Jim's Bike

Both Bike Snob and Matt Seaton warn against it, but they both do it. As does everyone who uses a bicycle on a regular basis: get sentimental about the machines they're riding. So with the health warning that I'm about to do that: let us plunge in.

Many years ago, I moved to the US (I moved back, don't worry), and in the basement of the house where I lived the landlord had left an old, red Peugeot road bike. It was the first "proper" bike I rode, and it's the one that got me into cycling. When I left the States at the age of 14, the landlord (Jim) gave it to me, and I started to put a respectable quantity of miles in on it. My ascent of Holme Moss on it (complete with small vomit at the top) is one of my happiest cycling memories (we're a strange breed, but if you hadn't realised that - what are you doing here?). I also learned bike mechanics on it. My weekly custom of a Saturday afternoon was to take a moderately working bike, and tinker with it in such a manner that it wouldn't work until divine intervention in the form of my dad and a spanner had fixed it again.

Over time I acquired more bikes, and "Jim's Bike," (as it was known) was relegated to the status of town bike. For five years it's been reliable enough to get me to work for 9AM, yet also familiar and speedy enough to be pilotable in the early hours of the morning when I've been trying to do an impression of a plausibly sober man cycling through a (what seems to be at the time) town centre crawling with police. Through that time it's also become more and more bastardised. Every time a part falls off, it's usually been replaced by a hand-me-down from a more flashy bike in my stable - or I've bought something almost entirely inappropriate for the job, and then had to put up with it (for the last few months I've been running a red and white cable housing, claiming it's art-deco).

In short, (and to sound dangerously close to a Disney film) the stories that bike has are irreplaceable (including the excellent one about me crashing it on the way to meeting my girlfriend's parents for the first time, and having to show up with blood and knackered jeans very much in evidence).

So why all this arse-sunbeams and navel gazing in a SingleSpeed blog? Well, because I'm a muppet and have totalled Jim's Bike. In what we could euphemistically refer to as a "fatal rear derailleur/wheel interface," I managed to bend the frame cycling home from university (much to the horror and consternation of the learner driver behind me who had to deal with a suddenly flailing cyclist undergoing a massive skid and deceleration from twenty). I have taken the frame to local bike shops, and much sucking through teeth has been done, and the unfortunate reality has been reached that it will be far cheaper to buy a second hand bike than to try and fix this Millenium Falcon of a bike. So tomorrow morning I'm off to the second hand bike mart to see if I can pick up a natty (yes, I did use the word natty - and yes, I have recently watched a lot of Bargain Hunt) fixie. Or failing that something equally as cool as Jim's Bike.

I won't throw Jim's Bike away though. Not yet anyway (though my landlord may object to me hiding a bike in my flat, though given the lack of functionality I'm going to claim it's merely a "bicycle shaped object,"). I have done what we're all warned against, I have become sentimentally involved with a bike (not like that, concentrate people), and then written about it. Just as everyone has one bad novel in them, every bike blogger has at least one bad and overly sentimental article in them. For which I can only apologise (and just imagine how exciting my next post will be if I do buy a new bike).