Again on the subject of bicycles in the movies – have you ever noticed that with one notable exception, Almira Gulch in The Wizard of Oz, cyclists are nearly always portrayed in a positive light? We’re almost never the bad guys. Sure, Butch Cassidy might have been a bank robber, but we forget…
I watched Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid the other day on my iPad and on this occasion gave a little more thought to the endearing scene where Butch is giving Etta Place a ride on the bicycle – and then amusing her with some trick riding until a humourless longhorn bull breaks up the…
On the subject of maintenance, I note this week the passing of Robert Pirsig, author of Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. As usual, being a step or two or three or four behind the rest of the world I was a late comer to Pirsig’s masterpiece. I didn’t read it until I was…
My brother and his family have taken up cycling recently and in an exchange of emails over the weekend I was advising him on the sorts of tools and gear it was wise to carry on outings – or at least the sort of stuff I usually carry when I go out for a ride.…
Hard on the heels of my post about the death of Mike Hall comes word that Giro d’Italia winner Michele Scarponi was killed on training ride near his home in Italy. Apparently, from what I have read, the driver of a van failed to give way at an intersection, failed to see Scarponi coming along…
It was a tram driver’s strike in Melbourne back in the early Nineties that got me riding a bicycle again as an adult. I was living in Elsternwick that year, an old bayside suburb in the city’s inner, and catching the ting-a-ling tram down Glenhuntly Road each morning to a fairly dull job writing features…
For some time now I have wanted to find an image that would illustrate the title of this blog, and encapsulate the sense of partnership between my bicycle and I as we make our dawn rounds of the English countryside – being the inspectors of sunrises as Thoreau once characterised himself in Walden. And this…
When I think of all the places I have been to and the journeys I have taken on my bicycles over the years none have been as transforming as the journey that began on the streets of Melbourne many years ago when I dusted off my old tourer and began commuting to work. I have…
“Isle of Fright!” screamed the page-three headlines in the newspaper that morning announcing the discovery of a new species of ‘vicious’ flesh-eating dinosaur that had been found embedded in the 120 million year-old cliffs of England’s fair and gentle Isle of Wight. Believing this walking nightmare to be the long-elusive great-great-grand-daddy of Tyrannosaurus rex, palaeontologists around the world were hailing it as one of the most significant dinosaur finds in recent years. An artist’s rendition showed it striding, fang and claw, through the swampy landscape that characterised the area at the time, in the company of an iguanodon, a brachiosaurus, and an armour-plated polecanthus, other prehistoric beasties that had also once roamed the island. Stirring stuff. And so for the sheer giddy hell of it I hopped aboard my old tourer and rode over there to see if I could find some dinosaur bones myself.
They call it the sleigh ride: the three-hour flight on a ski-equipped Hercules cargo plane from the U.S. base at McMurdo to that most exotic of Antarctic destinations: the South Pole. Schoolboy keen, I showed up early at the icy airstrip, bundled up, bags packed, eager to go. It was the summer of 2000 and…
