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it's a breeze

breezer uptown

the bicycle as transport. now there's a novelty. you have happy chappies like me trundling round the wild environs of islay on several thousand pounds worth of carbon fibre at the weekends because it's a great thing to do. it keeps me fit, it keeps me healthy, it reduces my bank balance on an unprecedented scale and i get to chat about bikes as the directeur sportif and i wend our merry way over passing resemblances of what used to be called roads.

but i don't actually have to. and by that i mean that i'm not going anywhere special and i don't have to be there at any particular time. in other words, the colnago is not my considered method of transport (perish the thought). surprisingly enough, the editor of islay's famed publication, the ileach, does use a bicycle for transport, and it appears to be doing him the world of good - well, apart from the five or ten minutes after he arrives during which speech is all but impossible. still, we'll give him the benefit of the doubt, since the office is half-way up a hill. my excuse is that i don't actually stay far enough away from the office to warrant taking a bike out the shed, so i walk.

but this very column originated way back in the late nineteen eighties with an article in the ileach pointing out how much practicality there would be in doing away with the car, buying bikes, panniers, lights and wet weather gear for the whole family and only hiring a car at holiday time or for those moments when a double bed simply wouldn't fit in the saddle bag. financially, anyone carrying out the above would be considerably better off both financially and health wise, allowing the replacement of the bicycles about every two to three years if desired.

surprisingly, after the article appeared in the ileach, everyone ignored it completely and there are now more folks around islay who drive ten yards for a newspaper than there were back then.

it may have been slightly far-fetched to have expected otherwise, though with the editor cycling a round trip of eighteen miles almost every day and along the somewhat unprotected environs of the strand, i can see little reason why more cannot do the same. perennial excuse is the wind and just how much of it there is, but think of it as character building and problem goes away (well, maybe).

and then you find that joe breeze, one of the founding fathers of the mountain bike from the days when nutters would throw themselves down hillsides in marin county on schwinn cruisers with chubby tyres, is now making commuting bikes. what most of the folks round here would call 'proper bikes'. and with the seemingly endless increases in fuel costs at present (petrol costs well over one pound per litre on islay at the time of writing) riding a bike to work, particularly if the journey is less than ten miles, would seem a particularly sensible thing to do.

after all, a few billion chinese can't be entirely wrong (nor, using the same analogy, would there appear to be any long term virility problems with regular use of a bicycle saddle - but that's another post entirely).

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this website got its name because scotland's graeme obree built his championship winning 'old faithful' using bits from a defunct washing machine

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as always, if you have any comments on this nonsense, please feel free to e-mail and thanks for reading.

this column appears, as regular as clockwork on this website every two weeks. (ok so i lied) sometimes there are bits added in between times, but it all adds to the excitement.

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