Everyday People

My first car was a white 1962 Morris Minor. Actually, that’s not strictly true - before that I drove my mum’s 1966 one, and her 1972 van, which we took to the Reading Festival one year. All had ‘A Series’ engines, and I could strip them down to the con-rods & rebuild them with...
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. . . like a fish needs a bicycle . . . Get a bike instead:
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OK, so here’s the Prisoners’ Dilemma: Two guys are arrested on suspicion of being the pair behind an armed bank robbery. The investigating officer is cunning though, and separates them, making each an identical offer: Confess to the robbery, and thus provide the evidence to put your accomplice away for a long stretch, and we can...
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I met my business partner for a quick lunch today in Jarrow - a place with an interesting history: In 1936, mass unemployment and extreme poverty in the north-east of England drove 200 men to march in protest from Jarrow to London. Their MP, Ellen Wilkinson was with them as they came south to petition...
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(n.b. That’s a tongue in cheek title. We love Xtracycles.) ANYWAY, having made that clear, take a look at this, which I found via the Bicycle Diaries: Until the punchline, I thought it was going to be an advert from some lunatic “we’ve got a big enough army not to need to worry about any so-called...
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What we wear reflects more of our self image and sense of where we belong in the world than most of us would like to admit. Whether your personal style is conformist . . . . . . or a little less restrained . . . . . . how you wear what you wear speaks...
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Reading a couple of pieces over the last few days by Magic Roundabouts and Padded Pants, and Treadly and Me, and even this piece in the New York Times, I’ve been struck at the way we see differences in our fellow human human beings rather than the similarities. There’s some switch inside our brains that...
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Yesterday I asked my fellow would-be BikeAbility instructors if they used cycle paths or roads. Not surprisingly (as we’re going to be teaching others how to ride on roads), all eight of them said they rode on the road. So then I asked them which they would prefer to ride on. Every single one of them...
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I’m sure this question’s been asked and answered before, but I got put on the spot in a meeting today: What sort of bike should people have for riding to work? Just to be clear about this - we’re talking about the 75% of people at the organisation I was visiting, who live within 5 miles...
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OK - first off, please go and read this first rate article by Andy in Germany - Car Free Struggles. When you’re done, and have left a suitable comment, come back here and read the rest of this post. You’re back? Good. Here’s my question for you: Really, how hard is it to ride your bike...
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