Tall story: Double-decker bike commuting

This chap - snapped outside Kennington Tube station the other day - commutes round London on his double-decker, six-foot-tall bike. Well, an upright riding position in London is quite useful.

When stopping at lights he has to find something to lean against. No doubt it comes in useful when riding through potholes, though, as he can still see over the top of them.

Scheming advice

We had a Cycle to Work scheme evangeliser pop in to work this week. The scheme lets you buy a bike through work for virtually half price, and a chap called Michael from Halford's brought a bike and some kit along to our staff room (right) to tell tempted employees what was involved in cycling to work.

In fact, as you might imagine, the British Library has a fairly strong contingent of pedalling employees; the generous covered staff bike parking is three-quarters full on an average day. And it's not just the student interns or gnarly IT boys who wheel in: many suits-and-meetings managers cycle in too, which is clearly a good thing. A convenient staff shower helps. Well, it helps them. I don't cycle fast enough to break sweat.

Anyway, I went along to chat to Michael, posing as a normal person, to see what he said. He was a dead ringer for former England cricket captain Michael Vaughan, so I expected him to start well and then throw it all away just as he got going. I'm very wary of 'advice on cycling' I've had from chain store employees, which feels as reliable as legal advice from that bloke in the pub, or financial advice from a investment banker.

But guess what: Michael said all the right things. First thing you'll need is rack and panniers and mudguards, he said. Biking to work is fun, fast and makes you feel good, he said. He didn't scaremonger about the risks but he gave the right sort of cautions. He said pretty much what I'd say, with some minor differences of emphasis (he's a bit keener on neoprene overshoes than me, for instance, and a bit less keen on football-stadium illumination, but there you go). He was enthusiastic, pitched things at the right level for the thinking-about-it waverer, was good on the details and benefits of the scheme itself, and was generally a very good evangeliser for biking to work.

Michael, who cycles everywhere every day and clearly loves it, knows what commuter cycling is. And yet (as I moaned in a previous post) go into Halfords, or any other chain store, and try to find a commuting bike: you're struggling. Stock instore and online caters for what people think they want - mountain bikes and road racers - and marketing reinforces that. An ounce of good personal advice is worth a ton of marketing. I like the sound of that phrase: I should set myself up as a business guru. All I need is some advice on how to market myself.

The cheapskate buyer's guide

As threatened yesterday, here's a summary of what the Cycle to Work scheme magazine, Cycle Commuter, recommends as biking gear (usually their cheapest recommendations), and the Real Cycling Alternative.

(They say the most popular purchase choice under the scheme is the Specialized Sirrus Comp at £650. My bike – a Specialized Crossroads – was donated as an unwanted gift.)

Accessories: Blackburn EX1 rack (£30); Agu Yamaska 475 rack pack (£40)
Real Cycling Alternative: Better get a bike with one in the first place, but Blackburns are good. Instead of rack pack, buy panniers (Ortlieb Classics, £100 a pair but you can go shopping with them - mine are almost as new after five years of heavy daily use). They don't mention mudguards, which will be £20 or so (but why not get a bike with one in the first place?).

Lock: Abus Granit X+, £60.
RCA: Yup, you have to get a really good lock, but one's not enough. You need two – get an additional Abus, perhaps one a couple of notches down that's longer to give more room to shackle up with. Lock inflation is running at about 6% per year (1950s, nothing; 1970s, pocket combination lock; 1990s, one sturdy D-lock; 2000, two sturdy D-locks). By 2040 you'll need three D-locks, laser shields, CCTV and a robot Jack Russell.

Lights, reflective vest: Cateye Opticube Uno plus Smart LAM317R, £40; Altura Night Vision, £20
RCA: Fine. But look out for Aldi's cheap mayday sales. Even if they're not doing their five-quid sets of perfectly decent lights this year, you might pick up some bargain Croatian-brand baked beans or Latvian-made shoe-horns.

Computer: VPO MC1.0+, £80.
RCA: You'll only lose it, get it nicked, or launder it by mistake in a trouser pocket. Get a cheapo one (such as the sub-£10 models in Aldi's mayday sales). Or better, don't bother with a computer and do what most people do to measure their mileage – lie about it.

Helmet: Specialized Chamonix, £30.
RCA: See 'helmet scepticism' post earlier this week. A woolly hat from the pound shop is all you need, and then only on cold evenings (£1). Plus you can wear it inside Aldi or Lidl to blend in with the other customers.

Glasses: Endura Shark, £30.
RCA: You'll only ever wear them on top of your head, and then lose them in the pub or sit on them in the cafe. Get a pair from the pound shop (£1).

Gloves: Altura Night Vision, £20.
RCA: You'll only leave them in the pub or on top of a fence while you stop to take a photo. Or, even more frustratingly, leave one of them in the pub or on top of a fence. Get a pair from the pound shop (£1). Or perhaps two pairs, just to be on the safe side.

Jacket, trousers, shoes, socks: Altura Nevis, Endura Humvee, Shimano MT32L, Polaris Merino, £155 the lot.
RCA: The jacket, trousers, shoes and socks you're wearing. £0. Sure, they'll get scuffed and grubby and you'll wear an embarrassing hole in the back of your trousers, but that's what TJ Hughes and Peacocks are there for.

Now, you don't necessarily have to go to a pound shop. It doesn't have to be that expensive. I was up Kingsland Road the other day and the recession is obviously moving things downmarket. Next door to the poundshop is a 99p shop. Next door to that is a 98p shop. Seriously.

But here's the final score. Cycle Commuter's (mostly cheapest) recommendations will set you back £505, and you still won't have a set of mudguards, or enough locks or luggage capacity. Real Cycling's recommendations supply what they missed, and yet cost only £313, and are much better suited to commuting.

And you'll expand your repertoire of budget baked bean and shoe-horn buying choices.

Foiled again? No, despite the ice

We got chucked out of work yesterday afternoon at 2pm. Rather dramatically, as we signed out, there were foil survival blankets (right) available for us to take home.

This presented something of a dilemma for a Yorkshireman. On the one hand, I couldn't do anything so self-pitying and wussy. The only survival bag you'd admit to having in God's country is a Spar carrier full of crisps and lager.

But on the other, it was free. And that trumped everything. So I took two, telling myself it was OK because I might be cycling somewhere really dangerous one day, like the Stelvio pass in winter, or the Norwegian arctic, or Middlesbrough.

Anyway, I got home OK. The way back was easier than the way in, with very little traffic. I got snowballed by a gang of teenage schoolkids off the leash in Cleaver Square. It was a bit intimidating at the time, though I can laugh about it now. I didn't engage with them because you never know, things might have got nasty, and I might have pulled a knife on them.

I cycled in to work again this morning. The side roads were as uncyclable as yesterday, caked in hard, uneven grey ice. I pushed. It was, in fact, like walking on a glacier. (I was surprised when walking in the Alps for the first time that glaciers are not silky-smooth and translucent blue like virgin mints, but are actually moon-rock dirty and cobblestone bumpy.)

The main roads were fine for cycling though, wet but melted of all ice and snow. In the sun, the tarmac looked sleek, warm and glossy. There was a hard shoulder of slush, ice and snow all the way along the side, though. Occasionally a taxi or bus passed too close, as if they thought I should be off 'their' bit of road and humping along the ice. Not without huskies I wasn't.

But those few impatient drivers notwithstanding, cycling across Waterloo Bridge (right, middle two pics) was elating. It was far preferable to walking on the pavement, which was still carapaced with acned ice and snow.

Tavistock St, running parallel with Euston Road just to its south, has a separated two-way cycle path. I'm getting less keen on using the separated path even in good weather, because it seems to create chaos rather than order at its many junctions. But using it today was out of the question anyway: while the road was fine, the cycle path (right, bottom) was icebound, impassable without crampons. Councils have a duty to keep roads roadworthy, but don't have to do anything about cycle paths, and it shows.

Still, on the way home, if I see any commuters slip and fall and need keeping warm while they wait for the ambulance, I'll be well equipped.

And if not... well, when summer comes, I've got a couple of insulating bags for keeping my beer cold.

Call that snow? No, a 'snow event'

Snow? Call this snow? I can hear Geoff Boycott now: In Yorkshire we call this frost! That's no excuse for skiving off work!

All this is, according to the BBC weather team, a 'Snow Event'.

Or, as we used to call it, 'Snow'.

(Perhaps this neologistic tautology is a bit like 'Binge Drinking', which we used to call 'Drinking'.)

Well, whatever, London was blanketed by white overnight. Our garden looked like the Perry Como Christmas Special this morning, with a foot of fat fluffy stuff on everything. There was that delicious, velvety quiet.

The streets round our house were one mighty, shin-deep squeaking duvet. Smothered cars lay neglected, giant cottage loaves risen out of their tins. As I walked my bike round to the main road, the wheels creaked like bedsit floorboards.

Usually, my route up to the British Library involves back-streets, lanes, alleys and cut-throughs. It quickly became obvious that this was a bad idea. They all had that nightmare surface of snow compressed by just one or two vehicles into a hardpack of ice. Applying brakes turned my bike into a vertical sled.

Where I could, I took main roads. Waterloo Bridge and Southampton Row were just about OK, with grooves channelled out by cars as if imitating a cross-country skiing piste. Anywhere where the traffic thinned, such as the three-sides-of-a-square detour round Russell Square, you were in ice-hockey territory.

At junctions there was a lot of tricky stuff that might have delighted Robin Cousins but was scary for cyclists. Euston Road was just slushy, but the traffic close up on one side of you and the bank of unploughed snow on the other made for an unpleasant experience.


There was little traffic. Most noticeable was the absence of buses, all cancelled because of the Snow Event, and the extra waves of pedestrians, dark matchstick figures soft-shoe-shuffling their way along the bleached pavements like extras in a Lowry painting.

(See bigger version of picture on right)

Most vehicles were driving reasonably sensibly. Even the taxis. A few, though, must have been absent in science lessons when they did coefficient of friction, because they hadn't twigged that this ice stuff is quite slippery - icy, in fact - and offers all the purchase of a Teflon wok. I saw at least three cars brake, only to slide on gently a few feet over the junction with wheels locked.

I ended up walking a lot of the way; a journey that normally takes 25-30 minutes took me just on an hour.

Still, when I trooped into the staff car park, I saw to my delight that I was the only person daft enough to have cycled in. (There were other bikes, but they'd obviously been left over the weekend.) Yes, they're my footprints and tyre tracks in that picture.

But I can be pleased that, having battled in to work, I can make sure the website is updated. With the news that the Reading Rooms are closed and that there's no hot food - even in the staff canteen. Oh...

We're promised another Snow Event tonight. Which sounds rather fun, actually - you rather imagine skating rinks, snowman contests, and stalls selling mulled wine. Maybe I'll leave the mulled wine until I'm safely home, though.

Hard rain's gonna fall, but only 12 times a year

Dishcloth skies and four-dimensional drizzle this morning as I biked to work. Central London was wet, tired and grey. Or perhaps that was just me.

But anyone driving past me, had they looked up from their mobile phone, would have wondered what I was so damn happy about. Because when it's raining, I'm wary of looking miserable. Poor bloke, the drivers might think, he can't afford a car, or the time to be sat in a traffic jam like me. Or worse, ha ha, I'm warm and dry, and he's cold and soaking.

Which isn't the case. I love cycling and that doesn't change given a bit of vertical moisture. All the positives are still there - door-to-door convenience, control over route and timing, speed and cheapness, and arriving feeling alive and well, despite the kebab last night. The only thing that changes is that you've effectively been standing in a shower with your clothes on for half an hour.

Now, given decent waterproofs, you'll arrive at work completely dry. Sadly I've only got half-decent waterproofs, so I arrive with, on average, one leg and one arm sodden.

Figures authoritatively plucked out of the air by the website bikeforall.net say it only rains on 12 commuting days a year. Well, rains hard, anyway. That translates to six full sets of damp arms and legs per annum, which isn't too bad. Today was one of those special days.

But no misery for me in the rain. No clenched teeth, narrowed eyes and hunched shoulders, like a Tour de France rider being hotly pursued up Mont Ventoux by the testing lab. No. I want drivers to know that I'm happy. I don't want to risk their misguided pity or contempt.

So the harder it rains, the more I look like the Dalai Lama in a reflective jacket, smiling away, chuckling when the lights turn red, eyes creasing and shoulders rocking in pleasure when a passing bus launches a puddle at me.

I just wish I could do the same when it's sunny.