What Goes Around: A London Cycle Courier's Story

"Yes. Back in the late 1990s—before the internet, before attachments and Dropbox and downloads— there was a cycle courier culture in most major cities. They often rode fixed gear bicycles. There was an urban bent to cycle couriers, and some transitioned to becoming velodrome track racers because of their experience on fixed gear bicycles. What is really compelling about this book is that she gets the landscape of London right. She accomplishes beautiful literary writing, that really captures this idea that when you’re on a bicycle, a city is not mediated. What I mean by that is this: when you’re on a bus, when you’re in a car, you’ve got glass, you’ve got enclosures that protect you—from the smell of back alleyways, from being exposed to unpleasant things—in a way that the bicycle simply does not. She doesn’t use the word, but it’s about how insulated and frictionless our life is designed to be now, and how being on a bicycle pushes against that. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter To illustrate that, you can think of the example of driving two different types of automobiles. One is a 1960s convertible with a manual transmission and no power steering, and you can feel everything that’s happening. The other is something like a Tesla, where you’ve got power steering, and everything is mediated through a computer to the point of it being self-driving. By design, you really don’t know what’s happening because there are all these interfaces. You can think of modern technological life generally as erring towards this sort of mediated, frictionless relationship to reality. Being on a bicycle in London, as she describes it, is the antithesis of that. Stopping and knowing a particular park bench in Hyde Park. She gets a lot about landscape and cycling very, very right. Yes. She’s not a racer, she’s got a job to do. She’s got deadlines, she’s walking up to office buildings and delivering blueprints and plans. It’s very much a specific cycling subculture that she taps into, with this aim of describing her affinity for London and this proximal access to a city that you’re granted by being on a bike that you miss out on in any other form of conveyance. It’s more of the person in front of you, to be honest. I wish I could say something romantic, Nigel, but no, it’s staring at the wheel in front of you and knowing what’s happening up the road in a particular breakaway and who’s motivated to chase down said breakaway. So there is a strategic macro view, but there certainly isn’t any noticing the countryside. Training is very different, particularly when you’re going out to do a long aerobic base ride alone. I have very fond memories of training alone in the Santa Cruz mountains in the Bay Area in California. Those situations are very different: you do notice and are struck by the silence and beauty of the situation in a way that you never would be in a competitive situation. Reflecting back, I think I perhaps preferred training over racing, which is an odd thing to say for someone who’s ostensibly in that line of work."