A wheel story of adventure

TRANSPORT: It's All About the Bike, By Robert Penn, Particular Books, 208pp. £17.99

JOURNALIST AND cycling enthusiast Robert Penn isn’t quite Sergeant Pluck, but in his entertaining and vividly informative book he proudly intimates that he’s more than halfway there.

The doughty Pluck is the hero of Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman, the satirical tale of a tender but unrequited love affair between a man and his bike. Penn quotes Pluck's "atomic theory" that prolonged contact with a bicycle can result in "molecular exchange" whereby a man spends so much time in the saddle he becomes half man, half bike.

A reference to Flann O'Brien in a chapter about buying the perfect saddle – a B17 by Brooks – is typical of this erudite and intriguing read. It's a simple idea for a book. Wanting to buy a new bicycle, he chooses not to spend £3,000 on a mass-produced, off-the-peg carbon racing model because he knows they are designed with that bane of modern technology, inbuilt obsolescence. Penn is not a fair-weather cyclist. He was once inspired to cycle 40,000 km around the world after reading Dervla Murphy's Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a Bicycleand he continues to cycle for leisure and to get from A to B. He intends to get 30 years out of his new bike so he hunts out the best, hand-built from parts that have already proven themselves and are made by craftsmen. Each chapter documents his acquisition of the key parts of his new bike and it's a process that takes him to specialist workshops across Europe and to America – from Sapim in Belgium, a company that makes spokes, to Portland, Oregon to pick up the perfect headset, "an unglamorous but fundamental component of the bicycle".

What could have turned out to be an overwritten shopping list for cycle obsessives is transformed into an entertaining read by Penn's easy writing style and the nuggets of information that dot each page. For example, the reason we never forget how to ride a bike is down to the nerve cells in our brains called molecular layer interneurons which encode the skill of cycling into a language that can be stored as memory in other parts of the brain. The modern bicycle was invented thanks to the ingenuity of Scottish vet John Boyd Dunlop, who in 1888 invented the pneumatic tyre while living in Belfast. A doctor had recommended cycling for his sickly nine-year-old son but suggested it would be better if some way could be found to minimise the jarring of the cobbled streets of Belfast. Dunlop tacked linen to the wheels of the boy's tricycle, which in turn held an inflated tube in place against the wheel. He patented the idea and began small-scale production in Dublin and took out an ad in the December 1888 edition of Irish Cyclist: "Look out for the new pneumatic safety (bicycle). Vibration impossible". Tell that to anyone who has ever cycled through Trinity College on one of the otherwise superb Dublin bikes!

Penn touches on the bigger question of why cycling has fallen so far out of fashion when it’s such an efficient, cheap and indeed democratic way to get around. It can’t be down to Mark Twain’s cautionary but memorable line, “Get a bicycle. You will not regret it, if you live” – though many cycling Dubliners will nod their heads in agreement at that sentiment. The low point for the bicycle in Britain, according to Penn, came in the mid-1970s, when it was no longer seen as a valid form of transportation. Instead a bicycle was viewed as a pest, with people who persisted in cycling seen as either eccentrics or poor. Penn suggests that perception is only seriously being revised today. I’m not so sure. Despite the introduction of our bike-to-work scheme, which has resulted in a major upgrade in the quality of bicycle on the roads, my guess is that there is still a sneaking suspicion that if you’re on a bike in Dublin city you’ve either got a death wish, are eccentric or a bit bohemian, or, in the eyes of some, too poor to own a car.

Only last week, while cycling home from work I was run into the kerb by a swerving car. I remonstrated with the driver, a twentysomething Celtic cub – who, sadly for her, doesn’t yet realise that it’s all over – with a steering wheel in one hand and a mobile phone in the other. She seemed aghast at having to converse with someone as lowly as a cyclist. “Oh why don’t you save up and buy yourself a cor,” she sneered.

Bernice Harrison is an Irish Times journalist