live-cycle

Do you remember learning to ride a bike? For some time I suspected that I had always been able to ride a bike, that I was born with the ability, or that it was a quite natural part of growing up. But then I had a flashback: an eight or nine-year-old, in a back garden in Johannesburg, a large lawn ringed by fruit trees.  I remember an older boy visiting, someone from the church choir, too old to be my friend. Probably had a romantic interest in my eldest sister. Glen was his name, I think.

Well, he had arrived on his bike – a black Raleigh, as they all were in those days. I had asked him to teach me to ride, but the bike was too big for me. So while he and my sisters sat on the lawn talking, I began scooting around, standing on the left pedal. After a while I put my right foot under the crossbar and started pedalling – suddenly, quite unconventially, I was riding a bike.

That Christmas my parents gave me and my two older sisters a bike to share – a girl’s bike, black Raleigh, with a simple pedal-back brake. We fought over who could ride it when, but it was the first feeling of freedom that cycling has given me ever since. A girl’s bike? Friends jeered and mocked, but I couldn’t care less.

Thinking about it, Iwas quite lucky. We didn’t have much money, so it took a few more years before we each got our own bike. But we had a bike, we had friends with bikes, we had space to learn to ride them, and to fall off (I got into trouble when my second sister fell off and chipped a tooth, even though I was nowhere near).

I see that this week the Government launched a new strategy to teach children at school to ride bikes. It is called Active Travel, but somehow it has not yet managed to hit the national newspapers – I think they are all too concerned with talk of bullying in the Westminster playground. I became aware of it only through an email from the Halfords press office, welcoming the initiative. Of course, as a bike seller, Halfords has a vested interest, but that does not mean we should ignore the move, which could lead to a healthier, happier nation. Without initiatives like this, the propapagation of cycling would be stuck in a ditch. And where would that get us when the petrol pumps dry up?

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 25th, 2010 at 6:31 pm and is filed under Dennis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.