As we skid towards the end of the freezy season, it’s easy to feel smug - I’m now just into my 14th year as an all-weather cyclist. I know exactly when I started and why.
I’d been increasingly captivated by the cycle writing of Matt Seaton, which evoked a world free from tube crushes, motorway gridlocks and no-show buses. “You know you’ve caught the cycling bug when you start taking your bike everywhere you go,” he wrote in March 2002, when my own bicycle was rusting in the cellar. “Suddenly you’re adept at undoing the quick-release levers and dropping the wheels out of the frame so that the bike will go in the boot of a car. You become accustomed to booking a place for your bike when you reserve a rail ticket…”
His was a romantic vision of the open road, far from the grime of inner-city commuting, but it planted the possibility of a life in which travel became exercise and there was no need to double any journey time for fear of road works or the wrong sort of rain. Then in February 2003, the London congestion charge was introduced. I swore I would never pay it – and I never have.
I knew it would have to be an AA-style all-or-nothing commitment, and staying off the wagon required regular infusions of Seaton’s sceptical enthusiasm. “I love this statistic, always have,” he wrote in his Two Wheels column in November 2005. “On average, London commuters get wet fewer than 12 times a year.” Coming in the month of max wobble, as I confronted the second winter of abstinence with the wind turning spiteful and firecrackers exploding all around, this was balm for the soul.
In 2006 he inspired postcode pride by quoting research which revealed that the London borough of Hackney (where I live) had led the way in the great cycling boom, partly because the alternatives were so unattractive – poor public transport (check), congestion (check) – but perhaps also partly due to its long history of radicalism, which had attracted environmentally aware young people predisposed to cycling.
By Christmas 2007 he was in a debunking mood, rubbishing the theory that the increase in London cyclists was due to the terror attacks of 7/7. It was true that a lot more bikes were sold immediately after the bombings, he reported, but what in fact happened “was a spike in the graph that lasted a fortnight (up, on average, by 15%, or 4,000 trips per day); then it was back to normal … But ‘normal’ here means a steady upward trend.”
Suddenly, I was part of the new normal. Moreover, as he also assured me, “the average commuting cyclist, pedalling at a middling speed, will burn about 700 calories an hour”. Not only was I fitter but – barring the odd encounter with rogue pedestrians or a curb-hugging bendy bus – I was less stressed.
So this was journalism that not only changed my life but may even have prolonged it, not through a single revelation but via a persistent voice in my ear. And if I have succumbed to what Seaton described as the cyclist’s “not-very-attractive tendency towards smugness”, it seems only fair to point out, as he did, “that there is an objective, scientific basis for being utterly self-satisfied”. You can find it in the archive of Two Wheels.
We are keen to hear from Members about the Guardian articles that changed their views on the world, politics, society or culture. If you would like to share your experience, please email sophie.zeldin-oneill@theguardian.com, with a brief outline of the article you’d choose and why.
