This, then, is not designed to tell the reader how to differentiate between brands of derailleur or explain why riding a bicycle is good for your health. There is plenty missing. I’ve left out most of the political and environmental debate (provision of facilities, zero emissions etc.) because it is either obvious or it is already well served by innumerable blogs and forums. I haven’t included anything on track cycling on the grounds that if you need a velodrome to do it then it is out of most people’s reach. There’s nothing on folding bikes, Moultons or recumbents because they look ridiculous and can’t corner. I cannot tell you about your VO2 max or how to lace a wheel. I don’t know how to stop your bike getting nicked and or how you become an Iron Man. I’ve picked and chosen quite shamelessly from all the available information on the basis of what I felt was interesting and useful. Because almost all cyclists feel a strong sense of ownership of both the bicycle and the experience of cycling, there will almost inevitably be some I can’t satisfy, and who will wish I’d included less of some stuff and more of another. That, I’m afraid, is an occupational hazard of writing about a subject about which so many people feel so passionately. The other occupational hazard, common to all non-fiction, is discovering that half the best stories come to you after the book is published. People write in, talk to you at book events, offer fabulous heaps of gold-mine material. Sometimes you get to include some of that material in future editions. Even if you don’t, there’s always the pleasure in knowing that the subject has inspired readers to dust off their own untold stories.
My own background is straightforward. I ride a bicycle every day in London, I do as much mountain biking in Scotland as I can, I’ve done long tours abroad, I’ve taken part in sportives and audaxes, and that’s it. Like thousands of other cyclists around the country, I also use every other form of public and private transport available – cars, cabs, trains, planes, buses, the London Underground. I’m not a cyclist because I hate cars or can’t understand the pleasure of driving – I’m a cyclist because I reckon there is no lovelier form of transport.
Chapter One
Framebuilding
Far away in a corner of Lincolnshire, there are men looking at the sky. They stand in a row in a car park and they stare at the clouds. They stay like that for quite a long time. In order to see the sky more closely, most of them have got cameras with huge white lenses of the type generally used by paparazzi photographers to take covert shots of celebrities’ deodorant marks. The lenses are the size and shape of ships’ foghorns, and are so heavy that they require a whole separate entourage of kit to support them – sandbags, tripods, vans, wives. Despite their supporting role, the wives do not seem to be that interested in either the cameras or the sky. Instead they sit patiently, sharing out home-made pasta with other wives or lying back on deck-chairs soaking up the flatland sun while the men swing their lenses from ground to cloud and back again.
When the men have looked at the sky for long enough, they go and stare at a wall instead. Directly opposite the car park is a wooden perimeter fence a couple of metres high. With a small stepladder, it is easy enough for the men to press their lenses to the gaps or for the taller ones to see over the top. Anyone passing down the road from the nearby town can see a long line of men wobbling on their ladders with their noses pressed to the planks. It looks like a convention of trainee window cleaners, or maybe peeping toms – very British, but a little bit sinister too.
It’s midsummer in the countryside, and this is the sort of scenery to make you believe in England again. Somewhere nearby, there are canals, bright expanses of poppies and the occasional heart-lifting lilt of a lark’s call. Once in a while a hare lollops out of the high fields of green grain and tears off into the distance, pursued by invisible demons. In the distance Coningsby’s church tower sails over the surrounding fields and the proper old-fashioned bell still tolls the hour. Even so, the men with long lenses have not picked a particularly restful place to sit back and picnic. Every twenty minutes or so there is a low rumble from somewhere far away. The men take it as a cue to start twiddling dials and taking urgent meter readings. The wives get up suddenly and run for the cars. The rumble moves closer, resolves itself into an approach from east or south and alters from a mutter to a roar. A small black dot appears over the tree tops. It is moving very fast. The sound has sharpened and is suddenly so huge that you have no choice but to stop whatever you’re doing and turn towards the source, so huge it blots out everything except itself. And then for a second a vast black triangle slides over the sun. It is very low now, low enough to see every detail. The men with the lenses click silently, their movements frantic. Indifferent, almighty, the triangle heads towards the runway. Even with your hands over your ears, the sound of it is now so overwhelming it makes your vision go fuzzy. Its passage makes your heart squeeze tight with fear and excitement, and when it has gone it leaves a stinking rip in the summer air.
This is RAF Coningsby, home not only to the surviving RAF Battle of Britain planes (a Lancaster bomber, several Spitfires, a couple of Hurricanes and a Tiger Moth), but to the British contingent of Eurofighter Typhoons. The Lancasters and Spitfires alone would probably bring the planespotters in their droves, but the combination of nostalgia for World War Two and anticipation for the thrills of World War Three is almost irresistible. During particularly busy periods, including training days for the Battle of Britain displays, the car park and the whole surrounding area is full of people all busily destroying what remains of their hearing. Each man has his camera and a little notepad on which to keep track of dates, times, radio frequencies and serial numbers. If you like fighter planes, this place is Mecca.
So it’s fortunate that Dave and Debbie Yates are keen on engineering in general. Their smallholding is about half a mile from the end of Coningsby’s runway, and life for them is punctuated by the roar of approaching bombers. They moved here four years ago from the North East, and have set the whole place up as a smallholding. In the winter, they train spaniels as gun dogs. And in the summer, Dave makes bicycles.
Dave Yates is famous for his frames. In his time, working either as part of larger manufacturers or for himself, he has built the basic skeletons of over 12,000 bikes of every shape and size. Most of his time is spent here in the workshop either putting together bespoke frames for clients or repairing their old favourites. The rest of his time is spent teaching the secrets of framebuilding to others. It’s a rare skill. Once, there were thousands of small-scale frame-builders all over the country, producing a few steel-framed bikes a year for their local markets. But few individual framemakers managed to survive cycling’s long decline in popularity, and fewer still were prepared to teach what they knew to a new generation. Dave is one of only a handful of those who kept the faith. And after half a professional lifetime working for small-scale companies in the North East, he and Debbie came south and set up here.
His workshop is over in a discreet corner of the farm well away from the main house. One half contains a lot of light industrial machinery – mills, lathes, obscure bits of componentry – while the horizontal bit is a light, comfortable space including three workbenches, a stack of Reynolds 531 and 521 tubing, a jig and several shoulder-height canisters of oxyacetylene gas. Despite the midsummer fields outside, the workshop has a very particular smell to it, a potent combination of metal, fire and instant coffee. For nine or ten individual weeks during the summer months, Dave takes two students (more would be impossible, since so much of his time involves working with things that might explode) and guides them through the construction of their own frame. That frame can be any shape or size as long as it is made from steel, can reasonably be made from scratch in five days and is not something silly like a tandem.
Partly because he’s rare and partly because he’s good, there is usually a waiting list of about two years for a place on one of Yates’ courses. He has the patience of a born teacher, unflappable, generous with what he knows and truly passionate about his subject. As the week progresses, he begins to remind me of Gimli the dwarf in The Lord of the Rings. Not because