Carradice Regained and Eastward Ho!

So, I've had the Pashley for four months now and the novelty hasn't worn off. My journey to work has become pleasurable, moreover, I arrive at work enlived, energised, enthusiastic. At least until the first lesson...

But what of my intention to do some 'gentle touring' ?

I must confess, my plans have gone slightly awry. My intention was to spend the past few months preparing for such an undertaking but... that hasn't happened.

So... I'm going to do it anyway.

I'd kicked around a few different ideas, such as a tour of the Isle of Wight but I've decided to revert to Plan A which was to tour the east coast of England. Primarily, this is an exercise in nostalgia as I intend to pass through holiday haunts from my childhood (Caister-On-Sea, Great Yarmouth, Hunstanton) - places I haven't visited in over 30 years. Norfolk's status as the flattest of counties may also have been a deciding factor...

The ghost of my late father seems to loom largley over all of this.

Even though we weren't close during most of my adult life, his death, over a year ago now, still feels raw. I can't help but wonder whether part of my desire to revisit these places is some subconscious urge to go back to a time when he was a real presence in my life.

So it may also be more than a coincidence that I've recently bought a Carradice saddlebag.

                                   

Dad had one of these bags on the back of an old Sturmey-Archer 3 speed. Before he reached a sufficient grade to merit a company car, he cycled to work on this ancient contraption.  To us, as children, cycling the 13 miles to Braunstone seemed a monumental undertaking, an almost Herculean task. Occasionally, I would get up for school early, just in time to see him trundling off down our gravel drive. Squinting, the Carradice bag would be the last thing I'd see before he disappeared out of sight. 

As well as fitting in with the traditional look of the Pashley, the Carradice bags are very practical, particularly if you have a saddle with bag loops like the Brooks, and being made from 'cotton duck' canvas they're (almost) waterproof.

I've opted for one of the largest models, the Carradice 'College': so-called and so-chosen because it's wide enough to fit A4 folders (handy for school and touring alike).  All of the Carradice bags are hand-made and one of the nice touches is having the maker's name on your label. Thanks, Keely!

But what of the tour?  Can I really do any sort of tour on this sort of bike? The sheer eccentricity of the undertaking appeals to me but up until a week ago I hadn't cycled a route of more than 10 miles on the Pashley. It was leaving it late in the day but I definitely needed to some sort of training or test route.

So last week I decided to take the Pashley around Rutland Water. If Rutland is famous for anything it's probably for Rutland Water, or being the smallest county in England,  or perhaps this...

Rutland Water, a drinking-water reservoir, is one of  the largest man-made lakes in Europe. 

The near-sunken Church at Normanton is one of the lake's more striking features.

The cycle path that runs its perimeter is a route I'd done many times before but I'd never done the full 23 mile route before, which takes in the optional Hambleton peninsula. And I certainly hadn't done it on a 21kg bike with only 5 gears before.

Opting  to  do  it  the day  after  Hurricane  Bertha had passed through perhaps wasn't  the wisest  move.  It was still a bit blowy on the exposed south shore and  for the  first time I started to curse the Pashley's upright riding postion. Wind resistant it is not.

But the Brooks sprung saddle, now just about broken in, was a revelation. No post-ride saddle-soreness for me, even the following day. In fact, I felt completely fine. Much fresher than I did the previous week after just a six mile walk.

The weather forecast is beginning to clear and I'm running out of excuses not to do this. Tomorrow I shall go.                                                      

Meet the exes

Last time around I presented my Pashley Roadster as 'my new love'. To continue the romantic analogy, I thought I'd reflect back on all of my previous love affairs. My old bikes, that is.  

I don't mean to presume that there's something unique about my past relationships with bikes, in fact, I suspect this is a collective, shared memory for most people of my age - the pre-computer game generation. Getting your first bike was probably one of the most exciting moments of early childhood. It was the present. Of equal importance was the day your parents took the stabilisers off for the first time. It was like being able to walk to school on your own. The bike represented freedom, independence. Or at least the first steps (or revolutions) towards it.

I can't recall the very first bike I had (it might well be the one on the right of this polaroid, by then handed down to my brother) but the first memorable one was a Raleigh Striker (left).

To my surprise, they still make this bike and it doesn't seem to have changed greatly but back then everyone had one. I guess it was a sort of proto-BMX only heavier and, to all intents and purposes, indestructible. 

If you were a Striker rider it was customary to graduate to the Raleigh Grifter (essentially the same bike but bigger with 3 speed grip-shift gears).  The other popular bike for the younger kid, at the time, was the Raleigh Tomahawk and the big brother of the Tomahawk was the Raleigh Chopper, my next love.

This wasn't my Chopper, but it's pretty darn close, right down to the shade of green.

The Chopper was the ultimate bike of this era, although I guess it was influenced by American 60s-70s dragster type bikes. It wasn't built for speed and had a tendency to wobble when you were giving it some welly in top gear, as I recall. Keeping it balanced while changing gears at speed wasn't helped by having the joystick gear lever on the top tube either. But this wasn't supposed to be a practical bike! With its long, cushioned seat (perfect for croggies) and wide handlebars it was a bike for cruising.  To my shame, I was a little embarrassed by my Chopper, as my mum had bought it second-hand, and in those days there was a stigma about buying second-hand. This was the ex I didn't appreciate at the time even though she constantly got admiring looks from other boys. You don't know what you've got til it's gone.

By this time I longed for a 'racer'. All the cool, older kids had one. If you were super-cool you had cowhorn handlebars and the length of the cowhorns were proportionate to your coolness. Owning a racer was the final rite of passage of childhood in those days (well, not quite the final one...) This advert kind of summed up that sense of longing and still brings a lump to my throat...

I saved up all of my Christmas and Birthday money in 1982 or 83 and bought one of these from Coalville Cycles - a Dawes Lightning. 

A real looker. My dad approved because it was a classic British make - no jokes about sitting on a razor blade from my dad. It had a sunburst paint effect and foam handlebar grips, as I recall - rather similar to  the  Raleigh Winner,  which  was the  most popular racer  at the time.   My best  mate had  a John Fern special and we'd regularly race around our own circuit, a sort of Tour de Bardon et Hugglescote. 

I probably didn't enjoy the Dawes as much as I should have. In truth I lost all interest in cycling by my late teens. In my adolescent mind it was cooler to walk, and to walk around with your collar turned up and a dark cloud above your head. 

There followed the fallow cycling years. I remember inheriting my uncle's racer while I was at university but I jilted that particular ex and left her waiting patiently in my landlady's garage in Bristol when I moved back home.

I didn't get back into bikes until the late 90s when I bought a cheap Halfords-own mountain bike, in a horrible luminous yellow, which I ran into the ground over a year or two (it literally fell apart half way around the Rutland Water cycle track).  But by this time I'd got the bug again.

So I needed a new bike. I had a friend at the time who was really into bikes. Let's call him Ben, because that was his name.   Ben had more bikes than he could fit in his flat so he persuaded  me to buy his old racer, even though I didn't want it. After riding a heavy mountain bike for the past couple of years the geometry of this slender racer felt all wrong the one time I took her out. So she sat unused in my outhouse for a year, gathering rust. Ben later complained that I hadn't looked after his bike and persuaded me to sell it back to him. Hmm.

Ben had a Cannondale that cost over a grand which AMAZED me at the time. He wanted me to get a Cannondale too and I even got as far as test-driving one but that didn't feel right either. It was out of my league. Instead I bought a Schwinn Sierra, much to Ben's disappointment.   

Schwinn were the big American bike manufacturer in the 70s and 80s, although they never caught on over here to the same extent.  In some ways the Sierra echoed the Dawes - foam grips, sunburst paint effect - but this was a sturdier steed. For most of this time I was living in Loughborough and it was a great place for cycling - with Beacon Hill outwoods and so many pretty villages proximate (Quorn, Barrow Upon Soar etc). I would often do a 10 mile circuit through on my way into work, as well as longer rides in the evening, listening to Neville Jason's reading of 'Remembrance of Things Past'  on my walkman. Aah. Halycon days. I only got rid of the Schwinn recently, to make room for the Pashley. At 16 years this was the longest relationship I've had, even though she spent the last 4 years of it locked in an outhouse. Frustrated spouses, please don't get any ideas.

By this time, I'd moved house and cycling wasn't quite so convenient living in the urban metropolis of Nottingham.  I'd also changed jobs, re-training as a teacher, and after a long, hard year of teacher-training I'd decided to treat myself. The Cannondale Bad Boy 'Lefty' was my treat.  It was a complete vanity purchase, as I've said elsewhere.  She'd caught my eye over a decade earlier when I test drove another Cannondale.  Compared to the Schwinn, she was as light as a feather and great fun to ride. And the looks she would get! I could never tell whether they were of admiration or puzzlement (because of the unusual 'lefty' fork) - but it didn't matter either way. I liked the attention.

I still have the Bad Boy. I even took her out the other day but if felt wrong. She's not so much an ex as a mistress, I suppose. Or is she the wife and the Pashley, the mistress?  I'm confused. And possibly in need of some relationship counselling.

My new love

We were so very nearly star-crossed lovers. I'd decided it couldn't work. She would let me down (probably somewhere up Nottingham Road hill). I needed to go with my head, not my heart.  I started looking at others, cut from a similar cloth (the Dawes Clubman, the Raleigh Sojourn).

But then, just when I'd given up hope, she was there. On ebay. Nearly new, at a bargain price. It was fate.  And love at first sight.  

It wasn't plain sailing though. Before I'd taken her out for our first date ride, I'd managed to have an accident   Yup, that's right.  You might notice that the Roadster comes with a fold down stand on the rear wheel which raises the bike slightly off the ground. Well, a gust of wind and one clumsy owner resulted in the bike falling over and landing with all of its considerable weight directly on the right brake lever, shearing it in two...  Hand made in Britain... (sigh). 

The replacement sturmey archer doesn't quite match, but I don't mind that. I like odd socks, after all. The standard Pashley plastic grip needed cutting off in the process so this necessitated an upgrade in grips too (PDW Whiskey ergonomic, if you're interested). Again I wasn't too bothered by this as the original grips seemed a little cheap compared to some of the other components. The only other thing I've invested in is a Basil 'California' side basket. I'd spent many a fruitless hour searching for a pannier set befitting of my ride. None were quite right and the ones I liked the most were hideously expensive. I was also concerned about the thickness of the tubes on the Pashley's rack and the potential difficulty in fitting a traditional pannier. I've plumped for the very simple (and cheap) Basil basket as a stop gap. 

It just slots over the top tube of the rack and is surprisingly secure.  It's very handy for grocery shopping (I tend to take it in with me instead of a supermarket basket) and I love that I can just sling my existing school bags into it as they are (without any of the faff of swapping contents between bags).   Interestingly the Basil basket is marketed as the California here, whereas in the U.S the same basket is marketed as the Cardiff.  I guess Cambridge was taken!

I was surprised how well it handled on the first few outings.  Yes, it's heavy but only compared to today's bikes.  It doesn't feel any heavier than the Schwinn Sierra I happily rode for years before the Bad Boy. The 5 gears are just about enough to handle most situations, although I pity any oncoming drivers who were confronted with my strained grimace as I was climbing Nottingham Road for the first time. It's also quicker than you might expect but after being overtaken by a pensioner for the first time I've realised my brakes weren't the only thing that required adjustment - my ego did too.  

Riding in an upright position has been the biggest revelation. My morning commute was suddenly different, a route I must have cycled a hundred times before.  I noticed things I'd never noticed before. Then it suddenly dawned on me - cycling doesn't have to be about just getting from A to B as quickly as you can. There's pleasure to be had in taking in your surroundings, in the getting there. However slowly.

From bad boy to stately gentleman

This summer I've decided I want to do some proper cycling.  Not 'Tour De France' inspired endurance tests but some 'gentle' touring, at my own pace. In the UK. Staying in comfortable bed and breakfasts...   Well, you've got to start somewhere - right?

To put you more fully in the picture, I am an overweight forty-something teacher with persistent back problems (that narrows it down to about a million people or so I reckon) and the extent of my cycling for the last 5 years has been the short commute to school and back.  

Now, the bike I've been using for this commute is wildly impractical for any sort of touring (wildly impractical for just about anything perhaps): a single-speed 'lefty' without even the fixings for a rack. A Cannondale, ahem 'bad-boy'. Yes, it was a vanity purchase. But do you know what? It's great fun to ride. Most of the time.

Retro-fitting it with a Brooks Flyer saddle will give you some idea of where my bike tastes have been heading recently, but I quite liked the juxtaposition of ancient and modern styles (although the sheer weight of the saddle and the Ergon grips have impacted its nippiness somewhat).  Yet it has proven rather impractical for my commute too. I'm not going to use this forum to moan about teacher workloads but have you ever tried to pack full class sets of marking and a bursting planning folder into a rucksack? Besides, I was starting to hate the faff of getting changed out of my sweaty lyrca into 'school uniform', never mind the frequent taunts from school children I would occasionally pass in the morning while in full cycling gear - usually variations on "Look, Mr B's got tights on !" Or the general feeling that I looked like a Russian ballet dancer gone to seed...   

So I started looking around for a new bike - an exciting process in itself. I decided to try and take advantage of the 'cycle to work' scheme and its variants.   My criteria was thus: (a) it would have be a bike that I could use for the school commute (so a rack was a must)  (b) it would also need to be suitable for light touring and, most importantly, (c) it would need to satisfy my vanity (preferably something retro styled).  You would think I'd learned my lesson from the bad boy. 

Like any self-respecting teacher geek, I compiled a spreadsheet to help me narrow down my options.

Before I started doing the spreadsheet the one bike I had in mind was the Pashley Roadster Sovereign (see criteria (c) above). But the more I looked into it the more I realised it too was impractical: it was too heavy, it has only 5 gears, the hub gear system itself  is unreliable, the tubes on the rack are too thick to fit most panniers  etc    

So which bike did I end up with? 

The Pashley Roadster Sovereign, of course.