On the Road Bike by Ned Boulting Page A

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.
    â€˜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