My town bike is waiting for a pair of new tyres so I had to take the cargo bike to the station this morning. Now, the cargo bike is a tank, as bikes go, it’s long and heavy, but it also has an electric motor so getting it up the hill is rather less of an effort than getting a Pendleton Somersby up there on pure pedal power. I appreciated that this morning: it’s wet, so I zipped my jacket up, but it’s not all that cold, so I’d have been uncomfortably hot by the time I got to the top if I’d been doing it unassisted.
Anyway, the bit I really enjoyed was going down the other side. There was no other traffic, it wasn’t wet enough to impede my vision, and the wind and the rain on my face were exhilarating. I once read somewhere that cycling may be the closest most of us get to knowing what it’s like to fly (as opposed to being flown, I mean). It certainly felt like that this morning.
Kathleen Jowitt 