Cycling has become quite polarising recently: there has certainly been a backlash towards the bicycle revival. It has become yet another battlefield in the ongoing culture wars which we seem to be living through.

For some people, a false binary emerging. Cycling, who until fairly recently was seen as a poor person's transport, is now middle class, urban, possibly pro European and left wing.

This makes me a little bit sad, because for me bicycles spark so much joy; and because I  have cycled in places like Tanzania and Tokyo who I connected with people precisely because I was out on a bike. Cycling can be an excellent way to meet new people who may be different from you, and it remains the one of the most logical ways of getting about in a town or city.

I would quite like it if you bought my book about bicycles, which goes into more detail.

It was well-reviewed: 'rich, honest, engaging and entertaining...' said one reviewer. 'Fascinating, hilarious and thoughtful,' said another. "

'I was almost brought to tears,' said Life In The Saddle in a review which also said that '...it should be read much more widely.' Sadly, it was not read widely, in fact not enough people bought it for me to break even. So the unsold copies stare at me when I'm working in the loft.

It's a mix of memoir and adventures on sensible bicycles. A central thesis is that when we start using bicycles for transport we became healthier and happier.

It's definitely not an anti-car rant, I don't think. Although I did see some places (usually poorer countries) where car ownership in  was increasing that were becoming increasingly polluted and less safe for children to live, precisely at the time when some enlightened urban planners in rich countries were realising the benefits of bicycle friendly cities where you can breathe, rather than see, the air.

Having said that, 2020 was possibly not the year to launch a book which advocated in favour of cycling through China.

Anyway, here's a long and Christmassy extract, anyway. A version of which originally appeared in Boneshaker Magazine

You can also get the Bicycle Clip Diaries on your Kindle.

If you cam here looking for Get the Eason Look, it has sold out of its initial print run. But you can get an on-demand copy here:
https://www.blurb.co.uk/b/7923021-get-the-easton-look

Enjoy, and I hope you get a new bike for Christmas x

If the person on my street WhatsApp group who recently complained about bike parking 'when there isn't enough space for cars' is reading this, I'll happily give you a copy for free.

===

Even travel has got competitive, and people thrive on tips from the so-called experts. You must see this, eat here, and do this thing. I don’t have many tips for travellers, because so many of the best things happen when things don’t go according to plan, or when the plan is vague in the first place. But one thing I do recommend is to get your hair cut in as many countries as you can: unlike eating or sleeping, the whole process has not been made inauthentic by the travel industry.

So I get my hair cut in a shoe shop that doubles up as a hairdressers. The middle-aged woman who shortens my hair chats away rapidly and enthusiastically in Spanish, sometimes bringing in her friend to the conversation. I understand approximately 30 per cent of what they say, but I can tell it’s all very friendly and enthusiastic. I use non-verbal clues to work out the bits when I’m supposed to show assent, approval, and occasionally horror at what is being said.

I’m in Manizales to go mountain biking in the National Park Les Nevados, Villamaria. It’s a pleasant university town in the mountains, which at just over 2, 000 metres, isn’t all that high by world, or even Colombian standards. Although it would easily be the highest European city if it moved a few thousand miles west.

What it lacks in height, it makes up for in ‘abrupt topography’; this means that some of its streets are steep. So ridiculously steep that they are perfect for ‘urban mountain biking events’, where people ride fast down almost vertical streets and jump down concrete steps. Until fairly recently such riding would have been reckless, if not impossible, and the idea of cycling down mountains would have been seen as a cry for help. Now it’s an industry.

We are driven in a pick-up truck to 4,138 metres above sea level. My new holiday friends are a pleasant and sporty couple from Chattanooga. I think they are as excited as I am to be here, high in the Páramo wilderness, between the treeline and the snowline. Our destination is the Parque Nacional Natural Los Nevado, ‘the snowcapped national park’.

It’s just the three of us, and our Colombian guide Miguel who, it turns out, was a national mountain bike champion the previous year. He rides enduro, stage mountain bike races, where your downhill speeds are more important than your overall climbing ability. In the back of the pickup are our hardtail GW and Santa Cruz mountain bikes: black, low slung and menacing and with a touch of the BMX about them.

I think back wistfully to my days as an extreme sports pioneer. I was approximately eight, and unstoppable on my Raleigh Strika. It was a bicycle which hardly anyone remembers and rarely with fondness. It was a scaled down version of the Raleigh Grifter, itself a heavy and unsuitable British copy of a BMX. The Strika, which my Nan’s neighbour had won in the bingo, had the most uncomfortable saddle in the history of all bicycles. It was wide and made of black foam, which caused abrasions when you were wearing shorts, which, in 1981, I nearly always was. But I loved that bike, non-functioning suspension forks and all.

During the 1970s and 1980s, Raleigh still made nearly all bicycles that were ridden by British children. But you see their designs getting more and more faddish as the firm struggles to keep up with foreign competition and a whole new way of doing things. The Raleigh Commando, for example, was a military-themed bicycle which was available in camouflage, although it was really a shopping bike with a fancy saddle.

Special mention goes to the Raleigh Vektar, a BMX with a large plastic housing on the top tube. It contained what was optimistically described as an ‘onboard computer console’, with a speedometer, FM radio, and a ‘sound generator’.

Kids’ bikes today are technically much better to ride: lighter, stronger, faster. But I suspect that none will be discussed with the same shared sense of nostalgia in twenty years’ time. Looking back, the big difference between the British bikes we didn’t want, and the American bikes that we did was air.

The ability to jump up on your bicycle and, for a moment, be in the air was quite a remarkable thing in the history of how we ride. Who knows which bicyclist first experienced this phenomenon? An accident, presumably. You’d imagine it wasn’t a pleasant experience. On a big heavy steel bike not designed for it, there seems to be a pull to ground. An old bike would, perhaps in a northern accent, decline the opportunity to hurl itself off a ramp. ‘I prefer it here on t’ground, if it’s all the same to you and that’s where I’ll stay.’

Even though the Strika wasn’t designed for jumping, you could manage it, if the angle of the jump was just right. With trial and error, you could stay on, making adjustments for the heavy front end. You could even jump over stuff: down steps, over a fire, each other, sometimes. The best run was to leap down the steps past the caretaker’s office at Chandlers’ Ridge School. Then down the bank and out through the gap in the back of the fence, and back in a hi octane circuit.

On the right bike, jumping is an amazing feeling. To leave the Earth, for just a nanosecond, on a bicycle and to land it cleanly feels right. To add a slight flick or a twist is even better. It’s unaccountably fun. Why is this so? It’s a mystery.

I was fearless on a bike back then, without a fully developed frontal cortex and having been raised on Evel Knievel. I was in a biker gang, too. Admittedly there were only two of us, me and Ben Scaife. We scoured our suburb for things you could jump down, across or over; in between going to Cubs and listening to our anthem, Van Halen’s ‘Jump’. I shudder at the thought now. But in those days, it was all about getting as much air as possible, and Evel Knievel was an important role model.

Like us, he was a thrill-seeking adventurer, living for kicks. By the 1970s he was also a doll – I mean action figure – on a toy motorbike which in reality failed to do any of the spectacular stunts from the TV commercials. Although the actual Knievel didn’t always succeed in his jumps, and people knew this.

His bike choice seems totally inappropriate and early shows featured – incredibly – a 750 cc Norton and a 750 cc Triumph – big heavy English motorbikes, which were eventually replaced by a big, heavy American Harley XR-750.

The showmanship is part of the real Evel’s appeal. An early jump features a box of rattlesnakes and a pair of mountain lions, exactly the kind of thing we would have jumped over if they had been available in North East England at that time.

Watching the videos, with our modern health and safety sensibilities, is engrossing. But you want to intervene: as he falls, he flips like a rag doll, his body flicking this way and that, whacking into hay bales at speed. He is then hit by his riderless bike in a final act of cartoonish indignity.

In those days, the good ol’ boys on Evel’s team stood him up just as soon it was possible to do so, something which draws cheers from the crowd. He flops forward propelled by well-wishers who grab and shake his head roughly. Well done, Evel, you fell off your bike again. Just a few breaks and possibly irreversible brain damage.

Whereas today you’d avoid such impact where possible; if it happened, you’d stabilise the patient’s head as much as you could until medical professionals arrive on the scene.

His efforts look particularly strange in comparison with today’s motocross trick rider videos. They do back flips and no-handed jumps, or change direction in the air, in a stunt sequences which look they have been planned meticulously. With Knievel, it was more binary: a straight jump – you either make it or you don’t.

It’s possible see him as encompassing the tragic side to the American Dream. He wants to stop, but can’t. The roar of the crowd keeps him going, as do contractual obligations and various injections. He looks fucked. His injuries were famous and multitudinous, and his 433 reported bone fractures earned him a place in the Guinness Book of Records. He had an ‘internal morphine pain pump’ surgically implanted in order to ease the pain, apparently.

In real life, he was not a superhero, more of a bully and a crook. In 1977 he assaulted a promoter over the contents of a book, Evel Knievel on Tour, which alleged that Evel used drugs and abused his family. The daredevil exacted his revenge in a violent baseball bat assault. At the time, inevitably, both of Evel’s arms were in slings, so he needed his partners to attack the unarmed promoter.

We didn’t know that then, and nor would we have cared. This guy did mad jumps, and probably inspired more bicycle-related mishaps than any other figure in history. By 1982, when Raleigh got into the world of BMX, Evel’s brand of hairy-chested red meat virility and white jump suited theatricality was out of touch and irrelevant by the early 80s. The squares in the toy industry cancelled his contracts. But the notion that you could jump on a bicycle was firmly lodged in our young minds.

The bicycle industry needed the BMX craze, because people weren’t buying bikes for transport any more. And kids needed a BMX, because they were cool. 10 Speed racers were for older kids and prefects.

In the run-up to Christmas 1983, I was coming to the end of a fairly long-term strategy to achieve my ends, a BMX Burner, or maybe a Tuff Burner with sweet mag wheels. I’d been on the Strika for so long that my inner thigh skin rash was a more or less permanent feature. But I’d given up in defeat after it had been made clear to me that there would be no new bike.

Even as a kid I understood that times were tough in the early Eighties. Obviously we were spoilt in comparison with the kids in Tanzania, who have to fetch water and herd goats and don’t go to school. But factories were closing down and the steel industry – amongst many others – was in decline. The 1980s might have been a time of champagne, red braces and amusingly massive cellular phones down south, but up north we used bread clips for Spokey Dokeys.

My Dad no longer worked on the steel or ICI, and his job working for the local authority was safe, but interest rates had doubled. Years later I found out that my parents had struggled to hold on to their house. The industrial heartlands were decimated as people got on their bikes to areas where there were jobs. Cousins and uncles headed south, and people went to work on oil rigs.

The places that made the things that made us proud were now becoming embarrassing, rust belts, towns that people made jokes about. The empty buildings would later come in useful for raves and then yuppie apartments, if you live in one of those towns which have yuppie apartments. As opposed to one of those towns which just has charity shops and social problems because decades later there are still no jobs.

There were streets where hardly anybody had a job in my town, and pit villages close by suddenly found themselves purposeless.

But something strange happened on Christmas Day in 1983. A pedal poking out through wrapping paper in the dim light. A bit of gold handlebar.

A Raleigh Super Burner, and proof that dreams can come true. I promise that I’ll oil its chain and promise not to jump over rattlesnakes. I’ll be good and do my homework and never get another detention or top the demerit chart in my form class again. In the moment I saw that pedal peeking out from its crude wrapping, this was all true. No subsequent present has come close. Perhaps that Raleigh Super Burner is the high that I’ve been chasing ever since.