Thursday, August 12, 2004 AD
From bicycles to bucket exhausts
The art critic and biographer Tim Hilton has written a book called "One More Kilometre and We're in the Showers", reviewed by the Daily Telegraph here.
The book is a history of cycling in the "golden age" of the 1950s and 1960s. Hilton is about the same age as my father, who was a keen club cyclist from the late 1950s onwards, and still goes riding each Sunday for distances that are terrifying to a man half his age (i.e. me). I therefore found the reviewer's description of British cycling enthusiasts in that era rather moving:
It must have been pretty mindblowing.
What's poignant about this description of "no-nonsense, self-reliant men and women ... from skilled working-class backgrounds" is that so much of that culture seems to have disappeared today. The contemporary equivalent of the young men and women who were riding bikes into the Yorkshire Dales in 1958 - not only getting fresh air, exercise and companionship, but also expanding their horizons - are today more likely to be attaching bucket exhausts and huge spoilers to their (de-badged) Astra GTi's and driving round the Leeds inner ring road with their subwoofers pounding.
ISTM there's something deeply symbolic about this: on the one hand, the young men of the 1950s, like my father, who rode out into the Dales and has then kept on "riding" into a professional career as an accountant, that has recently taken him as far as China to negotiate joint venture deals, at a time when you might expect him to be winding down ready for retirement. And on the other hand, the young men of 2004, going round and round the inner ring road, remaining forever in the same place while making that place somewhat more unpleasant for those around them.
The book is a history of cycling in the "golden age" of the 1950s and 1960s. Hilton is about the same age as my father, who was a keen club cyclist from the late 1950s onwards, and still goes riding each Sunday for distances that are terrifying to a man half his age (i.e. me). I therefore found the reviewer's description of British cycling enthusiasts in that era rather moving:
His subjects belong to a slice of society that is usually overlooked: no-nonsense, self-reliant men and women, often from skilled working-class backgrounds, teaching their children to cycle within the society of thriving cycling clubs, dedicated to the "culture of the bike"...My father is indeed a "no-nonsense, self-reliant" man from a very working-class background. I must find a way of asking him what it was like to come from a run-down area of Leeds (long since demolished) and go riding out into the Yorkshire countryside to places like this (I make no apology for repeating this picture of Burnsall which I posted a few weeks ago - I think this is truly one of the most beautiful views in the whole world):
It must have been pretty mindblowing.
What's poignant about this description of "no-nonsense, self-reliant men and women ... from skilled working-class backgrounds" is that so much of that culture seems to have disappeared today. The contemporary equivalent of the young men and women who were riding bikes into the Yorkshire Dales in 1958 - not only getting fresh air, exercise and companionship, but also expanding their horizons - are today more likely to be attaching bucket exhausts and huge spoilers to their (de-badged) Astra GTi's and driving round the Leeds inner ring road with their subwoofers pounding.
ISTM there's something deeply symbolic about this: on the one hand, the young men of the 1950s, like my father, who rode out into the Dales and has then kept on "riding" into a professional career as an accountant, that has recently taken him as far as China to negotiate joint venture deals, at a time when you might expect him to be winding down ready for retirement. And on the other hand, the young men of 2004, going round and round the inner ring road, remaining forever in the same place while making that place somewhat more unpleasant for those around them.
