On the Road Bike by Ned Boulting Page B

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.
    â€˜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?’
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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