Life seems just like a rubber band stretched around the elastic pull of the Market Place. Our task is to travel the rubber rail of delusion, kept comfortably numb to the more spiky realities of life lived real – a place where the glare of the marketplace stuns us less. The Novocain of our times are the fantasies of marketing spin; the oh-so-intentional social constructions of those who seek our cash and our submission to the True Religion of the marketplace. We are all headed off on some endless cattle ramp into the bowls of a destination we know is wrong; a destination that will make a holocaust of times to come. But as long as the destination remains elusive, all we have to do is check our progress against the reference points of those immediately behind, and with those just ahead. Then we don’t have to worry about all the rest. We are seemingly drawn along this line of time on the scent of shiny toys and by a life miraged though the constructions of marketing spin.

There’s signs all around that our track is a road across a void with rails as flimsy as the edge of a Pyrenean mountain descent. If only we can open our eyes. The reality of that void all around would cause us to slow. It might cause us to stop! It might cause us to walk our bikes down that hill instead.

Here’s a clue. The fabrications of delusion have caught up with the world of cycling; even cycling! That’s a place that should be immune. But it’s not. Not even here.

My flag of concern concerns the oil spill of marketing sludge into the Sacred Central of the High Temple of Pinarello! Yes, even there. The rot’s set in. Nothing is sacred any more. Consider the new Pinarello Dogma 60.1. A fine machine. Technically. But a bike for which I now have unending contempt. Pinarello has sold out. They are now busy ingratiating themselves onto the flabby Dentist egotisms of lives stretched past the border of fashionable youth. Pinarello’s Dogma has become the Botox solution for those who would cling to the fantasies of a youth long gone. It’s become a cosmetic appliance for those who can afford its ludicrously inflated price. $20,000 for a bike that’s worth half as much in terms of the performance it provides. If it were only an instrument of cycling rather than as an appliance of personal vanity. $10,000 for the bike; $10,000 for the pose. I am disgusted. Waiting lists apply!

Consider this. For $10,000 you can attach yourself to a BMC or a Scott Pro Tour machine. Either will perform at least as well. Either are at least as well made. Either have captured all the functionality even a Tour de France winner needs. I love the Dogma. I want a Dogma. But I am not going to pay a premium for pretence. I am not going to join the ranks of the Open Top Sports Car brigade who now seem to be turning their pudgy poncy ponderings to the world of two leg-powered wheels. When did cycling become the new Golf! When did our bike shops start stocking size XXXL knicks? When did the fuel of choice turn from water to double whipped cream latte? When did the bicycle become a shield of pretence for the cafe crawling crowd? Bah! A pox plague on the flabby over-cashed middle aged. They are driving prices beyond my reach!

Once cycling was a place through which to escape the stupidities of culturally constructed delusions. Now it’s a destination. Once we were impediments on the road of those travelling the sports car delusions of their past-it lives . Now we’ve become the playground for their cosmetic cash. I think I will take up banking or the stock market trade. Now that the Pre Global Financial Crisis set have moved on from the world of finance into the financing of pretentious cycling instead.

This post is, of course, already out of date. I am watching Stage 3 of the 2010 le Tour. That’s the one with the pave. The cobblestones in the road. That’s the stage that followed on from the carnage of Stage 2; the stage of the BIG CRASH. You know, the stage that most of us are embarrassed to admit we enjoyed; being the sadists that we are…

So, we are now four stages in. That’s enough to note a few things.

I must say that Christian Prudhomme’s attempt to relieve the usually underwhelming opening week sprinters’ stages has worked! But at what cost? Certainly at the cost of a few bruises, some broken bodies and LOTS of broken bikes. From the riders’ demonstration parade at the end of Stage 2, it’s obvious that at least most of the them aren’t particularly impressed. But what was the alternative?

You see, in my view, Le Tour has outgrown itself as a rider’s race. It’s outgrown itself as an icon for the cycling community to admire. Now it’s all about the show. Now it’s all about impressing the masses who do not ride; impressing the car-driving Charlie set who drink 2363kj Green Tea Cream Venti’s at McStarbucks. It’s all about impressing those who like blood. Someone else’s blood. Not theirs…

Which, I think, is why the new self-appointed le Patron le Peloton, Fabian Cancellara, decided to make his point. The vision of that Swiss superstar herding his flock as a protest parade across the finishing line was something of a downer for all those who can’t really tell the difference between football and cycling; except one involves a ball and the other being the sport without one…Pass the MacStarbucks please…

Was that a spectacle of angst against an overly hard ride? Hardly that. No. It was a display against the gladitiatorisation of a sport that requires more brains to follow that with which the football crowd are usually equipped. I don’t think le Patron was concerned about the narrow roads, or the crashes, or even leaving poor old Andy Schleck sitting beside the road. No, I think the concern was to do with the spectacle of those events becoming the reason for the show. Is this the way Prudhomme intends to boost ratings growth? Le crash, le burn. The footballisation of le Tour. Appealing the the deadheads who love gladiator sport. Appealing to those who love to watch pain and hurting – unless, of course, that pain’s their own. Cowards of the couch. Non-cyclists to be sure. No wonder Fabian decided to react. I am on his side.

Onwards to another observation of mine. If the Belgians love cycling THAT much, I’m off to Belgium to live… What a crowd! They were Alpe d’Huez crowd crowds along the entire route. The God of God’s must surely favour Belgium with passions such as those.

Which leads me to the laws of physics. Bernoulli’s theorm to be precise. That’s the one that says the pressure in a fluid decreases as its velocity increases. Velocity is high when pipes are tight and flattens out when the pipes get wide. Which must mean that pressure goes up when the pipes funnel out. Consider Figure 1. During any given time interval the same volume has to pass through the narrow section A₁ of the pipe with diameter 2h₁ as through the wide section A₂ (V₁ = V₂). Therefore the velocity v₁ is larger than the velocity v₂, and the pressure in the narrow part is smaller than in the wider part. Now, was it just me or did someone else start thinking about Bernoulli’s theorem while watching le Peloton negotiate those incredibly narrow Belgian roads? This explains why there were so many crashes! Those Belgian pipe-like roads are pretty narrow. And the same volume of bikes has to pass the narrow bits (like A1) as has to pass through the wider roads, like at the finish line (let’s say, A2). Watching Stage 2, we sure could see the pressure at a peak when the pipe got wide! At the finish line…

Most of us would like to reach some sort of position in society; hopefully higher than where we might be now. President, general, corporate CEO. Or maybe just a councillor on the local school Board. Maybe it’s a position of status you’re after. Fastest, richest, loudest, best shot or most notorious; anything at all so long as you’re better than your neighbour, sibling or worst enemy. The games people play to out rival others can be the most exciting spectator sport of all!

It doesn’t matter if your game is delusory. What matters is that at least one other person shares some enthusiasm for the endeavour with which you seek to engage. Competition to be the grower of the biggest potato in the village matters if at least just one other person is also after that crown. That battle to be the best can be just as hard fought with passion as any other war.

I’m thinking back to one status war with which it was my pleasure to engage. A truly wonderful spectacle of pointless endeavour! It was to do with wicker chairs. A row of wicker chairs to be precise. You see, to sit in one of these chairs was true sign of success. They were a row of chairs circling inner sanctum space landscaped to define a devotional space of splendour through which to acknowledge (our collective antagonisms and jealousies for) the big boss man in charge. Just like a row of water fronting villas on the edge of some over developed bay, these wicker chairs fronted – and held back – echelons of lesser chairs behind. They girded his royal elevation from the swill of lesser plastic chair sitters behind. Rows and rows of envious wannabes. To sit in a wicker chair at the front, you needed to be at the front of your own career. You needed to be a professor who had published lots and lots of papers in journals that probably no one else in the world would ever – or could ever – read. The more abstract and impenetrable your arguments might be, the more chaotic and abstract your numerate/arcane dead-language purple prose, the more empathic you’re journey to a possie on one of those front row wicker chairs. You must indeed be clever and superior if no one else could understand a word! The more arcane your writings, the less the chance someone else would dare to admit they didn’t have a clue! Yes, the furies of incomprehensibility were a hard fought war of words and portulent posturing. The prize was to sit in one of those wicker chairs! And listen to endless drivel surrounding the administration of exactly nothing for a group of people blissfully anchorless to the practicalities of the rest of the world.

I never got to sit on one of those chairs. I had much more fun watching the sport from the hard plastic chairs behind. It was a sport of pontificational fury with a subtlety of innuendo and vacuous point scoring that would bore the otherwise comatose audiences of championship snooker, the zombie thrill seekers of world championship cricket – or lawn bowls enthusiasts; all words and wind, signifying ultimately, nothing at all. So I took up farming instead!

Now I’m wondering about the very concept of fame. Is life’s biggest goal really to occupy some dodgy wicker chair, or to gravitate to that corner office; of simply to be called ’sir’? Is it ever just about the height of your pile of cash? Is it about the size of your house? Or yes, about how fast or far you can ride a bike?

It’s the rules of engagement rather than the nature of the games we play that matter most. If your game is to lead, but all you’re trying to lead is a bicycle race, then the tool of engagement is just your legs. If your game is to lead an empire, the tool is an army of guns or diplomats. If your pathway is through war, not everyone’s going to be equally impressed. Someone’s going die. Or at least loose their house. That battle for the wicker chairs was pretty tame. The fallout was just envy and spite; rather than much in the way of blood. The game to assert individual beliefs is much much worse. Mad mullahs empowered via the compulsion of bombs is a different kind of engagement to be sure. To have our view of the world be constrained via the slit-visioned veils of some one else’s prejudiced beliefs is a tough shroud to wear.

Which is why we should all sit back and reflect on the harmless glory of sports that engage only through personal fitness and the capacity to play well as a team. That’s why cyclesport is a model for the sustained future of our race. Consider the energy of a prospective corporate tyrant or of one who would become the chief faschist in charge. How much better for all if those compulsions to grind could be diverted to pedals instead!

I have a vision! Imagine a word where all wars of ego could be resolved through summiting a col rather than mountains of underlings. Where the energy of success is measured by personal power meters rather than by the energy of other people’s resources if not by their blood and misery. Board room brawls should be resolved through heading out for group ride. Military summits should be negotiated through climbing a hors cagegorie hill rather th through poker play with a stock of nukes. At least let’s restrict our quests for personal supremacy to thrones of no greater stature than a row of wicker chairs.

I am sick of it… Brassed off. Fed up. If it doesn’t stop I’m going to become a recluse. I’ll just cycle off into the distance on an endless solo ride…

Everywhere you look, up, down, sideways, frontwards, backwards – people keep telling me what to like and what is best. They tell me what is hot and what’s not. They tell me how stuff should be done and how my approach is always wrong. Let’s face it. Everyone is their own little island of perfect advice. Every single human being is a big bundle of prejudices wrapped up in the veneer of their own delusions of good taste and omniscience. Most people spend their entire lives searching, seeking, exploring, digging and hoping for validation; any validation will do. Which is why you find like-minded folk clubbing together like castaways clinging together as their boat goes down.

In music the critics -and everyone is a critic- tell us what’s good and what’s not. If you only ever chose what the critics might recommend, you’d end up with a collection of Top 10 McSwill. See! I am being a critic now… my game is to seek out stuff that people generally reject and reject the stuff they don’t. That way I can enjoy my sense of cultural victimisation as a perpetual masochist pain!

Let’s enter the shallow end of this mirky opinionated pool. Take musical choice for a start. Let’s pick a critically dammed musical recording of note. The Stone Roses’ second album, Second Coming, is a good start. Consider this glowing review: ‘this is a turgid, interminably boring record…’ I love every second, so there! We ‘Classical Music’ buffs are not supposed to rate Respighi above Verdi. I do. So there! Take that! We are supposed to admire Schoenberg. Nuts. Mozart was a god. Not in my book. Give me Bach any time… And why can’t I give equal time and value to the works of Devin Townsend and Mendelsson? Have you ever heard Townsend’s Accelerated Evolution album? Play it loud. Ride to that and you would win any cycling race – or crash. Wow!!

Then there’s my choice of cycling teams. The cognoscenti is all for Team Sky. Or Radio Shack. Or whatever and which ever except the one I go for: Caisse D’Epargne. Everyone is an informed critic on the best team and the best rider. It’s all part of the fun. But is there anyone else out there who cheers for Louis Leon Sanchez other than those from his local town?

Choice of bike? Choice of component group? Stand back and watch the rival camps scream. One man’s choice is heresy to at least some.

Choice of a favourite author? Watch the learned critical pontificators connect your choice with Mills and Boone…

Because there are so many opinions out there, it will usually be possible to find someone else with whom you agree. So seek them out and quote their support; soon you will have a cult or a quorum of support to validate your choice. The internet is helpful here. Search for your choice, qualify it with the keyword ‘great’ and populate your club. Replace that keyword with ‘bad’ and pile up the evidence against whatever it is with which you might disagree.

All this gets really fun when your choice has some foundation in an ethical or value position. There you will find choices that simply cannot be argued for want of social exclusion; or jail. Consider religion! Islam, Christianity or Judaism. Only one can be true. Which one? Prepare to burn when you choose against the choice of your mates or what’s standard for your culture. Open up any of these Big Three and watch the fun. Sunni or Shiite? Catholic or Presbyterian. Orthodox or Reformed Judaism. Take a choice and man the barricades. They are all cess-pit contagions of self-referentialised prejudice. And don’t even get me started on the new religion of Atheism as ruled by Saints Dawkins and Hitchens et. al. They are as bigoted and ego-driven as all the rest. That’s why I pump for Tarvu (the world’s greatest comic relief). Or the book of Urantia. No one can argue against you when your choice is off the scale. Except to say that you are mad. Or deluded. But free of those infernal mainstream clans…

Politics is almost as bad – or probably worse if you happen to live in a country ruled by the Taliban…

So… given that I am (perceived to be) wrong in everyone else’s (clearly deluded) eyes and everyone else is wrong in mine… here’s my own personal universal proclamation of good taste and informed choice. If you don’t agree, you are wrong and un-informed. If you agree, you are indeed an elevated being! There’s just one catch. Because my choices are informed by a perversity to think the opposite of everyone else, no one else is allowed to agree. If you agree, then I must be wrong. Which means that I have to think upon this all over again. Which explains why I really, truly, enjoy my solo bicycle rides – arguing with myself all the way…

So, here’s my list:

World’s greatest bicycle maker: Pinarello
World’s greatest bicycle component group: Campagnolo
World’s greatest cyclist: Louis Leon Sanchez
World’s greatest cycling team: Caisse D’Epargne
World’s greatest composer: Gustav Mahler
World’s greatest artist: Goya
World’s greatest contemporary band: Green Carnation
World’s greatest bicycle ride: my next ride!
World’s greatest country: Antarctica (no people with whom to disagree)
World’s greatest politician: the Dalai Lama
World’s greatest religion: the Cargo Cult
World’s greatest leader: His Majesty King Khesar, The 5^th Druk Gyalpo of Bhutan
World’s greatest work of fiction: Dianetics by L Ron Hubbard
World’s greatest work of non fiction: Dianetics by L Ron Hubbard
World’s greatest ever computer: the Macintosh Portable
World’s greatest bicycle race: Paris Roubaix
World’s greatest corporation: Apple Inc.
World’s greatest genius: L Ron Hubbard (I mean, he got away with it!!)
World’s greatest idiots: those who follow L Ron Hubbard (or any other religion…)
World’s greatest tourist destination: Consuegra (where Don Quixote exercised his lance)
World’s greatest moron: equal honours for Robert Mugabe and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
World’s greatest scientist: The Dalai Lama
World’s greatest economist: former King Jigme SIngye Wangchuck for the idea of Gross National Happiness
World’s greatest idea: J M Keynes for ‘In the Long Run, we are all dead’
World’s greatest stupidity: football
World’s greatest con job: golf
World’s greatest perversion: religion
World’s greatest problem: human ego
World’s greatest joke: the game of cricket
World’s greatest mistake: listening to academics
World’s greatest evil: the Chinese economy
World’s greatest stupidity: buying Chinese goods
World’s greatest movement: misanthropy!
World’s greatest peril: human overpopulation
World’s greatest delusion: the concept of sustainable economic development
World’s greatest dangerous idea: economic rationalism
World’s greatest saving grace: cycling, bicyclism!
World’s greatest fable: altruism and selflessness
World’s greatest movie of all time: 2001 – A Space Odyssey
World’s greatest and rarest phenomenon: critical thinking (on anything at all…)
World’s greatest proof that critical thinking is rare: dependency on the car and the re-election of George Bush for his second term
World’s greatest website: click here…

Iron Man
Ok, try this. Take any mega star hero, your local politician, your President, Prime Minister or just your immediate Boss. Remove the support system of fame. Take away the Mercedes Benz, robes of honour or office, the Rolex watch, the paid-to-be-adoring crowd of zealous acolytes, the power suit, the penthouse suite and the truck loads of cash – and what do you see? Just see how vulnerable and unimpressive this one time hero has become. Someone pulled the plug on his aura. The magic, the noise, the glare of glory was but a lightshow connected to a powergrid of spin. The cogs spin off like a mechanical clock blasted by a gun. The hero staggers out and lands on her knees. He has to learn, once more, how to walk. She’s now just a doddering spectre of the big cog he once was*.

When you removed the tower of power, only the spark that once ignited that one time furnace of fame remains. The empowerment, the authority, the aura and the mystique is gone. What was it that once impressed us so much? Was it the man (or the woman) or just the blaze he ignited? Was it the aura or the man? Was there anything, really, ever there at all? Perhaps all the persona we saw was the suit. The suit of iron. The Iron Man suit! A man inside pumped to power via super electronics and a loud Hollywood script. Imagine an Iron Man hero pumped not by electric whizz bang, but by a kingdom of slaves, or Personal Assistants, or five hundred kids who stack his shelves. Or by 100 underlings aspiring upwards to his job. Or by the less inspired who are inspired by anything bigger or just more noticed than themselves.

How easy it is for the frailties of a single man to hide in a machine of spin like that. He hides within and blinds those who would look more closely by shining the light of his fame in their eyes. Let them watch his flashing lights. His shiny titanium shields. His gas jets for self propelled flight. He’s like the Wizard of Oz. Or like the organic blob of seething malevolence that hisses and fizzes inside a Dalek suit. An individual can ascend to a great height when elevated on the shoulders of minions paid and placed to hold him up.

When we do manage to catch a glimpse of the man inside the suit, we are almost always disappointed. He does not withstand that pared off scrutiny for long. His unsupported star soon fizzes out as we watch his failures, blemishes and a reality that increasingly resolves down to just a man in the crowd. Just another guy. Or worse.

People need, apparently, to admire their leaders. Otherwise they tend to throw them out. So leaders need to impress. Leaders can choose how to realise such an aim. Leaders can design the machine that drives their ambition forward. Leaders might build a suit of power. Leaders might dig their moats and build their personal myths. The machinery of power bloats the more the man at the core is incapable of impressing all on his own.

I am watching the pandering inanities of our political leadership. The Big Man sits on an Everest of faces arrayed like a mosaic with a million parts. Picking a face to blame is like picking a face from outer space. They all blend in and fuse to one big amorphous mass. It’s hard to point the finger of blame when everyone looks exactly the same. Unless, of course, that someone chooses to be noticed to take an occasional hit of praise; or to accept their own personal 15 minutes of fame. Meeting a leader who chooses to stand out and alone gives us a shock. Not from the electricity of his personality, but through the disorientation of seeing The Man resolved from that empire of minions that usually elevates him from view. We sense that something is wrong… Especially if our admiration was actually based on the horse of power he rode rather than on just the man himself! How impressive is that bit on the very tip of Mt Everest? Is it not made impressive by the 8,000 meter mound of ground underneath?

Bicycle Man – Bicycle Woman!
There’s two ways to impress. There’s two ways to lead: by taking the lead up that hill that leaves everyone else behind, or by fighting from the safety of being out of range (of scrutiny, or of ever actually being seen at all). Clever leaders are ever so rare. Clever leaders don’t mind being revealed through letting the folk see the power of their pedal strokes. Clever leaders are happy to reveal the machinery at their command; to let us watch how all the cogs at their command interconnect. Good leadership lets us observe the part the leader plays; it allows us to see how all the cogs connect through the chain the leader drives through the sweat of his personal effort. Clever leaders are happy to let the cameras watch their smooth cadence and prowess in the hills. Inane managers prefer to ride a black box instead. They don’t want the cameras focusing in on gears they grind, so they veil their cogs under a bureaucratic veil of management smog.

Lousy leaders need their Hors Categorie hills of underlings to take up the strain; to hide their mistakes, to cloud the roles they take. The art of their part shifts from the pedalling of cogs to the shifting of blame. They prefer to ride their minions through the cowardice of remote control. They hide inside that Iron Man suit!

If you load up a bicycle with all this junk of management fat, you won’t even get to the starting line. The frame will crack and your wheels will buckle and you’ll just sit there in the middle of the road. You can stall the race. You can stop some from getting around.

Now I know what a cynic might say. The bicycle leadership model is subject to all the vagaries we see on any Grand Tour stage … like Cadel Evans having a really bad day. But! And this is the key. If leadership works like a good cycling team (which counts Cadel out), then there are replacement leaders to take a pull at the front. There are always alternative leaders in the Peloton of good management. Leaders inspire and mentor their replacements. Leaders inspire the harmony of a team. You don’t need to multi-layer mountains of support for just the man at the top; you invest in the functioning of a team of talent that can mix and match at any particular race and fit the idiosyncrasies of any particular road. You don’t need one bloated Sherman Tank to rule the world. You don’t need to invest everything in just the one Iron Man suit. Better to invest in leadership teams where every cog and every chain is open to inspection by anyone who cares to observe. How long does it take to replace a wheel in a Grand Tour stage? How long does it take to fix the dodgy cogs of Goldman Sachs?

*my attempt to be politically corrected to the specifics of being gender non-specific has clearly failed… Or as I used to suggest to my dumbfounded students, ‘bugger the glass ceiling, just give me leaders like Jeannie Longo’. That’s Jeannie in the photo above.

Feeling low? Feeling lethargic? Not enjoying life like you used to? Are you a male? Are you a man? If you are a woman, read on and laugh…

Are you ready, willing and able to attend to the servicing of your car and household plumbing but not to the necessities of your own physical health? Happy to clean the plugs of your lawn mower but not the congestion of your heart and lungs? Convinced that the market place is the broker between every problem and its cure? Want to re-charge your health just like you’d recharge your ‘phone? On the market for eternal youth? If so, then take the test on the left*. If you answer ‘yes’ to two or more of these deeply insightful questions, sign up now! Buy a round of pills and become the Superman you always thought you were. Captain America! Iron Man with jets. All yours for a measly $500 per month. $6,000 per year. $60,000 for ten. So long as you don’t die of the side effects…

Yes sir. Answer ‘yes’ and your problem is ‘Low T’. Low testosterone. The latest designer health malady and co-joined cure from Big Brother Pharma. Hand crafted psychoses and associated cures; direct to your door via the fast lane of the marketplace.

Read the questions. What else does this list remind you of? Are these the symptoms of a life let go from too much wallowing in the couch? Aren’t these the symptoms of a bicycle-shaped hole in the life of those afflicted by sloth?

Yes, I could hijack this stupid questionnaire and corral the argument as a pitch for more cycling in your life. All the issues it highlights can be addressed through spending one hour per day on your bike. But, I do confess, there are side effects from the cycling-cure that should footnote any cycling advocacy of that kind. Read the small print that should be attached to cycling your way back to good health. Perhaps these side-effects are enough to keep the mob planted in their couches, sucking pills instead of pushing pedals. I’ll do my community service and spell it all out. Read the following list.

The Small Print… Side Effects of Cycling Yourself Back to Good Health

* I am not going to give these turkeys any linklove by referencing this quiz. Just Google ‘Low T’ and ‘quiz’ if you insist on knowing more. Viva və läs′ə pēd′

For some strange reason, few people ever want me to drive a car these days. My family suggests that they’d rather walk… Indeed, my kids say that walking is faster.

You see, I have this theory. My theory is that whatever speed is good enough for a bicycle is good enough for a car. I mean to say, I can get most places on a bike in reasonable time.

Which got me thinking, as I do when I’m out on a lovely long ride. What if the whole world could slow down to the speed of a bike? Such a nice thought. Especially considering that this thought of mine happened at just that point when a double trailered cattle truck was overtaking at ten times my speed on that lonely, dusty, gravel shrouded, oh so very very narrow road.

Let me run with this thought play of mine. Assume, somehow, that all vehicles were tied to the maximum speed of a bicycle. Not a kiddie’s BMX. Or some first timer’s wobbly ride. No, let’s assume the speed of, say, Louis Leon Sanchez. Or of Lance, if you insist. What’s that? About 45km/hour average on flattish roads? And about 100km/hour down really nice, steep, properly tarred hills. [That's about 28m/hr and 62m/hr respectively, for those of you who still clinging to the Imperial system - like a drowning sailor clinging to a raft on the edge of an earth thought to be as flat as a dinner plate...]. But there’s more. Assume as well that your daily dose of travel is also linked to the possibilities of the pedal: about 200km in a really, really, good day. Of about 7 to 8 hours. Before the average punter would pass out.

Imagine a world slowed down to the pace of our pedal powered legs. Instead of 1000km in a day, you’d be looking at 200 instead. Or more likely, about 100 [62 miles]. Imagine what that would imply.

For starters, people would start thinking more locally than they once might have been inclined. People would stay closer to home. They’d shop, work and play within a radius of a good two hour ride. Local businesses would start to pick up. They, in turn, would start sourcing their own supplies from closer to home. We’d all start becoming vastly more locally self-sufficient. If you insist on getting stuff that’s further away, be prepared to camp out as journeys that once took a day by car would now take up to a week. As our local communities are recharged, so too would be our employment. And that long-promised era of internet commuting would really take hold! More and more of us would start working from home. Think of the CO2 that would then stay in the ground instead.

Globalisation would wither like the dried snake-oiled skin it always was. Globalisation of trade in goods and the globalisation of all the world’s stupidities. The globalisation of culture into some odious amorphous mash. The globalisation of identity. The globalisation of financial crises. The globalisation of impacts further out than our own back yards! Import the goods, exports the bads.

But electrons would still be free to swing at the speed they need. The internet would keep us connected to the globalised crowd sourcing of ideas, creativity and learning. That’d keep us from falling back to medieval times. The best of the past fortified by the knowledge and technology of this internet age.

Our thoughts of distance would start to compress. Distance would recede ever further away. We’d start becoming re-regionalised all over again. Big urban centres would become even more centred around nodes of our now slower paced transport modes. Planes would fall out of the sky! They’d never be able to take off at bicycle speed… Ships would start sailing again. Trains would matter as they once did and always should. Cars would become an even bigger pain. And how many folk will persist with SUV’s when it takes all day to reach the next pit stop for beer?

How could we all go off to war if it took us a year to get to the front line?

If you are going to shoot off a missile at pedal powered speed, you’d better make sure your nuke has got a thousand kilometre fuse…

And just think how much more careful we’d all start being about the garbage we throw out. If our trucks can only cart your junk 100km in a day, in no time at all landfills would leech their return to your back yard fence. It’s harder to ship the stuff off to some distant place when distance is compressed by how far you can ride a bike in a day.

And what if you could no longer depend on instant responses from the ambulence, fire fighters and the police. We’d probably become somewhat more circumspect about the risks we take and the things we do that might cause offence. It’d become easier to catch a bicycle thief when the best he can do is escape at the same pace as you. Just maybe the village doctors might start making house calls again! Imagine.

And what’s the future of the business lunch when it would take those business men all day to reach their wine and truffles bloated troughs?

And what, oh what, would be the future for golf! So long in the commute and so little time on the green. There’d be no time left for swilling at the 19th hole.

Life would slow down and we’d start noticing the details our speed once blurred from view. Journey’s would become a time for living rather than an interruption between destinations. Life lived along the way. The smaller stuff of our lives would grow to become life’s more exciting adventures. A trip to town would become yesteryear’s trip overseas.

Just imagine. And best of all, next time I come across that double trailered cattle truck, I could pass him instead!

To most people around here, I am just that ‘cyclist guy’ who fluffs around the place on his bicycle like a kid who never grew up.

Which is, to be blunt, nonsense. Kids don’t ride bikes these days. Kids don’t do anything at all!

It’s school holiday time at the moment. Today’s a fine, warm early autumnal day. I went for a lovely long ride (which means that I have to work later into the evening, but that’s the price that’s got to be paid…). I rode through a nearby town, enroute to a big recreational dam. But there’s no way that anyone would notice that it’s school holiday time. Because there are no kids. Anywhere. I mean, it’s as thought they all up and died. Or that some Pied Piper carried them off. There were no kids playing in the gardens of their homes. There were no kids skateboarding on the road. There were certainly no kids out riding bikes. There were no kids at the dam. There were no kids walking, there were no kids just talking. They are all indoors. Watching the TV or wired to the internet.

This is not about politics. It’s not really about sheep either. But it is about standing out from the flock; being the only sheep dressed in lycra rather than ubiquitous wool.

It’s also not really about my pathological aversion to that most arcane of socially constructed curiosities: wearing a suit and tie.

But let’s start with a game currently being played here in down town Australia. No doubt the same game is being played where you live too. Londoners will relate pretty quickly I am sure when they consider a certain Mayor called Boris. This is about what happens when we allow the cyclist we are to extend further out into life than out-of-hours ‘private time’. It’s about being unordinary when ordinary is how you would otherwise maintain your position in the flock.

It’s perverse, all this. Just consider the conundrum of someone like a politician grappling with the duality of the need to be noticed while, at the very same time, being a well-behaved member of a team. Stand out and the harsh sharp blades of conformity are likely to take off your head. Blend in too much and the folk won’t notice you are there. Is life really about the art of micro-tuned subtlety? Or can we become the erupting volcano in the room that’s pretty hard to miss?

Segue to Australia’s latest Leader of the Opposition, Tony Abbott. I have no interest in his politics, or of any other politician for that matter (particularly the towering inanity of our own particular local member…) But something caught my eye a while ago. Picture this. The reporters were interviewing Tony Abbott in his plush Canberra office. Sitting beside his desk was his bicycle. I am almost certain that this is the first time a bicycle has sat beside the desk of such a senior politician in this country, or probably anywhere else as well. Did George Bush prop his Trek beside his desk in the White House? Does Boris do so in London town?

I didn’t hear what Tony Abbott was saying. I was transfixed by the bicycle beside his desk! Then, the next thing we heard was that Mr Abbott was competing in an Iron Man event; the media was apoplectic in shock. Now, there’s this. A Pollies Ride from Melbourne to Sydney. See the picture above (click on it to make it bigger. Follow this link to read the full story). He was going to ride his bike as part of a campaign to meet and greet; to connect and learn. And all on tax payer time! Now I am pretty sure this is getting down to seriously unique. One quote from the story is worth a vote to note:

…no one would be complaining if Abbott were doing the trip in a car instead of on a bike

Exactly. Precisely so. There’s serious difference going on here. This guy’s not playing the lame same game like everyone else. Every hack journalist in the country is laying inane sporting metaphors over the story; which serves to highlight their own insecurities rather than to serve effective derision on the pedalling pollie target in their sights. Take this intellectually disabled backfiring jab:

If the wheels of government only turned when Abbott wasn’t on his bike we wouldn’t get anything done

I bet the turkey who said that is permanently dressed in a suit; porky belly jammed up against his regulation desk. Dreaming of McDonalds and watching Australia’s Greatest Loser on TV.

But this is not just about one politician daring to admit cycling further into the highway of his life. It’s about why and how it is that so few other cyclists are prepared to go so far. Or to go so far in the shining light of the public’s unfiltered gaze. I mean, the car crowd are never shy to park their cars in the public gaze. The CEO of my last organisation even had a sign erected over his parking space so that everyone would know that that sporty little BMW was his. A statement of how he perceived himself, I guessed. (An open-topped, underpowered mini-man car). So why can’t we extend the same egocentric posturing for business hour posing to our bicycles as well?

For good reasons, that’s why! Because there’s more to a bicycle than posing. Anyone can stick a Colnago on the wall. But only a cyclist can ride it to the purpose of its design. There’s no roaring V8 of noise to confuse prowess for pose with a bike. You just look a dork if you can’t ride to match the bike you prop beside your desk. Being a cyclist is a more complete package of a statement to make than any business suit or car can provide.

I want my leaders to possess at least some degree of leadership! To lead, you have to be out front. Or at least prominently leading from behind. You can’t lead if you are invisible inside a flock. Leadership requires demonstrable qualities of distinction. Otherwise, just let the flock make it’s mob-meandering emergence like the happenstance of driftwood floating on a river. Like a mob of sheep, the flock will eventually end up in some place other than where they started. But they are still going to get shorn, in the end.

I know there’s some good qualifiers to all this, of course. You don’t necessarily need to voice your distinctiveness by stepping out in lycra and parking a bicycle beside your desk. It’s possible to use other means to escape the black hole attractions of floating with a flock. You can be distinctive via intelligence, for example. Or inventing stuff that’s totally new. Or by being immune to anger; or sticking to your principles, or anything else that maintains your orbit around the gravity well of the otherwise inane.

And yes, I am assuming it’s leadership that Mr Abbott is demonstrating here rather than just a predilection to pedal while his tax payer funded metre is running. Not all cyclists are leaders and not all leaders are cyclists (unless you are in a pro-cycling team). But his notions of pedal powered community mingling do have huge appeal; you can’t be more open to community access than that. They don’t make bullet proof cycling vests and it’s ever so hard for security hit teams to keep you under control when you are out on your bike. Especially when you are Iron Man fit and your security goons can’t keep up…

But I like the cut of this politician’s leadership suit. The message is clear. He’s in command of his security to be different; distinctive and assured. It matters not if his politics are different to what I’d ordinarily choose. That’s not the point. This person stands out. We can read him with greater clarity than is usual in the flock that goes for leadership these days. If someone is prepared to stand so high; to stand out so far; then we can at the very least admire him for allowing our judgements to be so easily made. His orbit may be heading off into outer space. But at least he is in orbit rather than decomposing at the bottom of the bog.

Bicycle mechanics… there’s more garbage swilling around this theme than just about any other. Let me contribute some more…

For something so astoundingly and magnificently simple as the workings of a bicycle, it’s a wonder that there can be so many controversies surrounding the operation of every part. There’s more mythology around how we should set up and maintain a bike than there were dramas in Valhalla on the morning of Gotterdammerung…(when the gods set fire to their palace).

You’d reckon that playing the game of wrenches on a car would be more complicated than playing around with bikes. But as cars get more and more complicated, car mechanics just gets more specialised. Dodgy gear boxes get sent off to gear box technicians, engine diagnostics are diagnosticated by dedicated computers lorded by factory certificated boffins wearing white lab coats with pocket protected pens. Electrics are the job of auto electrical experts, tyres are done by tyre places, body work by body work folk. There’s airbag specialists and repairers of windshields. Upholsterers and exhaust specialists. When you take a car in for repairs, it’s like setting off a chain reaction of cogs meshing with cascades of other cogs all the way down the line. It’s like springing an elaborate mechanical clock. Whirl the cog and pay the bill and hope that the job, somehow, gets done.

But it’s different with bicycles. For a start, one mechanic usually does it all. Not to mention also being bicycle salesman, chief public relations officer, complaints desk operator and a cyclist in permanent need of a ride. It’s tough being a bike mechanic! I mean, can you imagine putting in all that love and devotion needed to tend to some kid’s latest toy while also attending to the even bigger toys the grown up kids like to enjoy? How many punctures can a fella be expected to repair for owners who do not have a clue?

Bike wrenching is not just about spanners and chain lube. There’s also a kind of priesthood thing going on as well. Like everywhere else but only more so than in any other place, bike mechanics like their biases and myths. So when the customer fronts up for some work, she may be getting more than he may have ever bargained for.

Underneath most bicycle mechanics are some pretty entrenched points of view. Take the die-hard roadie forced to work on mountain bikes. Or, worse, having to sell fat tyres when his dreams extend only out to 700×23c. Watching a performance like that is worth the trip to my own local bike shop…Study his words, so carefully chosen. So cautious and guarded to not let his biases slip…’Yes, that’s a truly great Cross Country steed…’ if you are demented enough to want to ride a truck like that…

Then there’s the bike set-up game. This is the orgy room of Valhalla’s tempestuous neon-plush draped halls. How many frame sizing formulae are currently in vogue? How many bike mechanics are there in the world today? And let us not even get started on the concept of setting seat height. Like an inquisitor judging an heretic’s future in heaven or hell, all depends on accepting only the gospel of his own singular point of view. No matter what the ailment of any bike I take in for my own mechanic to see, I always come back with a seat deflated to half mast and no torque wrench to right his wrongs so that I can get home again. He’s a track specialist, you see…

And let’s not even touch that greatest of bicycle apostolic laws: Dura Ace vs Campagnolo vs SRAM. If your man has a determined attachment to one and not the others, you can be sure that he won’t know how to set up the offerings of the devil he hates. I spent a whole year trying to unravel the subtle insecurities of my SRAM entourage that he’d set up as per the dictates of Dura Ace. These things are not the same! There’s huge finesse involved in tuning the gears of the upper-end. Just like piano tuning or finally catching the art of fishing with a fly.

I’d hate to think how much money I have wasted over the years from accepting the advice of mechanic-salesmen who persist in seeing the world in black and white. I remember the first aluminium racing bike I ever bought. I remember my man telling me that aero was the place to be. I remember watching my bottom bracket rise and fall like a pendulum with every pedal stroke. I remember throwing that bike out in time for the very next race. And I remember a mechanic with the self-assurance of Lance at a victory press conference race review. ‘Yes …he said … these tyres really, truly, are puncture proof!’ Do you remember the Wolber Invulnerable from the mid ’80’s scene? I do. My NSCC club mates do too. We aimed to collect all our punctured tyres to wrap around his smug know-it-all neck.

And how about that guy who is yet to discover the virtues of the torque wrench for fixing a seat post in place? I recall a ride back from a race after my post had finally snapped. 50NM really was too much when the specs call for 6.5…

And, do I really need a fully decked monster suspended mountain bike for downhilling in the Himalayas when all I really want to do is ride the dirt roads surrounding my home? You try and convince a Bike Shop Expert on the virtues of a cyclo-cross bike when all he’s ever heard of are fat tyred mountain bike tanks. ‘No Sir’, said the man in the big city bicycle shop… ‘there’s no such thing in this country of ours’. ‘Cyclo Cross is only in Europe. Why not take this Trek Liquid 55 instead’. So I did. And it broke in half. And I went to war with the Factory until they honoured my warranty at last. Until my local bloke mentioned, ever so casually, that he could get me a Pinarello cyclo-cross bike in just a day or so… So now I seem to be the only person in this whole country of ours who rides such a bike exclusively on dirt roads. Loving every second. And wishing I had ever more seconds just like that to spend. And lamenting all the time and money wasted on mountain bikes. When all I wanted to do was to ride on dirt roads…

But it’s not all their biases over mine. Mine are just as ingrained (I am not making this up, you know…). Pity the bicycle shop man who has yet to discover the pathologies of my own particular points of view… Just say one word against Campagnolo and I’m out of his shop. Just mention Pinarello with any tone other than spiritual revelation and ultimate human attainment and off I go. And just try to argue for electric shifting Dura Ace! AND never, EVER! say anything at all against the unmitigated eternal glory of the Caisse D’Epargne cycling Team! Come to think on it, it’s kind of strange that every time I visit my local store, there’s usually no one there. I can sometimes hear whispers from somewhere out the back…