Me and my bike

Yesterday was quite historic in the life of Ali. It all began on Saturday morning when I got my dusty old bike out of the shed and walked it up to the bike repair shop, in disgustingly sudorific weather. I could fix bike punctures in the back yard myself when I was about seven years old, but when they asked me if I wanted to put the new tubes in, I decided that nowadays I couldn’t be bothered with that and paid them to do it. Then I had to buy a new helmet, because all the foam in my old one had disintegrated (and I had a red bike with a purple helmet, which wasn’t going to do!), buy a new hose for the pump (years ago I leant the bike to a friend for a week, they lost the hose out of the pump, then kindly replaced it but with one that was the wrong size, so I haven’t used the pump since) and now the new me is cycling to work.

So, I’ve cycled in yesterday and today and it's working well. The only problem is, I have a men’s bike, which doesn’t work so well with skirts, so I have to pack those. I don’t know why, but it seemed when I bought the bike, and still does, that if you’re actually into “cycling”, you ride men’s bikes (and to get the peddle distance right I would've needed something tall). So, back then when I was doing the more serious sort of riding, where you leave a country town and hit the open road, I bought this men’s hybrid mountain/road bike with twenty-one gears, so I could ride off into the dirt and road verges and the sunset and so on. But now that I am just going to poke around the inner-west of Sydney on it, I wish I had one of those nice vintage ladies bikes with a basket on the front, which I could peddle lazily about in a floral dress. But then, a while back they also made this rule, in some kind of moment of OH&S gone mad, that you can’t bring bikes into our building at work, so all the guys that have good bikes now ride in, disassemble their bikes, zip them up in a bike bag and carry them inside. That to me is a prohibitive hassle, so I’m glad my bike isn’t any sort of thief attraction, I’m not particularly fond of it, and I can just chain it up outside and not worry about it.

I was already walking to work, so the aim of cycling is just to save time. That and get a bit less sun each day (even though it’s outside the worst hours I feel like I get a lot of sun walking in and back, and I don’t want to come to work slathered in sunscreen), and maybe utilise some different muscles, since I mostly jog for exercise. So here’s to seeing if I stick with this ...