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.