Its Not About The Tapas, Polly Evans (2003)

Bantam Books 0 553 81556 3 Paperback 301pp £6.99

An enjoyable account of a solo bicycle journey made around parts of Spain made (probably) in 2002. It would serve as a good primer to Spain but also have something for those who know the country well

Burned out and brassed off in Hong Kong, Evans decides to cycle around Spain. It is a familiar, if not downright unpromising pretext. But Evans is a good writer with a genuine knowledge of and love for Spain. Examining the map at the start of the book, it is clear that her tour did not really take in much of Spain at all – she rides from San Sebastian to Barcelona, tours a little in Andalucía and Extremadura, and crosses to Madrid.

However, her grasp of Spain is sufficient for this to provide a framework on which to paint a convincing picture of the country in the early years of the twenty first century. She deals confidently, if light-heartedly with both historical context and the recent dash for modernity. Here she is introducing an explanation of Spain’s monarchy.

‘When Louis XIV of France said: “There are no more Pyrenees”, he was clearly misinformed. He had blatantly not bundled his freshly powdered wig under a cycling helmet, stuffed his spare velvet knickerbockers in to a very tiny pannier and tried cycling from Versailles down to Spain.”
Dealing with everything from Iberian food, to the fashion sense of elderly Spainish women, she maintains a similarly well-informed, but jocular tone.

Her excursion into Extremadura also marks out this book. This huge area is thinly populated, little know and infrequently visited by outsiders. For those reasons it is far more like ‘old’ Spain that any of those areas served by low-cost airlines. Evans enthusiasm for the area is reason enough for more people to venture north of Jerez.

PS Mar 09

Into The Remote Places, Ian Hibell (1984)

Robson Books 0 86051 253 X Octo 204pp £8.95

An episodic account of cycle journeys made in the early 1970s across the Darien gap, south through Africa (including the Sahara) and west-east across South America from Lima to Recife in Brazil

Hibell is accorded a high plinth indeed among adventurous cycle tourists. He is cited approvingly by everyone from Josie Dew to Bernard Magnaloux and copies of this book are now reputed to change hands for hundreds of pounds. It is a deserved reputation. Into The Remote Places recounts adventures of spectacular audacity – most notably crossing the Darien Gap and the Sahara.

Since his untimely death, obiturists have adopted a kind of short hand to describe his most extraordinary moments: ‘rescued from certain death in the desert by Tuareg tribesmen, chased by spear wielding Turkana in northern Kenya and savaged by soldier ants in South America’. Taken alone, the Boys Own adventures would make this book worth reading. But its really special quality is Hibell’s self-effacing, humble attitude to himself. He paints himself as a very ordinary man, doing extraordinary things, without his modesty ever seeming false. Possibly it is this that makes it easy to project yourself into his cycle shoes – even if you are never actually going to pedal further than the shops.

He paints some vivid pictures of the scenes that he has encountered too. Here he is when he found himself amid a herd of elephants:

“Now there were currents of elephants; streams that flowed this way that that. I was a rowing boat in the midst of a regatta, a wheelchair patient negotiating the M1 on a bank holiday weekend. I sought and found the protection of another tree and pressing myself up against its rough bark, closed my eyes.”

Or, having a hard time of it in the Sahara:

“Three days. 147 kilometres. The afternoons were interminable. Dullness overpowered me. I might have been walking on the moon; for all I knew the day’s journey took ten years. Only at the ransom of my other faculties could I put one foot out before the other. And even then I would count, very slowly to one hundred. By that time my
dizziness would have disappeared and I would get to my feet and stagger on.”

There are also interesting reflections from an age now long passed. His sympathies for general set up in Rhodesia, as it then was, are illuminating given his liberal instincts and his long immersion in the rest of Africa.

The book is not without its curiosities. Hibell makes his final journey with ‘Jean’, a young woman he met at a lecture he was giving in the UK between his journeys in Africa and Peru. Love blossoms between them, but when ‘Jean’ returns to Britain early, Hibell starts to pine. And before he has reached, the Atlantic she has written to him to let him know that she was pregnant. Hibell is delighted and happily starts to fantasise about family life, marriage and a simple cottage with a door framed by rambling roses.

This does give the end of his narrative a very strong, human conclusion. But it also sits rather oddly in a travel book of this kind. Indeed, in the age of the internet it is almost impossible not to seek out further instalments. This turns up any number of gems – not least Hibell’s appearance of Blue Peter.




It also becomes clear, however, that the relationship did not thrive and the author was soon in search of yet more remote places.

It is a bittersweet revelation. The human desire for a happy ending is unfulfilled; but, hero Hibell, the unassuming global circumnavigator, emerges intact from the clutches of domesticity.

PS February 09

Travels With Rosinante, Bernard Magnouloux (1988)

Grafton Books 0 586 20828 3 paperback 252pp £5.99

A compelling account of a five-year, minimal-budget, round-the-world cycle journey starting in 1980. The author took in: Europe; the length of Africa, travelling south; the length of south America, travelling north; the USA travelling east though the southern states and then crossing to California; China to Nepal and some major excursions in India and Pakistan

To judge from his picture on the book’s cover, Magnoloux is the sort of person who might cause your heart to drop if he joined you in a railway carriage. He is using sacks for panniers, has a filthy suitcase strapped to his rack and is dressed as though from a charity shop he visited several thousand kilometres ago. But suspend your prejudices, for he has a compelling tale to tell and a considerable gift for expression – particularly given that his first language is French.

He cycled about 48,000 miles (76,988 kilometers), lived on an average of £2 per day and did most of the trip on a bicycle for which he paid just £15. Given the scope of his experiences, this is actually a very slender book, each of the 30 chapters recounting his highlights in some of the 45 countries through which he journeyed.

What plans he had, he appears to have made from maps copied down by chance at frontier posts and in airports. He lived among the people whose countries he visited – sometimes working as a labourer to raise funds, elsewhere, giving lectures on his journey. In some respects his experiences might seem like the boilerplate expectations of such a passage – robbed at gun point, fleeced at borders, shown enormous kindness by some of the poorest people, and the opposite from a few of the richest. But he tells his tales with a compassionate authenticity that gives them all - even his few amorous encounters – the stimulating grit of quality reportage.

It would be interesting to know more about Magnoloux himself. He describes himself variously as a stonemason (at which he is clearly skilled) and an author. Throughout the book he demonstrates his ability with languages. He is able to immerse himself sufficiently to pick up some native words nearly everywhere he visits, and he provides snapshots of dialogue and their translations in half a dozen tongues. And, as no translator is mentioned, one has to assume he wrote this book in English. What he has done since then, I have been unable to discover – but would be fascinated to know, if anyone can shed some light.

He also provides only a hint at what propelled him pedalling on this lonely, frequently hungry, quest. In Tibet he found himself contemplating the motivations of the pilgrims to Lhasa.

“I wondered if, under the surface, there is such a difference between the Tibetan pilgrim who prostrates himself every three steps for 2,000 miles on his way to Lhasa and the European cyclist pushing his pedals every couple of yards for 4,000 miles around the world.

“Is religious piety the real motivation for the Tibetan? Isn’t it more general – a kind of social pressure, or the force of tradition? And isn’t it exactly the same for the European?

“To go around the world has become, for young Westerners, the social and cultural equivalent of a pilgrimage to Jerusalem for medieval Christians, to Mecca for present-day Muslims and to Lhasa for Tibetans. This thirst for travel, it seems to me, is a new form of initiation, a new set of atheistic rituals...”

The resultof his initiation is a fascinating picture of the world during the time of Magnoulox’ adventuring. It would also be a useful primer for anyone contemplating a similar venture. His broad brush impressions might well help with general route planning – Muslim countries are friendly, Africa is friendly, south America unfriendly, the US friendly, but full of cars; and in India, the village crowds who mob a western cyclist make progress near impossible.

The appendices, which aim to give more practical advice to would-be travelers, clearly cannot be depended upon given that the book was published 20 years ago – but in many of the less developed countries they are probably still as useful as ever.

For those of us less adventurous, his book provides a transport far beyond the railway carriage.

PS February 09

The Wind In My Wheels, Josie Dew (1992)

Warner 0 7515 0249 9 paperback 368pp £6.99

An account of journeys made in the late 1980s including most of Europe, the UK, Ireland, North Africa, Canada, India and Romania

This was Dew’s first book (she has written seven at the time of 2009). An enthusiastic cyclist since her childhood in the south of England, she started touring more ambitiously in her mid teens. The cover promises that, at the time of this publication, she has covered ‘four continents, 36 countries and 80,000 miles’, and her accounts of most of them are contained in this book. Whereas her subsequent books are based on journeys that appear to have been devised to deliver books, this is the summation of her travels up to this point.

She makes little of her courage or her eccentricity – although both are there in charming spade fulls. Precious few young women dedicate themselves to adventuring by bicycle, and yet Dew makes it sound like the most normal, natural thing imaginable. Not only that, but she fashioned her working life around her desire for regular long cycle adventures – she runs a catering service, towing ingredients around London on a trailer behind her bike.

Her approach is impressionistic and humorous. There is occasional cultural contextualisation – Granada is the ‘city that Lorca loved’, but he was shot close by early in Spain’s civil war, she explains. But for the most part, she is more interested in shopkeepers, bed and breakfast proprietors and encounters with passers by, than culture, architecture or topography. Much space is also devoted to the challenges of cycling in countries where a lone female on a bicycle is a rare visitor.

Here she is, for example, toward the end of a lengthy passage on the difficulties she had with a routine bodily function in Morocco.

“I sprang full-bladdered from my cycle to retire safely behind a rock, which promptly came to life. It turned out to be a big and startled Arab who had been peacefully snoozing among the genuine rocks in the landscape”. Thereafter Dew developed a technique whereby a cycling cape doubled as a portaloo.

At times her prose is pedestrian – her nose was ‘red as Rudolph’s’, Poland was ‘poverty stricken’ and Finland was ‘flat’. But the quick fire jump from country to country keeps the pages turning.
At this distance, the one thing missing from the books is some more precise dates (which may have been sorted out in more recent editions, or might perhaps in editions to come). For example, her travels in Ireland are nearly always troubled by fears of the IRA – an interesting indicator of how the Provisionals got into the British psyche during their 30 years of active campaigning. Dew crosses into Hungary ‘after the collapse of the Cold War’. But if we know precisely when this was, her observations would have greater value today.

Nonetheless, the journal bowls along pleasurably over an enormous number of miles – and provides a very reassuring proof that whatever is the addictive magic of cycling, both sexes are susceptible.

PS January 09

News from Tartary – a journey from Peking to Kashmir, Peter Fleming (1936)

Jonathan Cape Quarto 384pp

An account of a famous 3,500 trek through China and into India

This is clearly not a book about cycling. However, Fleming’s journey, and the means by which he accomplished it have a good deal in common with some of the ‘epic trip’ cycling books, and for that reason I have included it here.

Fleming made the 3,500 mile exploration in 1935. At that time neither was there a road or railway that covered this route. There had also been civil wars and violent skirmishing between local chieftains, Soviet Russia and nationalist China. It was an Odyssey so outlandish and dangerous that it is hard to conceive of its modern equivalent. Even so, in his introduction Fleming dryly notes that: “The trouble with journeys nowadays is that they are easy to make but difficult to justify” (an epithet that has more resonance with each passing day).

His ostensible reason for making the trip is that few outside the region – save for those seeking to make inroads in the area, such as Moscow – had any reliable idea of what was going on there. Fleming was acting as special correspondent for The Times (of London). So, two thirds of the way through his account, he pauses to offer his assessment of what was the political situation at that time. Broadly speaking, the Russians were seeking to expand their area of influence, for no real reason than a feeling that it was their destiny.

He made the journey in the company of Elia Maillart, (known as Kini) but was otherwise unsupported and was out of touch with any part of his own world from March to August that year. The journey involved travel by horse, camel, rough lorry, and for many, many miles, foot. They hired guides and joined traders’ caravans, and endured countless attempts by local bigwigs halt them as a result of their having ‘incorrect documentation’.

Much of their food – or at least the protein – Fleming shot with a ‘rook rifle’, whose usefulness prompted a lengthy correspondence on The Times’ letter pages. And every now and then their progress was enlivened by surprise encounters with people of the same class and background as themselves.

At his best, Fleming was a dazzling writer – but there is little in the way of writerly show in this book. It was written after the conclusion of their journey, but the tone is very matter of fact. In part this seems to be because the journey itself was so outrageous in its ambition, and so extraordinary in the terrain that it covered, that literary embellishment seemed unnecessary.

At times this can make its 180,000 words slightly heavy going. By the end of the book, however, the down-beat style probably a fair reflection of the experience of walking, making camp, eating what little food they could forage and sleeping, day after day.

Nevertheless, the extraordinary nature of Fleming and Kini’s achievement provide enough to keep you reading. And by the book’s conclusion you are left in no doubt that their feat was remarkable and one that is worth sharing with them at first hand. Indeed, it is clear from some of his exploits why Fleming’s brother Ian would draw on his elder sibling’s attributes when he was crafting the character of James Bond.

PS January 09

The Great Bicycle Expedition, William C Anderson (1973)

Crown 0 517 505975 Quarto 208pp $5.95

The light-hearted account of a journey made by a new-to-cycling couple in their fifties and their young adult children from Copenhagen to Calais in the summer of 1972

In the early 1970s cycling had a renaissance in the United States. The ‘oil crisis’ of October 1973 is frequently cited as the motive force for this rediscovery of self propulsion by Americans – but Anderson’s testimony suggests that there was something in the air long before OPEC intervened.

He was a career airforce officer turned professional writer who enjoyed success with a series of amusing, easy-to-read accounts of his family’s adventures. By 1972 they had traversed their own continent with a caravan, built for themselves and moved into an eco-home and explored the Mississippi on a houseboat – each of which had been turned into a book.

As Anderson tells it, he was take aback by his wife’s agreeable reaction to his proposal for fresh adventure. More surprising still – but rather less explained – was the acquiescence of his college-age son and daughter. None had ridden a bike since childhood, the author explains – a good four decades distant, in the case of half of the party. In the Danish capital they buy new touring bicycles, and then hit a predictably steep learning curve.

It is all told in an enjoyable enough way. Dialogue drives much of his account, and at times his vignettes read like a script for the Cunningham family of Happy Days fame to proceed a-wheel from Scandinavia.

Here is Anderson trying to get his leg over for the other kind of ride.

“You are in great shape,” I said to her (variously, the wife, the distaff, Big Red or my soulmate), plucking a dandelion and handing it to her. “If you were in any better shape I couldn’t stand it. In fact,” I waggled my brows at her. “What say you and take your great shape over to yon haystack? Play a little kissy-face?”

She looked at me out of the corner of her eye and gave me the dandelion back. “Honestly! If you don’t think of the darnedest thing at the darnedest times.”

“Correction. I think about it all the time. I just mention it at the darnedest times.”

“Just address yourself to your map, hotlips.”

The author’s main endeavour is in squeezing humour from their situation – at which he is good, even if it is very warm and gentle, by modern standards. There is not much by way of observational reporting, although where there is, he catches the tone well. His write-up of the in-your-face sale of hard-core pornography that was so noticeable in Sweden in the mid-1970s, for example, is consistent with my memories of the country a few years later. And the Swedish maitre d’ who parries Anderson’s surprise that his country had an army with the retort “We have a very neutral army” also rang true.

Anderson also records the names and prices of hotels and restaurants, which are of historical rather than practical interest at this remove. He does, however, provide some insight into how poor Americans felt abroad in the years after their currency came off the gold standard in 1971. Anderson carries “Europe On $5 A Day” with him, but concludes by saying that even with cheap hotels and modest restaurants, the per-person cost of trip has been more like double that. He doesn’t mind however, and records that it was ‘one of the most memorable experiences of my life’.

In fact, it is a recommendation of the inexpensive delights of cycle touring in times of economic turbulence, that has unexpected resonance today. Perhaps we should be reflecting anew on the role that the bicycle might play in transporting us from today’s credit crisis.

PS January 09

A Canterbury Pilgrimage, Joseph and Elizabeth Robins Pennell (1885)

Seeley and Company 79pp 1 shilling

An illustrated account of a ride on an early tandem tricycle journey made by an American couple whose cycling travelogues did much to make wheeled touring respectable in Victorian Britain

In August 1884 the Pennell’s recreated the journey made famous by Chaucer’s pilgrims on what, I suspect, was a Humber Club Cycle Quadricycle Roadster. These extraordinary conveyances from the penny-farthing era are now completely unknown. Clearly, however, at the time of their manufacture, they made possible travel of a kind that had hitherto required a horse and trap.

This was the first volume penned by the Pennells – over the following decade they would traverse Europe and produce written and sketched accounts of their adventures. He drew, she wrote. That said, in this edition, there are two quite separate styles of illustration. One is naturalistic, the other a cartoonish take on Chauceresque emblams.

The Kentish jaunt is the basis for a charming, gentle account of the garden of England. They seek out the pilgrim’s milestones – the Tabard Inn, Boughton Hill and, of course, the shrine at their journey’s end.

They can have had no idea how completely the county would change in the century that followed. To read them now is to visit an almost unknown world. Deptford and Blackheath are villages separated by countryside. In places, the roadsides are thronged with tramps. And, the Thames is crowded with barges and commercial sailing ships.

There were clearly enough cyclists on this route for their wheels not to cause shrieks of amazement, although several people reacted with concern at the sight of Joseph trying to catch their likeness in his sketch pad.

The book is of the size and style of a school exercise book with a stitched seam. According to Irving Leonard, writing in Bicycling in 1967, this, and the Pennell’s other publications, sold in large numbers from railway bookstands. And their import to cycling history, was the role that they playing in making cycle touring respectable.

Unused to wheeled travellers without horses, some sections of Victorian society viewed bicyclists with alarm. The Pennell’s, by taking their travel cues from such respectable guides as Chaucer, and later John Bunyan, showed that were a conveyance suitable for gentle folk. And by painting such an attractive picture of their tours, they did their bit to fuel the ensuing cycling boom. Today, this account of a cross-county pilgrimage delivers readers an evocative transport in time.

Incidentally, Kessinger publishing are currently republishing this book, and much of the rest of the Pennell's work. Given that you can still pick up originalls for less than £20 (and sometimes less than £5), it might be worth holding out for an original.

PS December 2008

Full Tilt – Ireland To India With a Bicycle, Dervla Murphy (1965)

The Reprint Society 238pp

An account of a cycle journey made in the first half of 1963 covering precisely the journey described in the title, by an Irish woman in her early 30s. Most of the book concentrates on the portion of her ride that took her through Afghanistan and Pakistan where she made some truly remarkable rides, including cycling the length of the Khyber Pass and a hair-raising journey through the Babusar Pass.

How fabulous it must have been to have been so brave, determined and carefree as was Murphy to make such an epic journey. At nearly every stage of her progress wise heads tried to persuade her of the foolishness of her ambitions. And time and again she ignored them. Quite possibly much of what she did was rash – but it is justified by the testimony that she was able to bear.

The early stages of her journey pass in something of a blur – so much so that readers might be persuaded that the book is not for them. She actually sets off from Dunkirk and in less than a page has reached the Yugoslav border – despite cycling through one of the worst winters Europe has ever recorded. Indeed, the only matters of incident before the Persian border are those that involve her automatic pistol.

Within a few days she had used it to shoot dead a Croatian wolf as it made to attack her, shot it over the head of an amorous Kurd whose advances she thought would not be slowed by mere exhortation and narrowly resisted plugging a Turkish policeman, whose amour was doused with a knee to the nether regions instead. The pistol makes no further appearance – possibly because she admits to having packed just four rounds of ammunition.

It is well worth hanging in till Tehran, because that is where her narrative takes off.
For the most part, the book is culled from letters she sent home to friends as she rode. Entries frequently end with fatigue forcing her to sign off. She is enviably lucky with the people she meets along the way, who offer her extraordinary kindness – senior army officers, a Pakistani Prince and endless diplomats put her up and help her along their way.

The section of this book that make it really worth reading are those that cover her wanderings across Afghanistan and Pakistan. By this time she has become ‘Afghanatical’, and her sympathies are clearly with the people among whom she lives. She writes, almost obsessively about the food she eats, for example. Here she is in Galapur on 6 June: “The food situation here is very grim – an acute scarcity of flour and no tea, sugar or sale left after the winter. Most people are living on goats’ milk, eggs and mulberries – not my favourite when served simultaneously, but this evening I was too starved to fuss.”

Murphy's greatest quality is that while sharing the living conditions of those among whom she lives, and acutely recounting some of the minutiae of life in the region, she is never so arrogant as to lose sight of her essentially alien quality in relation to those around her.

Indeed, despite the privations, she worries increasingly about ‘modernisation’ in this part of the world. In Kabul she writes: “I feel have been privileged to see Man at his best – still in possession of the sort of liberty and dignity that we (in the west) have exchanged for ‘progress’.” She even worries about the western enthusiasm for easily moving around the world: “Progress has deprived (the western travelling public) of the incentive to live fully”.

Despite this, Full Tilt was to be the first of a great many travel books from this author - some by bicycle, others on foot. Indeed, her latest offering The Island That Dared (at the time of writing she has just turned 77), about a recent journey in Cuba, was published earlier this year. There is an interview with her about that book here.

PS December 2008

The Ultimate Scottish Cycling Book, Paul Lamarra (2003)

Mainstream 1 84018 617 8 207pp £14.99

An area-by-area guide to cycle touring in Scotland, based on a tour made in 2002, including extensive ‘how to’ information.

So many guides to cycle touring in the UK have been written that the job of squeezing some new juice from the format is a challenge. Of course, roads change and attractions come and go. (Only 20 years ago, I cycled the length of the A74 and the A9, something that would be neither fun, legal nor necessary today). Nonetheless, finding something new to say, or a new way to say requires considerable initiative.

And that is just what Lamarra has brought to this book. There may be precedents for the format he has adopted, but I am not aware of them.

Nine chapters each concentrate on different areas of Scotland. It is a pretty good spread – from the Western Isles to Galloway and the Borders. Inevitably, he does not cover everything. But he does go where many guides have avoided – rural Aberdeenshire, for example, which provides some of the best cycling country in the UK.

Each section recounts a carefully planned tour or several days made, I am guessing, in 2002. Lamarra is particularly good on capturing the flavour of places – he has the excitement of Oban to a tee, likewise the transition of wild Perthshire into the tourist attractions of Pitlochry. There are also some great route tips – anyone could miss the private, but easily accessible, roads built for hydro-scheme workers that allow one to get into the head of Glen Lyon, without cycling its length, for example.

His accounts are peppered with his own wry observations. He recounts the experience of the weather on the day that he made the rides and the difficulty or otherwise he had in finding accommodation, as well as entertaining historical asides. Each chapter then ends with a diagrammatic route map, map references, directions, accommodation and food stop suggestions and other important transport information such as ferry timetables. This information is particularly strong and he has clearly gone to some lengths to put himself in the position of a travelling on wholly unfamiliar territory.

As Lamarra suggests in his introduction, this is not a volume for the saddle bag. Rather, it is a primer to be enjoyed over the winter, while planning one’s own tours in Scotland. There is much of this routes that you may wish to copy turn by turn. But the real value of his book is in firing the imagination, and giving you the wherewithal to plan. Despite having read dozens of cycling books about Scotland and ridden quite extensively in many of the areas he covers, by the end of the book, I was back with my maps, dreaming of a fresh Caledonian campaign.

If I have a beef, it would be with the title. Such a grand promise is never going to be deliverable. However, books are published to be sold, and doubtless Mainstream were keen on something that they hoped would jump off the self. “An account of nine cycle tours in North Britain, with accompanying notes for wheelmen hoping to emulate the author’s progress”, might well have been the title had it been published in the 1880s. More accurate it might have been – but it would hardly be the stuff to tempt the armchair cyclists of today.

PS November 2008

Daisy, Daisy Christian Miller (1980)

Routledge & Kegan Paul 0 7100 0709 4 180pp £5.99

Miller is the mother of grown up children who sets off to cross the United States on a Bickerton. The date is never specified, but at a guess it is 1978 or 1979.

Her account is amiable enough. She carries a tent, accepts lifts where they are offered and gets into enough scrapes to make this an entertaining read. By the close of the account she has journeyed from Yorktown, Virginnia to Portland, Oregon, via Kansas, Denver, Salt Lake City and the Rockys. More than anything it paints a picture of the USA beyond the major costal cities – much of it small town, agricultural and frequently with very little money.

Perhaps the most intriguing things about the book is that it was published at all. For sure, Miller is a more than competent writer. But today, it is rare for someone to undertake an epic adventure on a whim, and then write it up. Books that bare any comparison to this one published today tend to be by time-served professional writers, who start with a clear plan to generate sufficient material for a book.

To the extent that this does not appear to be a contrivance, and that a major publishing house chose to take it on, it is refreshing. Whether it captures enough of the time and place that it charts to merit a continuing readership is a more open question.

PS Sep 08

Round Ireland in Low Gear, Eric Newby (1987)

Collins 0 00 217639/4 308pp £12.95

Newby is a titan of travel writing. A Short Walk In The Hindu Kush and The Big Red Train Ride, among many others, are rightly considered classics of the genre. He was in his late 60s, however, when he and his wife Wanda took to these island’s rainiest land mass on heavily laden mountain bikes.

The Newbys are returners to cycling – having both clocked up a few clicks during the second world war, but few since. Perhaps because of this, their bicycles only play a small part in the narrative. Of course, there are terrible headwinds, unnerving hills and, more than anything, rain (hardly surprising given that they start their tour in December). But Newby is far more interested in, and interesting on, the countryside though which he is passing, rather than his means of transport – and the book is much the better for that.

For years, British visitors to Ireland have found aspects of life preserved there had apparently been consigned to GB’s history books long ago. Perhaps the 1980s was the last point at which this was true. That is certainly Newby’s finding, in the pubs, boarding houses and shops that he visits. Here he is in a pub in Waterford.

“We found it (food and drink) in T and H Doolan’s old snug and dark pub which contained no one but a very old man wearing a huge uniform overcoat who was drinking tea and a very grown-up young woman who was into the Irish Paddy and hot water, which seemed like a good idea in the circumstances. The old man told us to bang on the bar to summon attention, something that I am always loath to do in case the publican is on the bottle and comes rushing out to hit me over the head with it.”

There is nothing nostalgic about Newby’s book, however. He documents what he sees meticulously and is brilliant at setting it in historical and cultural context. Indeed, it is at doing this that he is almost without peer. Certainly anyone seeking to write a cycling travelogue of this kind would do well to start here.

His skill and care make this a fascinating document of Ireland just before everything changed – before the tide of migration turned, before money flushed though every corner of the country, before the substantial settlement of the ‘constitutional question’. It is an engaging, infuriating, beguiling place – now hard to find. But at least you can reach for Newby and pay it a fond visit from your armchair.

PS August

French Revolutions, Tim Moore (2001)

Yellow Jersey Press 0-224-06095-3 277 pp £12

A humerous account of the authors attempt to cycle the route of the Tour despite his lack of experience on a bicycle

This is a good – if obvious – idea for a travel book. Follow the route of the Tour de France, in this case the tour of 2000, at a touring speed. As a non-cyclist, this gives Moore a framework around which to hang a travelogue, meditation on cycle racing and a chance to marvel at those who complete the route at a rather less leisurely pace than the author achieves.

Moore is undoubtedly an amusing writer. Here he is teeing up his assault on Ventoux.

“The trouble with cycling up mountains is that – panniers or, as today, no panniers – after about four minutes, as soon as that first metallic-tasting, lactic gasp rasps inward at the back of your throat, any thoughts of appreciating your surroundings, contemplating the Continental way of life, or otherwise entertaining an appropriate holiday mentality have been booted out of your brain by an all-encompassing him-or-you struggle to the death with the force of gravity.”

Were someone who knew nothing about cycling looking for a light-hearted introduction to the Tour, this book would serve well.

To anyone who starts the book with a deeper knowledge of cycling and cycle sport than Moore, however, it is impossible to shake a feeling of irritation with him. He is an able writer, for sure, although the efforts of his wise-cracking show. He has read up on the great race, and can rehash many of its curious tales with some élan. But at the end of the day, he has little that is actually new to add. You can’t help feeling that he alighted upon the idea of a Tour-based book as a commercial opportunity, rather than anything fired by passion. As a result, he steadily creates a feeling that, at heart, he is mocking cyclists and cycling for the amusement of others.

PS August 2008

Trial By Tandem, Alan McCulloch (1951)

George Allen & Unwin 236pp

The author and his wife, Ellen are killing time between jobs. At this point, in late 1940s, he is old enough (probably about 40), to have progressed from life working in a bank, to that of a professional art critic. Indeed, later in life, he and his wife become some of the most eminent figures in art curation in their native Australia.

In Paris for a conference, the couple buy a tandem on a whim and set off on an Odyssey through France and Italy. This is a book about cycling only in the sense that the tandem exists and a generally unwelcome gooseberry in their relationship. Indeed, McCulloch insists that despite her time pedalling behind him, his wife never properly learns to ride a bicycle. Certainly, the experience of cycling and travelling on a two wheels take up very little of the story.

Their journey, and his writing style, are gentle - although the prose is shot through with perceptive observation and taut writing. "A curious feature of bicycle travel is that, although you are whistling along, utterly unprotected, through the atmosphere as it were, you have a strong sense of privacy, the feeling of being unobserved. Consequently one soon develops a lack of self consciousness about clothes, and quickly sheds all items superfluous to the job in hand". Thus, McCulloch introduces his being barred from entrance to the casino at Monte Carlo because he resembled a tramp.

They stay at rowdy youth hostels, enjoy the hospitality of a Vicomte, search for signs that Van Gogh is remembered in Arles and eventually return the tandem to the dealer from whom they procured it in Paris. The book has a witty observation about all of them - even his wife being with child by the end of their travels.

Throughout, McCulloch brings the sensibilities of an artist to his account, and the book is illustrated with pen and ink drawings that he did en route. It is a charming book, and a record of post-war Europe that seems a million miles from France and Italy today. There are moments when he appears to be spinning out his tales, to fill the pages and there is not much in the way of narrative drive to keep the pages turning. But the book has considerable charm and provides a more than pleasant means to pass away and afternoon.

PS July 2008



Ellen, by this point is with child