When you're cycling you feel like Bradley Wiggins. Who's going to argue? Nobody even knows that's in your head. I like the continuity, the sense that nothing much has changed since your grandparents bought a bike, and the permanence, the knowledge that your grandchildren probably won't do it very differently either. I like the way it teaches you your city by every incline and pothole. I like the fellowship and the freedom. I like the accessories. I even quite like the Lycra, though I'd never wear it.
