I want to ride my bicycle

[triskellian]

A month ago, I met bluedevi straight from collecting her new bike, with an enormous grin, and clearly reluctant to get off the bike and into my car to drive to London. I think if we hadn't had plans, she would just have carried on cycling around Oxford forever.

Since then, whenever I've ridden my bike, I've remembered what she said about discovering new joy in cycling when riding a nice bike, and I've looked sadly at my cheap and battered mountain bike, and dreamed.

smiorgan has two bikes, and has just ordered more bits which look as if they might be taking him towards three, and my bike was looking sadder and more pitiful each time I rode it.

This morning, we went on a whistlestop tour of three of Oxford's bike shops. In the first one, I fell immediately in love, but, for the look of the thing, went on to the two others, as insurance against an impulsive but unwise purchase. Neither of the others had anything which called to me, and smiorgan endorsed my choice (I think he just likes buying bikes), so we went back to the first place, and I promised to be back in later to swap my sad old bike (and a rather large amount of plastic money) for a shiny new one.

The plan was that, after a delightful lunch with mrlloyd and M, we'd cycle back to the shop, and I'd bring back my new toy. As we set off to leave, it started raining with extreme prejudice, so we put my old bike in the car (one of the joys of the new car is that it's large enough to carry a me-sized bike with no disassembly required) and drove instead. I wore my long coat and didn't bother with my helmet (I'd already test-ridden the bike earlier), but as soon as I took possession, I wanted to ride it again. I gave my coat and my bag to smiorgan ("get my coat, I've pulled") rode back to the car, and then rode around in circles waiting for him to catch up. And then he said I had to get off the bike, and put it in the car to go home, and, with flashbacks to bluedevi, I didn't want to. In the rain, with smiorgan following with my coat and bag, I cycled home again with a big grin on my face, whizzing effortlessly along while getting wetter and wetter and not caring in the least. By the time I got home, I was shivering; otherwise I'd still be out there, riding around Oxford and laughing with joy.

Comments

[triskellian]

Yeah, I can't imagine riding a crappy one again, now I know the joys of a decent bike. But then I look at how far the pricescale keeps going up after mine (and after smiorgan's "nice bike", which is itself quite a few steps up from mine), and I wonder what the niceness-price graph looks like up at the top end... ;-)

(I think, and smiorgan concurs, that I got the best available niceness in the price bracket I was considering. There were more expensive ones, but the extra niceness wasn't sufficient for the extra price. And they were all, ahem, other colours.)