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.

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…

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.

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…

My morning holiday rides all pass a milk factory. And the cows that feed the factory. You can see it all over the space of a half hour flat spinning bumpy pot-holed meander of a ride. Happy cows wallowing in a supermarket of grass. The morning milking. And the busy hub of never ending big vat, stainless-steeled smoke stack puffing factory frenzy at the North Coast Dairy Cooperative. And then the tankers taking off to deliver bottles and cartons to a world that gives little thought to the cows that made its milk.

One of the dark, mysterious things that goes in in that factory is homogenisation. That’s the mechanical process of breaking up the fat or cream in the milk to spread it all around; to prevent the cream rising to the top like it does if you take your milk directly from a cow. I know this is true because my family drinks milk from our own cow. If you don’t stir the cream, all you get on your muesli is a massive dollop of cream. Cream does, indeed, rise to the top!

Which gets me to thinking. How poignant that society these days is powered by homogenised milk. Because homogenisation is the central meme of just about every aspect of life these days. We live in a world where cream is studiously and relentlessly prevented from rising to the top. And if it does, the machine managers of the world just skim it off and all the folk get is the white water that remains. The machinery of state seems intent on saving us all from the richness of a raw, unprocessed life; and feeding us just the thin watery remains. Policy and politics is the milk factory that homogenises society down into its uniformity of type; so much easier to manage us that way. Difference is too hard to handle. So skim it off. Smash up the cream and spread it all around. Welcome to the vat of modern life.

Take a look at what’s happening in our schools these days. Big Government is homogenising the curricula our kids receive. They learn what our masters want them to learn and avoid those raw unprocessed bits that make life interesting, if not more unruly. Just this week, the Australian Federal Government has opened the gates on its new Educational Homogenisation Plant. You can just see the factory stacks belching their steam of frenzied educational design. You can just see the bureaucrats round-tabling the bits that will go in and the bits that will be skimmed off. The juice that remains is the script to an ordered life of the politically correct. Our kids become widgets to be processed on a factory floor of learning managed with all the precision and direction of a Swiss railway line.

Yes, homogenisation is the deep political plan. Safe, uniform, boring, ordered and inane.

That’s one way to manage the unruly complexity of this world in which we live. We travel our delusions of calm around the trials and tribulations those rogue globules of fat would otherwise cause. Homogenisation frees us from the tyranny of difference. Smash and burn, crush and soothe the world back on the tracks of its homogenised rails.

The trouble is, of course, that cream is the place where most of the inspiration ferments. It’s the heady cloud from which innovation and the big steps of social progress are inspired. Difference elevates questions and inquiry. Difference makes the rest of us think. Difference provides the traction for us to escape from the bogs into which we’d otherwise slowly decay.

So what do we get when we devote too many resources to the technologies of homogenisation over the nurturing of free floating cream? A soulless, watery community of sheep; plugged into the canned conformity of nine-to-five, Mcdonalds and the homogenised religions of money and the automobile.

So what can we fatty globules of distinction do to escape the white watered milk baths to which most of us have succumbed? Be different, be distinctive and be brave. Ride a bicycle of course. Send your kids to a Steiner school. These are pretty impressive levers to pull. Basically, anything that confronts and confounds the machinery of state with spluttering indecision and an incapacity of response is the right thing to do. Keep those factories charged with the necessity to stay awake! Keep the sparks of creative tension tensioned over the big milk vats of State. That’s what keeps society alive.

Mine’s a potent yet mildly inoffensive anarchical push. Riding a bike is my active resistance of choice. It harms no one (except for those who should be harmed from their anti-cyclist rage) and adds layers of creamy possibilities to a life that would otherwise be squeezed and smashed under the tyranny of the Same. The more I ride, the more others might be so inspired. The more we ride, the bigger the challenge we provide to the homogenisation of Big Government’s watery community designs. Vive la Veloroucion!

There’s one last outpost of the uncivilised world, largely untouched by the machine manicured perfections of the bureaucrat’s ordered vision. We, the cyclists of the world, are still, largely, free to do our thing. Isn’t it wonderful!

You can almost understand why we’ve been left to last. Consider the different kinds of cyclists out there. Granny coaster-riding her way to the shops with bagel basket attached, is a cyclist. That 10 year old wobbling down the cycling track oblivious to the wider world, is a cyclist. Mountain bikers are cyclists. Lance is a cyclist. Even Cadel… Tandem riders are cyclists. So are recumbents(!) Pork bellied dentists riding the latest and greatest from the artisans of Italy and France, are, it is rumoured, cyclists. I am a cyclist too! Even my mate who only ever gets as far as remembering the bike rusting away in his shed, is a cyclist (because he did indeed ride once). Yes, consider the diversity of machine and riders out there who fit the Bicyclism bill. Was there ever such a diversity in the world of cars? It’s a glorious, fabulous untamed chaos of diversity and confusion out there in the land of the pedal powered machine. A confusion that enrages the Lego Land, Swiss clock tick tock of the bureaucrat’s lab-white Matrix model of how the world should and must be.

How long can all this last? We live in a world where the only sign of economic growth is via the perpetual inflation of government bureaucracy. Every day, in every way, we get more and more policies and rules to bandaid us from the anarchy of our unruly policy-confused lives. Like birds need to build nests, bureaucrats need to layer the world with ever more rules. It’s what they do. It’s in their genes (or perhaps it’s the drugs in their OH&S triple-approved water coolers…).

The bureaucrats have to rake the policy compost of their nests. How else can they maintain control over all the other turkeys rooting about in peripheries of their territorial domain?

So, when more and more cyclists take to the roads (as oil runs out and the rules that govern the mobility of cars finally governs all that mobility away), what precisely do you think the bureaucrats are going to do?

They’ll be wanting to save us cyclists from the compounding anarchy of our under-governed confusions, that’s what.

We’re the last Great Promised Land of unclaimed policy paradise for them to explore. There’s a gold mine of policy claims to be staked. A new world of confusion for our bureaucrats to tame! You can see the excitement build. Restructuring plans to make, Departmental re-organisations, policy summits to attend! World fact finding missions to plan. Green Papers and then White Papers to write. Senate reviews, Commissions, Investigations, Policy Councils to set up. Endless fun. It’s Party Time! A cycling-led recovery for a bureaucracy that might otherwise have fallen asleep…

Clearly, when our bureaucrats turn their gaze in our direction, they will feel the urge to do what they have always done before; to do what it is that is in their genes to do: to reproduce a litany of categories, classes and schemas through which to manifest order onto the unruly chaos within which we have wallowed for too long. In a flash, they’ll be convening committee structures all over the land. They’ll be appointing Committee’s with chairs charged to tame this last vestige of free flying chaos. They’ll be charged to deliver a vision of groomed hierarchically ordered landscapes – tick boxed, cog-driven, procedurally accountable, results/outcomes directed … ‘transparent’(!) … audit-compliant pathways to bureaucratic heaven!

In no time soon, there will be categories within categories with manuals of glorious specifications a thousand pages thick through which to define which particular hole within which we each would then be deemed to fit.

In no time soon. I’d become a cyclist Class IV, Category II, Grade V, open-restricted. Log books required. Annually reviewed. Insurance Category 1006b, Annex 1a. All for the one low and terribly reasonable cost of $500 per year. Not including medical and mechanical certification tests, also required – enlightening our prospects for eternal safety for ever more! Hallelujah! Blessed be the enlightenment bestowed by our benefactors to rescue us from our chaotic untamed-policy wilderness…

As a Class IV, Category II, Grade V, open-restricted cycling person, I’d get a series of rights. Right’s I never had before if only because I was too ignorant to know that these are the things to which I should have aspired, instead of the simple crude pleasures of just going for a ride… Please see pages 1004-6009 of the Official Cycling Code book through which to familiarise myself with what I now can and cannot do. Ownership of said Code Book being compulsory. $910.95 please. Payable at any friendly Roads and Cycling Authority Office (please take a number and wait in the queue). Credit cards – or gold bullion – acceptable. A small inconvenience to pay for the enlightenment now bestowed! Ah Men; long may the bureaucracy live forever… and ever… in accordance with the doctrines of policies decreed. Blessed be the rule makers.

Yes. This new orderly world of manicured policies through which to govern us once wild anarchical cycling louts will sing the song of glory to our bureaucratic lords. A sight to behold and admire! The vision splendid for thousands of repurposed bureaucrats once so terrifyingly dispossessed when the oil ran out.

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Is there anything on this earth more abjectly depressing than a bicycle built down to the price, standards and shelf life of a takeaway McHappy Meal?

It can’t be denied that there are, indeed, at least two classes of bike buyers out there. In the one camp are the enthusiasts. That would be anyone who reads this humble blog. In the other camp are what I would describe as the ‘Cycling McHappy Wheel’ tribe. They’re the mob who expect the world for the price of a bag of chips. They’re the mob taken in by expectations forged in the kiln of packaging and play school naivety.

The McHappy Wheel tribe are the vast majority of cycle-buyers. They’re the quickest to buy their way in and the first to loose interest; with the products of their ill-formed enthusiasms rusting in time with their short-fused persistence. These are the bicycles stowed, lost and forlorn in the shed, garden, basement or attic – or passed quickly on like some kind of virulent disease. Too crude, rude and unwieldy to use, these things blight any enthusiasm before the blessings of cycling ever get the chance to take hold.

I saw a sign! I heard the warning of danger to come. I read it first in the motorcycling press. Hate the subject or not, cycling and motorcycling are related by more than the number of the wheels they share. They’re two segments of a common front against cars. They are two segments of a common front of enthusiasm for wind-in-your-hair, braving the elements, asserted individuality that the car tribe will never comprehend. The McHappy Wheel virus has hit the motorcycling arm at gale force 10. Thus far, we cyclists are still sheltered behind the dunes.

Yes, we are seeing more and more China made bicycles out there. Yes, there have always been supermarket ‘drain pipe specials’ with all the grace and durability of a bag of soggy Happy Meal fries. Yes. But we have not seen anything yet. The cyclone is still offshore. It’s busy blighting our cousins in the petrol powered cycling domain.

Time to introduce the smirking devil we’re about the confront. The Chinese bicycle biz. This blight is as far from the history-forged cycling culture that stars the eyes of all those who truly know what it is to be, and to forever remain, a cyclist. The Chinese bicycle biz is only ever about making a buck. A quick, dirty, scruple free buck to be extracted from the loose change of those who have succumbed to the transfat-gorged fast food acculturation of the world. The Chinese bicycle biz can turn its talents with equal dedication and minimal re-tooling to the production of plastic spoons, nappy liners or red flags. It’s all the same thing to them. But for now, their focus is on the production of the most horrendous, vile, obscenely non-durable motorcycles the world has ever seen. And the great, tragically uninformed McHappy Moto-Wheelers are lapping it up.

There’s a few new games in town right now. Centre stage are the here-now-gone-tomorrow importers siren-songed into the Chinese tune of quick buck scalping busy selling ‘Flying Duck Happy Leaping Deer’ brand motorcycles to all those dumb enough to be seduced by prices way too good to be true. Even though that particular truth is the only truth the buyers are ever likely to find in transactions of that kind… The other game is the sheep-shuffle of embarrassed cringliness as the dudded McHappy Moto-Wheelers wheel their way into real dealers to get their junk fixed; once they find their 24 hour warranty has expired like the mobile phone number of the importers who’ve now so mysteriously vanished.

But what are we left with once all this dumping of Chinese cyclo-junk runs its inevitable course? No industry – that’s what! The masses have voted with their ill-informed stupidity. The real dealers are left with too many bikes they then can’t sell. Those bikes become last year’s models and become even harder to shift. Next thing you know, that dealer with a history back to the inter-war years is no longer there; or anywhere. Then the real-deal makers go under, or worse, are bought out for a song by a Peoples’ flag waving plastic spoon and motorcycle manufacturing company based in the industrial slumlands of invaded Tibet.

This model works even better for bicycles, of that you can be assured. For starters, for most folk, bicycles are an even less considered purchase than the motorbicycles with which the Chinese are now so enthusiastically engaged. The level of bicycle buyer intelligence that’s likely to apply will be even less than the low to which the motorcycle industry has now succumbed. We are all going to be dragged down into the swill-soured bog as the folk start spend-sending our industry to the oblivion of no-return.

There are some hopeful signs. Both the Canadians and the EU have hit Chinese McHappy Wheel makers with anti-dumping levies of 30% or more. To my mind, these levies are a levee from the bevy of the impending tide. Long may these levy levee walls hold! Our cycling future depends on it! Tell your local politicians you want protection! Vote with your money only for the real deal. Spread the message. Support your local bicycle shop!

Please consider making a donation to keep Bicyclism Blog going! Any contribution you make will indicate your support for my efforts and help cover bandwidth and related costs. You can make a donation through clicking the donate button on the Bicyclism Blog or the Bicyclism.net home page. Thanks!