Confessions of a Bike Junkie
It all started with 'Uncle' Jimmy Malcolm on the Scottish Borders around 1950. Can’t be really sure of the date, or indeed anything else from that time. Uncle Jimmy had a black bike with drop handlebars, chrome ends on the forks, seat and chainstays, and I thought it the most desirable thing on the planet. Even more desirable than Chrissie Jeffries—and that was a big call. The lust was such that it bent all normal boundaries. Jimmy was known to take the occasional dram or two, or three (factorial), and fall off the bike on the way back home from the Red Lion. My fantasy was that one day he’d do just enough damage to render cycling impossible, and then he’d donate the bike to me. Yes, I know. How low can you get?
It didn’t happen. And when, years later, Uncle Jimmy did pass on to the great velodrome in the sky, I was off and away to university, and the bike went... somewhere. A wonderful side-story is that, on an infrequent trip back to the village, I popped into the Red Lion and there in the snug were the usual suspects—except for Jimmy Malcolm.
“Where’s Jimmy?”
Silence. Then a shake of the head. “Aye. Jimmy. Aye.” Another shake of the head. “He’s deed, ye ken. Aye. It was naethin’ serious.” Absolutely deadpan. No indication of humour whatsoever. Turned out he had a bit of a sniffle that turned into a cold that became pneumonia that killed him—so maybe there really was no humour!
Anyway, what that bike did was invest me with an aesthetic sense of what a bike should look like, and although that has mutated over the years, the fundamentals are hard to shift. The curvature of the bars, the geometry of the frame, the dimensions of the stays, the pitch of the forks, the angle of the seat, the rim depth and so on all contribute to a sense of rightness—or wrongness.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m no Luddite. I love new technology and I’m a big fan of the Di2 on my carbon Trek, the hydro discs on my Specialized, and the wonderful Bosch drive system on my electric Scott. Doesn’t alter the fact that for sheer beauty, the classic—mainly but not only Italian—steel roadies of the ’70s and ’80s are in a league of their own. But I digress...
In the ’40s and ’50s, we were poor. Not breadline poor, but never a spare shilling, so when Billy Pearson was bought a BSA 'Tour of Britain' by his rich parents, it added another layer of angst to the bike-emotion quantum. Miserable little git wouldn’t even let me have a ride, although I pleaded shamelessly.
My, and most of my friends’ bikes at that time, were built from scavenged bits and pieces—acquired mainly legitimately, but nobody asked too many questions. They worked, sort of, but breakdowns were common and sometimes painful. Riding down Flodden Hill, sitting up, no hands, and the freewheel pawls jammed—tossing me up in the air and down with my bum in the triangle and the rough road surface tearing through shorts, underpants, and skin. How many of us have been there, done that, or something very like it?!
Then the big watershed. My mum had remarried—Dad was killed in the war—and the economic landscape changed. We had a car! Need I say more, except that finally, my whingeing and nagging paid off and I was bought a brand new bike! A Hercules, but alas, with flat bars and no chrome. Can’t have everything, eh? Anyway, end of bike saga for a while as other things intruded, and the bike became a means of getting about. How I wish that had lasted. The money I’d have saved!
University and living in a distant city brought the economy back into sharp focus, and bike scavenging once more became an imperative. Living in a hostel in Newcastle (on Tyne, that is) meant shares in old cars whose reliability was laughable, and consequently demanded access to a bike. There was an old garage on site, the exploration of which produced a cobwebbed and flat-tyred bike. Cleaning up revealed... a Claud Butler! I have no idea of the vintage, but it was black, had the typical elaborate lugs, and even had chromed fork and seatstay ends—which I believe was not common, so it was maybe a special build. Anyway, a childhood dream come true. It had (as I recall, but don’t rely on it) a four-speed Simplex derailleur with smooth jockey wheels. It was immediately liberated, refurbished, and served me well for the remainder of the time in Newcastle. When I moved on, I donated it back to the garage from whence it came. Wish I still had it.
Then came the bikeless years that I suspect most of us dilettante cyclists have at some point. Marriage, kids, mortgages, work your butt off for promotions, etc.—and at the end of all that, a move to a new country. Bikes? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Until, finally, a job at UC—or the College of Knowledge as it was then known—meant that getting to work on a bike was not only possible but desirable. An ad in the Canberra Times produced a Malvern Star International with a monster frame—62 cm, about 6 cm too big for me—but it looked good in spite of being made from gas pipe and weighing a ton.
We lived in Flynn at the time, beyond the top of Tillyard Drive, and have you noticed how wind speed and direction change with relentless precision? Always neutral or a gentle tailwind on the morning downhill run, and always brisk-to-gale-force headwinds on that long climb back. In combination with the Malvern Star, it did manage to keep the weight in check!
Then came a career point when a move to the Netherlands was necessary. Cycling heaven. Delft had cycle paths to die for—even with their own traffic lights! Flat as a tack, of course, except for the bridges over the canals or rail lines, which produced my first embarrassment. Approaching one of these on the Malvern Star, I was closing fast on a very elderly lady on a typical Dutch sit-up-and-beg going at half my speed. I needed a run at the hill and she was going to get right under my feet... Ah well. Up the short but very steep rise, she didn’t change a thing. Maintained the same speed, the same dignified posture, and—so far as I could tell—the same heart and breathing rate, whilst I was up straining on the pedals. That was when I realised that people like her had been doing this since they could walk, often with kids front and back and enormous panniers of shopping. Thighs of steel! No surprise that Dutch women dominate the professional peloton.
There is a certain pragmatism about the Dutch which extends to their universities, and the one I served had a scheme and arrangement with Batavus, one of the major manufacturers, whereby you could buy a bike for little more than cost and have the money deducted from salary over a lengthy period. In other words, you didn’t even notice it. So I bought a top-of-the-range hybrid which served me very well. It came back to Australia with me—and was promptly stolen! Up to this point, my bike ownership had been sensible and needs-driven. Lust for a classic Italian still lurked there, but was sublimated and kept on a leash.
Back in Oz after a decent interval—six years—I one day made the fatal mistake of being seduced by Stef (you know who you are!) into having an idle fossick around the Green Shed. There was a very sad-looking Peugeot roadie, covered in thick dust and cobwebs, with shredded tyres—but with something about it. It smelled right. Fellow junkies will know exactly what I mean. It just smelled right. To cut a long story short, I paid the princely sum of $50 and carted it home. What a bargain! It turned out the shredded tyres were singles, so obviously a bit of quality kit, and the dust just hosed off, leaving an almost unmarked frame—Super Vitus tubing, excellent chrome, and the original Simplex driveline. It didn’t take much research to discover that I had a beautiful 1983 Peugeot PSV10 for fifty bucks! The thing weighed nine kilos soaking wet. Replacing the tubular tyres cost four times more than the bike.
That was the end of sensibility. Things went from bad to worse. The bug had bitten and the virus was unrelenting. The lust object became the beautiful Colnago Master Ultralight with the Gilco tubing. Buying, repairing, refurbishing, selling, buying again—always with more bikes coming in than going out (and more money going out than coming in). I finally bought a frame from Austria and, over months, acquired the appropriate Campagnolo Record gruppo and Mavic Open Pro rims on Campag hubs. That should be the end of it? No way. I quickly discovered the seriousness of the formula for how many bikes one can have: (D - 1), where D is the divorce threshold. I have come perilously close on occasions. My photographic record lists around 500 bikes in the last 20 years. Not as many as some, but for a casual, substantial. The fact that my son is also a bike maniac hasn’t helped. Regular therapy (in the form of broken bones and lost skin) has helped to moderate the enthusiasm, and achieving my OBE (Over Bloody Eighty) a few years ago has consolidated the process. I am now claiming to be almost normal and easily into single figures—so long as you don’t count the ones in the care of my son. Her indoors still doesn’t quite believe it, but provided I can keep her away from the sheds behind the garage, it'll be OK!
Names withheld to protect the innocent.
