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Yesterday's office chairs are not the most extravagant thing we've moved by bike.
Our monthly stock-up of fizzy water from the supermarket, for example, is a regular freight operation: 12 two-litre bottles each. That's 24kg of liquid load sloshing about every time you evade a pedestrian on the phone enacting a random walk from a maths A-level question. It's like cycling a carbonated paddling pool.
That's the sort of road-test magazines should do in their reviews.
I once carted a four-foot concrete post three miles home from the builder's yard on my rack. I don't know how much it weighed, but I suspect my tracks are still there in the Peckham High Street tarmac. It was like piloting an oil tanker with a pair of handlebars.
The CTC magazine once ran a short list of comedy cargo biked by its members - using trailers, I think - and I seem to recall that 'a coal bunker' and 'a tree' were among the front-runners.
In 1998 I ran into a window cleaner in East Yorkshire who did his rounds by bike, ladder and all (top right). No fancy bike-trailer nonsense for him. Clearly there isn't much traffic to worry about here in Hornsea, the small town at the end of the Trans Pennine Trail.
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We thought we'd be the focus of amused remarks, rubbernecking drivers and the odd mild insult on the way home. But, being London, nobody paid a blind bit of attention.
Perhaps we should have bust a red light - they'd have noticed us then.
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