Tag: bicycle

Nearly half a bicycle

The atomic theory in Kilburn

This place (on Kilburn High Road) has been morphing steadily from dry cleaner’s to bike shop over the last few years. I remember being surprised one morning to see a few kids’ bikes lined up for sale outside but I’d say the shop is now approaching 50% bike shop. You can still see the dry cleaning hanging in the shop, though, so the old function is obviously clinging on. I imagine a bitter conflict in there, between the older sibling who wants to keep the dry cleaner’s going and a more entrepreurial younger one who wants to get into bikes, the coming thing (something about athleisure too – who gets anything dry-cleaned these days?).

In The Third Policeman, an absurdist classic from weird Irish civil servant, journalist and fantasist Flann O’Brien1, set in an unnamed rural community in Ireland before the war, one of his characters meditates on ‘the atomic theory’, which was still pretty new at this point: the surprising idea that matter is actually made of tiny particles called atoms and that, at their boundaries, objects might actually give up some of their atoms in a kind of exchange, blurring their edges a bit.

Sergeant Pluck, senior officer at the police barracks in this community, who keeps up with the latest ideas, has convinced himself that he sees evidence of the atomic theory at work in some locals who spend a little too much time on their bikes2 and are thus taking on something of their nature:

“Michael Gilhaney,” said the sergeant, “is an example of a man that is nearly banjaxed from the principle of the atomic theory. Would it astonish you to hear that he is nearly half a bicycle?”

If I had time I’d expand on this: I’d try to give you something of the awkward status of science after Einstein in post-independence Ireland, dominated by an atavistic Catholic church. Like other small European Catholic nations in this period, Ireland was self-consciously backward, priggishly anti-modern. It took the State decades to overcome its self-satisfied stance on, well, everything.

O’Brien was different: a modernist but also a devout Catholic, deeply sceptical about the actual modern. He often took the church’s side in his columns for the Irish Times3 (which he wrote pseudonymously because he retained his full-time job in the Irish civil service, an institution that retained essentially its colonial form for decades after independence). In 1942, for instance, he somehow managed to attend a lecture by Professor Erwin Schrödinger at the new Institute for Advanced Studies in Dublin4 in which the Austrian Nobel Prize-winner, in passing, threw some shade on the idea of causality. Your man was not impressed and wrote, in his column:

“I understand also that Professor Schrodinger has been proving lately that you cannot establish a first cause. The first fruit of this Institute, therefore, has been to show that there are two Saint Patricks and no God.

O’Brien was a brilliant writer, a self-conscious European modernist and an unembarrased advocate for new modes. I hoovered this stuff up when I was an adolescent: he had the oddness and the sly, disorienting humour kids like me were all looking for then. It was Kafka, Burroughs, B.S. Johnson, Vonnegut, Angela Carter and all the other weirdos. But O’Brien was different, more than an oddball: he was a conservative Catholic from the outer fringes. A lot of his stuff was buried and not published until decades later when rediscovered by publishers from the metropole who urgently needed more of this kind of borderline psychedelic stuff in their lists. His rhythms, his alienating settings and his humour could have come from Joyce or Beckett but he’d have run a mile if you’d tried to connect them or to recruit him to a scene or a movement.

His Catholicism meant that O’Brien couldn’t entertain or play with the new, scientific ideas in the way these atheist artists did. He would never have claimed that freedom. The atomic theory was just the kind of idea you can see animating a passage from Joyce but in O’Brien it can only be mocked. This idea, that objects might exchange matter, even at a tiny scale, is, to state the obvious, a profoundly anti-Catholic idea: a kind of blasphemous, material transubstantiation and a denial of the distinctness of God’s creations. It must have upset him profoundly.

Meanwhile, in Kilburn – still the centre of the Irish community in London – I might add that I only know about Sparkling Laundry and Cleaning myself because I cycle past it several times a week on my epic commute5. I had a conversation with my doctor only this morning about the possibility I might be taking on something of the bicycle myself.

  1. I’ve called him Flann O’Brien here but he was born Brian O’Nolan (Brian Ó Nualláin), wrote under several names and his Irish Times byline was Myles na gCopaleen. Wikipedia says he wrote science fiction under other names and some more recent collections have included stories by John Shamus O’Donnell, an Amazing Stories contributor who may or may not have been the same man. ↩︎
  2. Don’t forget, in this period the bicycle was also a symbol of the modern: a weapon, a hyper-efficient transportation device, a liberatory technology. ↩︎
  3. O’Brien’s Cruiskeen Lawn columns were a cult read with the Irish Times’ elite readers. They’re often about something of immediate interest in Ireland at the time of publication but they’re some of the smartest and funniest newspaper writing you’ll ever read – and they have become a model for much of this kind of stuff since. Try the collection Best of Myles. ↩︎
  4. Ironically Prof Schrödinger had been brought to Dublin in 1939 by Éamon de Valera as part of an effort to modernise the country’s creaking university system. ↩︎
  5. I might also, self-indulgently, tell you that I’ve occasionally taken as a subject for some poems Quex Road, a stub of a road that links Kilburn High Road with West End Lane a bit South of here.
    ↩︎

Boris Bike lessons

Note: I’m not a proper cyclist. I don’t own a bicycle pump or a puncture repair kit. The Mayor of London takes care of all that for me. I have a Boris Bikes fob and I swan around on one of his sponsored blue bikes for a total of about three hours per week. But here’s what I’ve learnt anyway:

Don’t wear anything special. This is my top tip. In nearly two years of Boris Biking in the West End I’ve never had any grief, never been cut up by a truck, shouted at by a cabbie or come off the bike. I may just be lucky but I reckon I’m beating the odds here (at least if what other cyclists tell me is true). And I have a strong feeling (no evidence at all, though) that this is because I don’t dress the part. Motorists steer clear of me because I look like a fat loon who’s borrowed a bike. So: no helmet, no lycra, no hi-viz and no special glasses (what are the special glasses for anyway?).

Take up a lot of room. To be precise, try to use a whole lane. Science bit: if you politely ride in the kerb, you’ll give overtaking motorists the strong impression that they can probably just squeeze past you without going into the next lane or onto the other side of the road – and your polite side will want to agree. But you mustn’t because, people being people, they will actually try to do it. Pain and aggravation will follow. So, if you take up a whole lane, not only will drivers have to slow down and think carefully about passing, they’ll have to politely indicate and move into the next lane, disturbing the flow of traffic and making everyone think. All of this boosts your odds.

Get out in front. This is about being visible (so it does slightly contradict my ‘no hi-viz’ rule). I always used to wonder why cheeky couriers and fixie herberts were always right out in front of the queued traffic at the lights but it’s obvious once you’ve tried it. You need every driver on the front row of the grid to know you’re there and to have to use their time at the red light to plan a way around you.

Jump lights. This is related to the previous point. Going through a red light when it’s safe to do so will get you out in front of the traffic and give you a chance to get organised before the rush begins. There are, of course, many circumstances when doing this would be stupid. Common sense applies (and they should probably change the rules to allow cyclists to do it legally. Getting the bikes through the lights first would be safer than requiring us all to go at the same time). The other thing is, I think drivers actually get this and appreciate you making yourself visible (although they might not show it and might phone in to James Whale later on to bitch about it).

Go round the outside (don’t try this on the North Circular). This is obvious but can be a bit scary. It’s basically the rule about not trying to squeeze down the left-hand side of trucks and buses where you will be squashed. But the larger point is: don’t be afraid to be in the right-hand lane. You are probably safer there than in the gutter. I think that the more confident and prominent cyclists are – the more ownership we take of the road – the safer we will all be.

Communicate. Wave, shout, raise your hand in a sort of taciturn, blokey way, point and smile. It’s like life: sullen silence will get you sullen silence. Don’t assume everyone knows what you’re planning and don’t assume they know inwardly that you’re grateful when they give way. I am quite sure that substantially increasing the sum total of communication done on the road will improve everyone’s mood, change behaviour and save lives. And another thing: when I started with this cycling thing, I think I assumed that cyclists would be chatting all the time, swapping anecdotes at the lights etc. But that doesn’t seem to happen. Why not? Is it just me? (see ‘fat loon on a bike’ point above).