When I see an adult on a bicycle, I do not despair for the future of the human race. H.G. Wells.
On Friday I received a curse from hell in email form asking me to review a recently purchased innertube and pump. I deleted the message and smiled wryly: for over a year I’ve averaged twenty miles a day with no punctures. Later that day at Hatton Garden, the inevitable happened. I got the bike home with occasional pumping and that evening was going to change the inner when a spin of the axle revealed how badly the hub needed a service. Feeling ‘in the mood’, I settled down to a few hours of grease and skimmed knuckles.
At this point the PR should note one or two things before reading on:
- Don’t smile wryly - the potentially redundant are in no position to behave with any degree of wryness.
- Stay in. Your money loves it, your bicycle loves it.
- Cycle. Travel faster than anything else in town, for free. It is also physically impossible to be in low spirits whilst cycling.
- Service your bike. You have time to learn, use it wisely. Put new knowledge to use and more coin in your denim. Here’s a good place to start.
A few years ago I was staying with a friend in Brooklyn who lent me his copy of a book called ‘Zen & The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance’. From what I can remember it was a self-help book that basically articulates how good bike maintenance is for your soul through weird quasi-fiction. (In return I lent him ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being’ which he told me he found ‘too preachy’. Since then I’ve pretty much stopped lending people books on the basis that those I lend them to may massively disappoint me).
Anyway for me the joy in the pattern of taking apart, fixing and reassembling extends further than the physical: carrying out exactly the same process of de and reconstruction on ideas and businesses is also good fun. The result can then form a basis for some creativity. But what makes executing this instinct on a bicycle particularly satisfying may be that there’s only one right answer, and no one needs to ‘buy’ it.
