On the Road Bike (11 page)

At the fearsome Vicar's Hill (a Category Two climb), my family came out to cheer me on, it being just around the corner from my house.

This was a big moment for me. My home turf, my family out to honour me as I passed. How many times had I seen this enacted on the Tour? The local hero riding off the front of an indulgent peloton and into the bosom of his family at the roadside. But that's not quite how it happened.

Simon (an actor who you may remember from his defining role in a Bananabix advert which aired briefly in 1997), had the audacity to attack. It was an unforgivable breach of cycling etiquette. The jobbing thespian, whose stagecraft had helped to shift a banana-based cereal, crested the summit before me, and drew cheers and whoops from my turncoat children.

And then it all went wrong for the theatrical artist. From my perspective, a few dozen metres behind him on the climb, I was delighted to see him slow down to take the applause, lose balance and fall in a ghastly sideways arc towards the road before he could unclip his shoes. He landed with no dignity left to his name in front of my children. The cycling gods had exacted an instant and terrible revenge. By the time I lumbered to the top, my family had stopped laughing at Simon and were looking rather pityingly at my effort. In case I needed a reality check, the looks on their faces told me that I wasn't in fact racing the Tour of Flanders. I was wasting a Sunday morning in the company of a bunch of South London misfits pretending to be somebody else, somewhere else.

But no matter. I loved it all. It was a ride masquerading as a race, an eccentric nod to one of cycling's great Continental institutions, executed with perfect earnest, British, dottiness.

I instigated still bigger and bolder adventures within the M25. Sometimes I had to dream them up. Sometimes they were breath-taking in their simple-mindedness. The eighty-odd miles it took me to visit every football ground in the capital was a high-tide mark in futility.

At each ground (Crystal Palace, Fulham, Brentford, Chelsea, Arsenal, Tottenham, Barnet, Leyton Orient, West Ham, Millwall and Charlton; in that order), I self-consciously took a picture of myself to prove that I'd done it. It took me hours and hours to complete the loop.

Somewhere in Edmonton, I bonked (cycling-speak for ran out of energy), staggered into a newsagent and stuffed two Turkish Delights straight into my mouth before I'd even paid for them. I had to sit down on the pavement for a minute or two after that while the world turned into a pink chocolate-coated jelly. Barnet nearly killed me. And by Leyton Orient, I had given up looking for back routes, and ended up ploughing down the A12, buffeted by the passing turbulence from three lanes of thundering trucks.

Eventually, but hours later than I had imagined I would, I arrived home exuberant. I swiftly uploaded the photos, and emailed the whole series to my dad on the bizarre assumption that my adventure might somehow impress him. I was in my forties. Other things might have impressed him, but not that.

He replied by email the next day.

‘Where's QPR?'

But I am not alone. The madness is not mine alone. In fact, I would hazard a guess that I am only mildly afflicted.

The last time I rode over Lambeth Bridge at 8.45 in the morning, I burst out in spontaneous laughter. Three self-organising lines of cyclists, each ten bikes long had formed at a set of traffic lights. Each rider failed openly to acknowledge the absurdity of this event. No one nodded at anyone in recognition, nor in wonder at the sight of so many other like-minded cyclists on the road. But one by one, and a little po-faced, the commuters took their place in this new pageant, becoming a very British affair. The ‘slow lane' for hire bikes, heavy mountain bikes and Brompton folding bikes, the ‘middle lane' for fixies and hybrids, and the ‘fast lane' for white middle-aged men on carbon-fibre bikes worth more than their houses. The cars didn't stand a chance. It was remarkable. People are remarkable.

Something good has happened here in London, which perhaps has found an equal reflection in towns and cities the length and breadth of the country: the number of people using bikes has gone from ‘negligible' to ‘something'. And sometimes, that ‘something' amounts to ‘really quite a lot'.

Car drivers rail at cyclists riding two abreast. I get into arguments at dinner parties with car drivers who rail at cyclists riding two abreast. Then, when I am out on my bike with friends, I find myself riding single file so that car drivers will not rail at me and my friends for riding two abreast. It's a first-world problem, I suppose. And cyclists can be every bit as sanctimonious as motorists can be unreasonable.

I took the kids on a cycling protest ride shortly before the 2012 mayoral election, thinking it would be a family-fun happy/smiley kind of affair. It wasn't. It was freezing cold, drizzling and militant. Before I could object, one of the organisers had draped a hi-vis marshal's gilet on me, and charged me with cycling ahead to major junctions and blocking the road by sheer willpower while our long stream of protesters cycled past. I spent the morning in agonies of discomfort, quite unable to discharge my duties with anything that even faintly resembled conviction. I must have looked like a vegan in a pie shop.

‘Critical mass, mate!' my fellow partisans would yell at me. ‘Reclaim the streets!' Oh, whatever. I weakly grinned back at them, and then looked at the motorist I was inconveniencing, with a cringing countenance. Wrong man. Wrong job.

But the cyclists are here to stay. They are a day-glo visible presence, with LED lights winking out their pious Morse code. They jump lights, they enrage drivers, they hug the gutter, they slip through the traffic, they slosh through puddles and they ring their bells in moral outrage. They race, they trundle, they rock from side to side. They puncture and they ride on. In all their manifestations, suddenly, they are everywhere.

The explosive and unheralded interest in cycling has penetrated previously inaccessible recesses in the capital. Places like the Village Barber's, at the end of my road.

This very unpretentious Turkish barber shop, run with occasional zeal, but mostly
Daily-Mirror
-reading, Lambert-and-Butler-flicking carefreeness by Ahmet, a second-generation Cypriot immigrant in his late twenties, is where I have been going for years to get my hair hacked off. On every one of those visits we have observed the same, barren, routine. Until last summer, that is.

Normally, up till now, I cycle to the end of the road, and lock up my bike outside his shop. He watches me, as he pauses briefly over the TV guide in the paper. Then I go in and ask for a ‘number four'.

And always, when I am seated, and he has tucked in the red nylon sheet thing into my collar, the same question. ‘Natural neckline? Or square?'

‘Um . . .'

Since I have never seen the back of my head except in those awful seconds when a mirror is held up at the end of the cut, I am never sure what the correct neckline answer is. ‘Oh, just the normal.' I hedge my bets.

‘Not working today, my man?' This, too, always gets asked, since I am invariably the only customer and it's normally a Tuesday lunchtime, when upstanding, productive citizens are at work in offices.

‘Yes, I am. Kind of.' He looks sceptical. I try to tell him about my imminent trip to Northumbria to cover a bike race. But it doesn't work. Ahmet has not registered a thing. He never does.

Until suddenly, last summer, the summer of 2012, when there was a confluence of two events. The first was an almighty traffic jam. It took him an hour to drive the three miles to work (no Olympic lanes in Sydenham).

The second was the arrival of his new neighbour, Mark.

At the side of Ahmet's shop, there is a tiny little room that has variously been rented out to all manner of chancers and shady entrepreneurs. The last tenant operated an IT Solutions and Web Design Service, which mostly unlocked mobile phones and did the odd photocopy for 10p a sheet. They didn't last long.

Then Mark, a wiry young bloke, took on the lease and, implausibly, opened a bike repair service. Instantly, it started to thrive. One day Ahmet looked up from his
Daily Mirror
, took notice, and promptly bought a bike.

Mark told him that there is a cycle path almost all the way from his house to the shop, along a river and through a park. It came as a revelation. Ahmet now rides with delight and pride into work every day, and no trip to the barber's shop is complete any more without a discussion of London's cycle network, the speed of commuting, and his elaborate preparations for the onset of the cold winter weather.

But it goes further than that. He's had new bike racks installed outside the shop. He takes a solicitous interest in how securely the bikes are locked. He recommends Mark's service to his customers, and Mark has brought new customers to Ahmet, middle-class men who would normally never have considered the Village Barber's at the end of the road, where a cut costs £9, and has done for as long as anyone can remember.

The two things, hair and bikes, have become movingly symbiotic.

When I lived in Hamburg, during a worryingly long directionless period of my life in the early nineties, there used to be a shop called ‘Wein und Schuhe'. As its name suggests, it sold wine and shoes. You'd pop in for a bottle of wine, and end up buying some shoes. Or, while trying on a pair of pumps, you'd be tempted by a South African Chenin Blanc. It was odd, but perfect. Now, at the end of my road, Ahmet and Mark have created the same perfect storm. It is equally miraculous.

But, if my claim to be a London cyclist was really going to stand up to scrutiny, then there was one pilgrimage I had yet to complete. It seemed inevitable that one day I would make my way to London's Herne Hill Velodrome, and quite shaming that I hadn't yet done so.

Its name, spoken with affection and reverence, kept cropping up. Every time I talked, either idly or with intent to anyone with a feel for the history of the sport, and in particular with a London connection, the place would get a nod and a name check. The only surviving stadium from the Austerity Games of 1948, Herne Hill has been in continuous use ever since. It reeked, even from a distance, of ‘heritage', which is what you get when your ‘legacy' acquires wrinkles. It had a holiness all of its own, that much was self-evident.

I had been skirting it, literally, as well as figuratively, for long enough. Given that my home is no more then three or four miles away, the fact of my non-visiting seemed increasingly to be preposterous. Indeed, it was becoming a source of
mauvaise-foi
; a deep-set shame that I would try to hide from the wider cycling family.

‘Remember the “Good Friday”, Ned? Not last year's, but the one before that?' This was the sort of casual testing gambit that would often be sprinkled into conversation with cycling folk, a group to which I scarcely belonged, but with whom I had more and more occasion to deal.

‘Sure.' (Bluff.)

‘Well, who won the scratch race?'

‘The scratch race?' (Playing for time.)

‘Yes. I can't remember.'

‘Oh, I know who you mean . . . Damn! What was his name?' (Playing for time and a bluff all in one.)

Enough of the deceit!

It was time for me to find out why it was that so many of the paths I'd followed in the lives of riders and fans of all generations seemed to meet and cross at Herne Hill. I would go and pay my respects at the oval-shaped tarmac cradle of Bradley Wiggins's career, and the bluff would no longer be so naked. I would fill in the bald spot on my map of the known cycling world.

As it happened, the Good Friday meeting was just around the corner. This, I had learned, was the very centrepiece of London's track calendar.

I had nothing else in the diary. I checked the weather forecast, not without trepidation. It seemed to suggest heavy downpours, a howling wind and occasional glimpses of watery spring sunshine: 12 degrees, but feeling like five. My resolve took an immediate knock. Perhaps, I plotted, if I exploited the almost certain reluctance of my nine-year-old daughter, I could use that as my excuse to stay at home instead.

I looked at her over the Cheerios one morning. ‘Fancy going to the Good Friday meeting? You don't have to.' I added the last corrective rather over-hastily.

‘Is that like the Olympics?' she crunched.

‘A bit like that. But not much like that. Although there will be chips.' Why was I suddenly trying to sell it to her? ‘It's a bike race,' I told her, more realistically. ‘Well, in fact it's lots of bike races.'

‘Cool.' She loaded up another spoon.

‘It might rain. Heavily.'

‘I hope Liquigas are there.' Crunch. She had a curious passion for the Italian superteam, mostly comprised of more-or-less reformed dopers. I hadn't the heart to tell her that the two-time winner of the Giro D'Italia Ivan Basso probably wouldn't be too sure what to do with the £50 Homebase voucher on offer for the runners-up of the Madison.

So, when the day of the races dawned, we set off. We rode there, through more and more salubrious parts of London until we dropped down into Dulwich village itself, manicured and affluent and a long way removed from Lewisham, which we had left behind us. As we freewheeled downhill, coasting past the unfathomably expensive organic babywear shops and cutesy bakeries, I felt suddenly unsure that I had taken us in the right direction. We stopped so that I could consult the map on my phone. It seemed scarcely conceivable that there could be a bike track tucked away anywhere near here, still less an Olympic venue.

But, turning onto Burbage Road (average property price £852,977), we stumbled across just that. Herne Hill Velodrome, as good as invisible to the passing motorist and set back from the road by some hundred yards, accessible only via a pot-holed track, is a patch of pure history, modestly disguised as nowhere very notable.

We chained up our bikes, paid a few quid at the gate and walked in.