Snapshot: The tandem, central to our cycling world
I’m a keen 45-year-old cyclist and my wife and I are members of Addiscombe Cycling Club in Croydon, south London. Ten years ago, we got married and we set up a tandem fund for wedding guests to contribute towards as a gift. We used the money to buy a beautiful red tandem and set off to cycle round Mallorca.
Three days into the holiday, my wife announced that she might be pregnant. I believed it was a ruse to get out of the 100km hilly ride we had planned. But she was. We now have two daughters, aged seven and eight. I have enjoyed riding with them in baby seats, watching them fall asleep. I especially enjoyed chugging them uphill or across country tracks when they were jammed into a trailer. They were fluent in the language of the Tour de France as far back as I can remember. They knew what peloton, tête de la course, poursuivants meant, courtesy of being allowed to watch Eurosport rather than cartoons.
On the way to school, the younger one would pretend to be Chris Froome, and her sister Bradley Wiggins as they jostled for position, elbows out.
Last year, we rented a house in Yorkshire and watched the Tour race through Holme Moss. The girls recently managed a 50km ride around the flat, breezy coast of the Ile de Ré. On a recent trip to Devon I took the eldest and her friend for an early morning ride up Salcombe Hill, as featured in Simon Warren’s book, 100 Greatest Cycling Climbs. We had to turn around just before the top as we’d run out of time.
But I wanted to do something bigger. I missed the feeling of racing flat out, or really pushing it. So last weekend we booked a shepherd’s hut in the Surrey hills. The plan was for me to take just one daughter at a time away for two nights to initiate them into the world of adult cycling. However, I realised that I needed to moderate my ambitions and create a transitional experience, so that my daughter could experience the thrills of full-on racing, but with the safety and comfort of fatherly protection. So I packed both our regular bikes and our tandem. That way, I could switch between giving her a chance to try out her independence, and then move back into allowing her to depend on me to steer and push it.
After a morning of lazing around reading Harry Potter and Percy Jackson, I told my daughter she would be going on a cycling initiation. We drove the tandem to some of Surrey’s hardest climbs. There were no children to be seen, only men and women in full Lycra with perspiring faces and carbon race bikes. We tackled Leith Hill (6/10), White Down Lane (8/10) and Box Hill (3/10). (The numbers refer to the difficulty of the climbs as rated by Simon Warren.)
In the end, I found myself depending on my daughter as much as she depended on me, as I implored, “Pedal, pedal!” as we approached the 20% gradient of White Down Lane. Later, my daughter rang my wife and told her, “Mummy, I am now officially a cyclist.”
Ajay Khandelwal
Playlist: We’re mums now, but still 15 at heart
Too Much Too Young by Little Angels
“Breaking out of school and we were kicking hard / A lot of good dreams and a lot of false starts / Swore we wouldn’t get old before our time”
Around 1992, with this song playing loudly on the stereo, my best friend, Dawn, and I jumped up and down wildly on my bed singing into our hairbrushes. At 15, we thought we owned the world. We were never going to settle down. We were going to stay young, free and single and travel the world. Our plan was to work together on cruise ships, stopping off at our favourite destinations.
Very often, and definitely in our case, life doesn’t follow the path you think it will. At 18, Dawn had moved in with her boyfriend and by 21 she was pregnant. I’d got a mortgage and by the age of 25 also had a child. Don’t get me wrong, my family are my life, but we sometimes wonder what happened to our dreams.
We’re now both 38 and, with five children between us, life can get quite busy. However, we have just returned from a rare girlie weekend away, reminiscing about old times and planning our future. It took a bit of organising, but we got there in the end. We have decided that weekends away must become an annual occurrence now the children are getting bigger and don’t need us so much. And, yes, we did dance on the bed to cheesy old songs and, yes, we also did plan what to do with our lives once the kids have grown up. Twenty three years have passed, but not much has changed.
Catherine Harbottle
We love to eat: My daughter’s raspberry buns
Ingredients
100g self-raising flour
50g margarine
50g caster sugar
Half a beaten egg
A little milk
1 teaspoon sugar
pinch of salt
1-2 tablespoons raspberry jam
Oven temperature 220C/400F/gas mark 6. Bun tin required. Prepare tin and light oven.
Put flour and salt in a bowl. Rub the fat finely into the flour and add the sugar. Add the beaten egg and mix with fork. Add sufficient milk to make a stiff consistency – ie, the fork will stand up in the mixture. Shape each piece into a round ball and make a hole in the centre of each bun. Brush the top of the buns with a little milk and sprinkle with sugar. Fill the hole with a little raspberry jam. Bake for 15 to 20 mins.
Take out of oven and leave for a few minutes. Put on a cooling tray. Display the best six buns.
When clearing out old recipes, I came across this one from 1983 which was given to my daughter, then aged nine, as a class competition at school. I remember making the buns at home with her and suspect it was timed to give a supply to be sold at the school fair, a clever idea and not a health and safety nightmare. They could also draw on the fact that more mothers were at home in those days to help. We chatted about this memory last night and agreed this could have been the forerunner of The Great British Bake Off.
The buns are delicious and the recipe has been added to my daughter’s family collection – both of her children are avid bakers and this is a real part of their mother’s history to hand on.
Christine Poole
We’d love to hear your stories
We will pay £25 for every Letter to, Playlist, Snapshot or We love to eat we publish. Write to Family Life, The Guardian, Kings Place, 90 York Way, London N1 9GU or email family@theguardian.com. Please include your address and phone number
