A refreshing, lycra-free account of a man’s circumnavigation of Britain
Forget Victoria Pendleton’s autobiography Between the Lines, Lance Armstrong’s It’s Not About the Bike, or Triumphs and Turbulence by Chris Boardman. The best book about cycling you will ever read is Mike Carter’s One Man and His Bike.
Mike is not a professional cyclist. Not for him Olympic-gold honour, or multiple Tour de France-winner prestige. He’s just an ordinary bloke who, one day, instead of going to work, takes a diversion and ends up riding 5,000 miles around coastal Britain.
His 2011 title, published a year before London hosted the Olympic Games and long before the capital got serious about cycle infrastructure is a breeze of a read. My son gifted it to me a few years ago and I finally devoured it last summer. I wish I’d picked it up when it first came out.
As midlife crises go, Mike’s is not unique. Many other people (especially men) take sports in their forties and fifties. Some take their newfound hobbies to extremes. What makes Mike’s feat different is that he never entertains any notion of being good or proficient at cycling. He is just a freelance travel writer fed up with the daily grind. That’s why one day, instead of turning up at work, he just keeps riding eastwards until he reaches the sea.
As a writer who is also a keen cyclist (and a proficient one. After all, I’m a qualified cycling instructor), I found One Man and His Bike approachable, humorous, and deeply touching. There’s a sense of kinship that runs throughout the whole book. Whilst at the beginning, Mike is (by his own account), a London-centric, media-employed kind of person, by the end we see a transformation. This echoes my own experience of getting out and about in London for the last six or seven years, travelling further each time and getting to know my adopted city’s nooks and crannies, including world-famous green spaces and hitherto-hidden gems.
Along the way, Mike Carter leads us by the hand into a pre-Brexit Britain that was already suffering the effects of the Tory-LibDem that came to power in 2010 and lasted five years thereafter. Mike visits deprived areas in both southeastern and northeastern England. Whilst his comments might occasionally be perceived as patronising, I was pleased to see no filter in his train of thought. It’s worth noting again that this book came out before we started vetting our language and policing every thought that crossed our minds.
As a reader, I sometimes welcome books by authors who are not specialists in the subject they write about. Mike is no historian or arts connoisseur. But his enthusiasm when describing places and buildings is contagious. Take his sojourn in Scotland. He arrives in Cape Wrath, the northwest tip of Britain expecting to find something anger-related. The name, however, is taken after the Norse for hvarf, meaning turning place. This is the spot where Viking warships used to turn around to go back home or to carry on to the Hebrides.
It is also in Scotland where he has moments of what’s come to be popularised in recent years as “mindfulness”. In Cape Wrath, Mike cycles alone, in total communion with a bleak landscape around him. A barren land, with randomly dotted trees, and an endless sea and sky, almost bleeding into each other in a colour-coordinated visual epic poem. I confess I welled up a bit. I’ve had a similar reaction to a sunset in Richmond Park, as I wheel away, and an orange disc starts its slow descent.
If the landscape has a leading role, so do many of the characters Mike meets on his journey. One of my favourite ones was the bloke who’s also circumnavigating coastal Britain, but in the opposite direction. Mike and he exchange tips and contacts. The latter come in handy when Mike arrives in Wales later on.
Mike also finds a lot of kindness. At some point I wondered if the whole purpose of his enterprise was a subconscious desire to find out if deep inside people are nice. If it’s OK to expect the best from strangers, in fact, if the much-advertised “kindness of strangers” really exists. The answer is yes. In spite of some dicey situations (and with more than 5,000 miles ridden, why would we expect otherwise?) Mike is welcomed almost everywhere he arrives. The offer of a hot cup of tea is never far from the lips of hosts, whether they reside in remote lighthouses or caravans. Up north he’s given some flak on account of living in London, but the tone changes immediately when he reveals he’s actually from the Midlands.
I’ve often thought about doing something similar to what Mike does in the book. It’s crossed my mind as I’ve cycled east along the Thames path. What would it take to two-wheel my way around this island I’ve called home for a quarter of a century? What kind of reception would I get (Mike and I belong to two very different demographics)? Whilst I wouldn’t wild-camp (I’ve paid my dues when it comes to camping. I’m not saying I’d never do it again, but if I can avoid it, I will), I would try to stay in as many cheap B&Bs and hotels as possible.
In conclusion, One Man and His Bike made me feel inspired and invigorated. It made me love my machine a lot more (and God, do I love my bicycle!) And it made me think of how, sometimes, we complicate things unnecessarily, when all that’s needed is to keep riding, until you reach the sea.
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