Last year saw me do a lot of bike touring - visiting Cuba, France, Sri Lanka and the US. Much of this involved getting lost, and relying on the helpful directions of friendly old locals.
The furthest I’ll get this year, however – thanks to various DIY requirements around the house – looks like being the remoter aisles of the local DIY store. In other words, I’ll still be getting lost and relying on the helpful directions of friendly old locals; they’ll just happen to be working there.
Being a devoted everyday cyclist, I’m doing all the travelling involved by bike. Anything transportable by a car is transportable by a bike trailer: worn carpets, dead mattresses, broken beds and the like to the dump one way; paint, ladders, flat-pack furniture from the superstore the other.
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The mattress was the trickiest: a double, which had been rendered a health hazard by a departed lodger’s ‘tea stains’ – though if that’s what he calls tea, I shudder to think what he used the teapot for. Anyway, we somehow coiled it up with tape and stood it upright on the trailer, like a bouncy castle on wheels.
My £70 bike trailer has repaid itself many times over (the council charges £40 to remove each large refuse item). But what truly makes all this a pleasing and efficient process is that the dump (which, charmingly, has a special entrance for bikes) and DIY stores (which don’t) are conveniently placed along a flat, well surfaced rail-trail that runs from behind my house – which is partly why I bought the house in the first place.
Quality of surface is the key, and it’s something local authorities are dreadfully haphazard about. What’s labelled a ‘cycle path’ on the map could be anything from a potholed, boggy track to firm asphalt – or both at various points along the way.
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