Let them eat Christmas cake. Then cycle it off

A typical Christmas dinner with trimmings packs 956 calories, according to the British Nutrition Foundation. Add cake (249 calories), pudding (587), a pint (185), two mince pies with cream (368 x 2), and a few glasses of wine (87 x n), and you can see why many people’s New Year Resolution is to get that flat-tyred bike out of the garage.

The level four miles from my house to King's Cross uses 68 calories, according to my odometer’s arbitrary-looking figure. At that rate, I’d have to cycle 175 miles to burn off my mum’s Christmas lunch.

So it’s just as well there are lots of other reasons for cycling today or over the next week, and not just cancelling out a surfeit of plum duff. Going out for a spin is the perfect antidote to yuletide ennui: those gaping holes between the Queen's speech and the blockbuster film, or Boxing Day and New Year, that can't be plugged with nuts and sherry.

It's also an experience in itself. Roads feel better, with virtually no lorries and only a few family cars doing the rounds. In cities, the absence of buses on Christmas and Boxing Day (whenever that is this year) makes the streets blissfully quiet – but the street cleaners are off too, so watch out for broken glass. Railways are at a standstill, as may you be after that dinner, so keep distances modest (no sag-wagon train back). Daylight's short (8am-4pm in London, only 9am-3.30pm in Inverness) so make the most of it.

Pubs are usually open at Christmas lunchtime but not evening; finding an open cafe or eatery will be tricky, so phone before to check. If you live near an ethnic area where today is another working day, enjoy the difference and try a new restaurant.

Any present is an excuse for a ride: why not test-drive that new pair of socks? Do your family-and-friends visits on two wheels – no risk of drink-driving.

Everyone's friendly. Ambling round on Christmas morning you'll be greeted cheerily by dads in new sweaters and kids taking their new fifty-quid mountain bikes round the block for the first (and probably last) time.

If you have a White Christmas, a bike is the best way to enjoy countryside whiteouts, or your town wrapped in cotton wool.

So enjoy that seasonal spirit from the saddle, and earn your rosy cheeks from fresh air rather than the sherry. Then if you do indulge, at least you have an excuse. You might even have worked off a few calories.

(This is updated text from an article I wrote for the CTC magazine in December 2007. Other bits of the article were posted yesterday.)

Icy weather takes the cake

No snow here in London (unlike whiteout Cambridge), but it's a bit nasty out in the capital's streets. Patches of black ice line every gutter and lurk in every shadow, and there's the constant threat of a white van's unexpected triple-axel.

Yesterday's ride out to Greenwich to see if conditions were worse in the eastern hemisphere proved a battle against of the cold of Shackletonian proportions. Despite having the very best quality mitts that East St market can provide - two quid is a lot of money in Dongguan, you know - my fingers were frozen. So much, in fact, that How Am I Driving feedback to the lorry that cut me up in Deptford was out of the question.


Still, not everyone was put off by the skating-rink conditions. On Saturday, at the subzero Kennington Farmer's Market, we chatted to Lara here (pictures). She runs Cakehole, a confectioner's, and this is her delivery vehicle. It replaces the gardening trailer she used to pull by hand.

The Pashley's front basket holds a dozen cakes, the trailer 18 more. The trunk is bolted into the trailer frame because otherwise people try to nick it. Well, the cakes do taste good. Let's hope they freeze pretty well, too.

More bike-shaped food for thought

Now that I've raised the subject of chocolate, in yesterday's post, I may as well work through some of the other things popular with cyclists and researchers into headaches, such as red wine and coffee.

Finding wine with a bike on the label is easy, and I've posted previously on this subject. This has done wonders for keeping down my alcohol consumption: I can't resist buying a bottle with a picture of a bike on the label, like the one on the right, but when I get it home I don't have the heart to open it.

I can't find any bicycle-branded coffee. The nearest seems to be either bicycle mugs or, more imaginatively, a coffee table made from recycled bicycle parts. I'm not sure I like the idea of household furniture with protruding pedals you can bark your shins on though.


Bicycle-shaped pasta is available online (right). It's not cheap at £4.50 for half a kilo, so you're even more likely to suffer the wine-label problem of finding that it's too expensive to consume, so it just sits around for three years at the back of a kitchen cupboard by which time it's past the sell-by date. Like most things in the back of our kitchen cupboard. Well, I think they're past their sell-by date. I can't read Latin numerals very well.

Cakes with bikes on are common. If you do an image search on Google you'll come up with a surprising number of wedding cakes featuring the happy couple about to honeymoon on a bicycle. A previous post also has a picture of some bicycle buns.

The chocolate bike in yesterday's post can be bought from the Chocolate Vault. Their site is written in American so I can't understand it, but maybe AltaVista has a translation engine somewhere.

And yes, I did have a headache yesterday - an army-firing-range of a migraine, but sadly a spontaneous one, not triggered by any of the above. It was annoying cycling home to the oomch-oomch disco thump of a bass beat when there was no car within earshot, but at least I didn't need lights: I had flashing illumination of my own.

Let them eat bicycle cake

It's about time we had a picture of some cake on this site. Thanks Ruth, who made them for the Southwark Cyclists' stall in the Silver Festival at Dulwich College yesterday.