in a fortnight I’ll join 20,000 other riders (most, if not all, faster than me) in tackling 100 miles of the Olympic Road Race course from Stratford, through the Surrey hills and back to the Mall for a sprint finish / wobble over the line.
It’s the first time I’ve done something like this, but I’m reliably assured it will be painful and hellish. But hopefully not pointless: Only this week we heard sad news: a cyclist was crushed in a preventable accident with a lorry for the third week running. It has to stop.
I’m raising money for London Cycling Campaign, who work to make cycling safer and more accessible for all Londoners. Their work is vital in improving safety for cyclists but also pedestrians and other road users, delivering benefits in training and infrastructure, as well as providing post-accident support.
Are you a cyclist?
Worried about safety in London?
Ready for a genuine investment in cycling infrastructure?
I hope you’ll join us at London Cycling’s BIG RIDE demonstration tomorrow (Sat 28th April).
We want all mayoral candidates to sign up to their ‘Love London, Go Dutch’ safer streets initiative and invest in physical cycling infrastructure that London is crying out for. Cycle trips have doubled since 2006, so it’s about time London became a proper cycling city!
After a petition with over 33,000 signatures was presented to City Hall, Labour, Lib Dem, Green and Independent candidates all signed up – only Boris Johnson, the BNP and UKIP remain.
(n.b. Originally published in Bog & Pheasant, Aug 2011)
It is seven o’ clock on a Sunday morning in July, and I’m pedalling frantically down a muddy track in the middle of the East Anglian countryside. Next to me are a gang of escaped urban bike couriers on chunky, single-speed traffic hogs, while behind me a couple in long neon pink wigs drive their tandem remorselessly on. Ahead is the sea, and a cup of tea, and the knowledge that if I get there I’ll have joined a small but growing band of riders who can proudly say “I finished the Dunwich Dynamo”
The ‘Dun Run’ is a semi-organized 200km bike ride from Hackney to the beach at Dunwich, in Suffolk. Rumour has it that the annual event began around two decades ago, when a group of bored couriers decided on an after-work ride one summer evening. Having found a straight road through Epping Forest, they continued on for several hours until they hit the sea. After a brief spell as a timed, semi-professional race in the Nineties, the Dun Run has been a free event* open to all comers since 1999. Attendance at the legendary event grew with the mushrooming popularity of cycling in the capital: last year over 1,000 riders took part.
As I roll up to London Fields on Saturday night, it’s easy to believe that double that number have turned out this year, despite the torrential rain earlier in the day: a confusion of cyclists clog the fields and road with fluorescent pinks, oranges, greens and yellows. Cycling vests are on display, London’s Velo clubs out in force. Every type of cyclist is here – recumbents; tandems and tricycles; commuters; kids; fixies; racers and even one or two optimistic fold-up bikes**. Much lycra is on show, as well (having done London – Brighton quite a few times in my jeans I scoff at this).
After about an hour’s worth of gentle milling around in the fading light, and with no particular sense of occasion, helmets are donned, lights switched on, and we begin to wind our way through the city. Epping Forest looms quickly and soon we pick up speed. Crossing the M25 we’re suddenly in the middle of the countryside. Villages with strange names slip by, I join and leave a succession of mini-pelotons and time ticks on as an endless stream of blinking red lights snakes blindly on into the darkness.
A stop at a village hall 55 miles in provides an opportunity for soup, leg stretching, and the toilet. A volunteer team are feeding hundreds of hungry people, currently looking – and smelling – more like refugees than long-distance cycling champions. A few people succumb to the temptation to sleep, while their friends look on in mock disapproval. Gradually the rest stop empties out as people gird themselves to remount and finish the ride.
From here on in the ride is slower, and more social. The pack thins out, with only a few tens of riders visible at a time. We suddenly realise we have no idea where we are; luckily a recently-overtaken greybeard graciously shows us the way (with a wry smile). The roads become smaller, and smaller as the rising sun in front of us warms our spirits (if not our hands).
Finally I roll onto the beach just after 7.30. Exhausted but happy cyclists and bikes litter the ground like a colony of flopped-out penguins. I’ve won a sense of massive achievement and though I feel myself becoming addicted to this long-distance lark, I reflect later, sweating through another 30 miles to Ipswich train station, that maybe a pair of nice, padded Lycra pants might not be such a needless concession to fashion after all.
I should point out that the event is organised – for free – by the brilliant Southwark Cyclists. Chapeau!
One nutjob actually completed the whole thing on a Boris bike…
Check this out, a motorist loses their rag with a Critical Mass demo and ploughs through them as if they were snow, not fellow humans (0:45 in):
For those of you that don’t know, Critical Mass is a great protest movement worldwide. They peacefully promote cycling as a sustainable replacement for motor transport in cities, as a way to get fit, and lower carbon emissions.
Most of the major cities of the world celebrate a monthly day where massed bicyclists ride together. They stop traffic along the way, but this is not the aim – in fact as in normal traffic, the massed cyclists tend to move as quickly – or slowly – as cars in congestion do. However by riding together they reinforce each mutual confidence on the road, and remind other road users that bikes are not invisible nonentities, but real people.
I’ve never seen any physical violence on any of the 30+ Masses I’ve been on in London or NYC, and most cars can proceed on their way after a few minutes’ delay: not dissimilar to being stuck in traffic as usual, and the campaigners have made their point. This time, however, the driver loses it. Disgusting, inhuman and inexcusable.*
*Coda: the BBC report that the driver ‘felt intimidated’ by the bikes. If you’ve ever ridden in a major city, you’ll know what a sick joke this is. If you’ve known riders who’ve been killed, as I do, you might be tempted to concluded that the driver in question should be taken off the road and examined by a psychiatrist…
For Her birthday we went on a little ride to Erith and back.
The weather was shit, and we ended up next to a poo factory on the Thames. 25 miles of rain + getting very lost on the Thames Path near the Dome (roadwurksss etc) was lame, but for Her first experience of winter touring, it wasn’t so bad. Plus, the Poo Factory man was a laugh.
Yes, we said yesterday’s piece was the last of the guest art contributions for this month, but it turns out that Lonely Joe Parker sent us one that got lost! So here is the actual final article from A Badge of Friendship:
I wanted to write about Weimar-era George Grosz, the scabrous illustrator and cartoonist whose utterly irreverent attitude and DIY aesthetic predated punk rock by a good decade or five. Unfortunately some staffer in a Sunday supplement went and dedicated a centerfold to him the other week, so instead I’ll have to ramble uninformedly about bikes instead.
I’ve loved bikes since I was small – I don’t know when I got my first one, but a yellowing picture my gran has shows her pushing me and smiling while I try to reach the magical speed of eighty-eight miles per hour on a sky-blue minimountain bike with stabilizers. In wellies. As it’s got a basket and streamers I think it’s probably a girl’s bike, and secondhand, but it had me hooked. Now whenever I see a toddler tottering along, legs flailing, I think of that sunny afternoon in the eighties on a small bike with a big golden flower in the background.
Bikes have a direct, visual appeal – from quaint sit-up-and-beg bikes that suggest their penny farthing ancestors; to purebred 70s racers sinewy like their riders, gleaming like an Arabian stallion in the sun; to sleek, space-age recliners, more like rocketships than pedal-powered commuter bikes. Then there’s the workbikes (gutterpunk couriers on their squat bastardized MTB / fixie hybrids; delivery trikes; and the ambulance riders on their cute mini lifesaver-mobiles with their dinky lights and sirens).
And the art inspired by bikes – notably a slew of Art Deco Tour de France posters and their imitators, but also cinematic depictions – fascinates me, as well as art made *by* bikes, such as city-painting, where teams of riders fan out dribbling paint (sometimes unwittingly) to create citywide tracery of wobbling lines that only the pigeons (and a few heliborne execs) can fully appreciate.
For me bikes’ real beauty lies in movement, and it’s in zipping around the city that they come to life in a balletic dance that is half human, half mechanised. I think you can read some of riders’ characters and lives in their style, and so watching other bikes is a bit like a soap opera, or a succession of interpretive performances – and my own riding tells my story, too.
There are the couriers, the new ones flying along panting on piecework as they bash through the traffic, the older, crustier ones seemingly seeping effortlessly through, plotting their path miles ahead down the road. The long-distance commuters and triathletes, hurtling along red-faced and steaming in their own personal Tour. The hipsters, gliding along obliviously like swans on a lake, and of course the beginners, easily picked out on their Boris Bikes these days, wobbling along nervously like ice-skaters.
‘Old Faithful’ was built at home by Graeme O’Bree using parts from a washing machine – he broke the world Hour Record on it in 1993
As a kid in a shit suburb in England I loved riding out round the houses looking for enemies to gun down, whether that was Maggie Thatcher, the Soviets, Messerschmidts or maybe Kevin from the other class at school.
The bikes in style at the time were mountain bikes with about 65 gears and for a while I only had a shitty old BMX frame. Then just as I got a normal mountain frame, everyone started getting spinner disc wheels like Gold Medalist Chris Boardman. Only they weren’t carbon-fibre aero-discs; just bits of heavy plastic that covered the spokes – what a gyp. You could put cool patterns and stuff on them though; WWF was pretty popular I think. I tried to make one from a bin lid and it nearly killed me when it stuck through the forks.
But, the freedom… I wore through a succession of shitty old mountain / really old town bikes until but I learned to fix bikes pretty well though.
One night after scouts my mate Chris Baker let me have a go on his racer. It looked like a heap of geek-junk from the Seventies – everything was all spindly and rusty – but, even on the shingly beach outside the hut in Hythe, it went like a train. I *needed* one of these speed machines. off I went. But racers were *definitely* the least cool kids on the block at the time, as no-one had invented fixies or skinny jeans.
Then – all at the same time – I outgrew all my MTB bikes (puberty hit) and BMX came back into vogue. So I got a shonky old Raleigh from some relative of my step dad, and I discovered that I could ride all the way into Southampton in only about an hour. So I decided fashion was just a way to sell you crap you didn’t need, discovered The Clash and started ignoring people who talked rubbish.
heres a bit recycled from the power page… then a bit that isn’t…
The Future
(i wrote a long, eloquent bit this morning and i poured my damn guts out. but myspace stole it away into the ether between ‘submit’ and you reading it. huh.)
Well we all know what Leonard Cohen thinks. And other people think it’s a foreign country. if that’s the case it seems like I must be on the wrong side of the fence. it’s all about the UK i think. there’s a whole land of weird little b+bs, couches to crash on and national distress coach tickets to fake and the other day i realised how little i really know about the rest of the country.
did you know you can’t even get pea fritters up north?
i mean, i’ve been there before, played a fair bit of it and worked in scotland, etc etc etc but with a whole band you’re always a bit distracted; focused; zeroed in on the mythology of Your Band On The Road. so i want to take some time to meet some new people and introduce them to my frankenstein guitar. and filthy moods in the morning before the coffee comes.
now, to a pretty large degree this is me rationalizing as the rest of The Power have all got their own very exciting projects to work on, but i’d like to think i’ve got some free will in it. which is either totally true or totally an illusion, depending on how you look at it.
also – after a wee break in the states to find out a bit about how they elect people over there – and probably a couple of months pouring concrete for dosh (like over twice what a scientist gets, which reflects shit on the people who pay the scientists) i’ve got a feeling that i’ll have some quite different songs in the book.
we’ll still release Do This! the last power EP at some point i hope, depending on what Sotones’ other priorities are, i guess. at the moment it looks like either a rush job before christmas, or shelving it for a year or so. i hope we do get to release it though cos its a cracker – ‘Points’ is like the third or fourth best track off it, ‘Buttercup’ is going to blow you away.
in fact making ‘Do This!’ was probably the most satisfying thing i’ve done so far. that’s probably why i’m not in a rush to get it out, cos i really, actually, for once believe its okay enough that i don’t need to worry. also it reminds me of bob and davo and cams and jimmy.
in the meantime there’s a bike tour to do, a guitar to fix, and some relationships to patch up. see you on the tour or a bit later on,
joe xx
—ooh, a new bit—–luckyReadersOfLonelyJoe—-
I really like cycling. i’m really pissed off at the moment cos i can’t cycle. i haven’t been able to for weeks now since i got hit on my way to camden and cracked out a cotter pin (bikeoids know what i mean) leaving my bottom bracket a bit of a wreck.
so i’m looking forward to the tour really.
but! don’t forget confidence – cos okay, he did pull out, but i was coming down the hill in the sunny, happy, isnt-the-day-nice-on-top-of-the-world way you do when you’re cocky, but don’t realise it.
first off thanks a lot cos we all know what a spaz i am at organising stuff…including crashing here n there.. anyway
here’s some flyers and other info type things
a bit of a mish cos i’m still trying to write up (15 days to go…) but pretty much there and so here are some flyers n that. any help u can give to promote, please do cos trying to think in promoter-speak and science-mind at the same time is driving me slowly crazy. well, rapidly crazy. well, crazy generally.. there u see??!?!?!?
SEPTEMBER
21 – Oxford (Port Mahon)
w/ Stornoway, Moneytree plus guest tbc
tickets from wegottickets, concessions here
load-in 5pm, doors 7.30pm, curfew 11pm sharp
22 – Winchester (Railway Inn)
23- Guildford (Platform Nine)
solo show
24 – London (Brixton Windmill)
supporting Let Our Enemies Beware, And So I Watch You From Afar,
tickets from wegottickets
25 – Brighton (hanging with the Moules)
26 – Southampton (Hamptons)
w/ Peter lyons, James Ewers (MY LUMINARIES), SKULLS (acoustic set), hellomynameisjoshi.
tickets from wegottickets
load-in 5pm, soundchecks: joe – 5.30 pete – 6 james – 6.15 emma – 6.30 joshi – 6.45, doors 7.30 curfew midnight, party till 1, who’s got the after party???!?
hello.
you’re at the end of the email…
i better go and write a thesis now. its okay, only 18,000 words to go. that’s only just over 1000 a day.
thanks, love you all lots and you know i’ll be mister-nice-and-calm once its all done…
joe xx
