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By the Friday of a working week, after cycling 300 miles or so, I found my bicycle had bled into my being, infecting me with its surfaces of leather and steel. Its chromium forks thrummed in sympathy with my heart rate. The cadence of my pedal strokes corresponded with my breathing. I began to feel better on the bike than off it. When I stopped cycling, when I got off the bike at the end of a week’s work, the memory of the miles covered was registered in the stiffness of my legs, in the weariness of my arms, in the cramps that twitched their way across my calves. The city itself persisted only as a series of brief snapshots, stills from a film that lay inert until animated again by the flicker of pedal and wheel.
***
At 8.30am, Old Street is clogged with other cyclists. Lycra-clad bankers head into the City on their carbon-framed racers, wobbly commuters on Boris bikes hug the gutter. Suited Brompton riders glide through the gaps. Graphic designers and web developers, bound for Soho, drift by on their track bikes, studiously ignoring everyone else. I join the peloton, attacking when I see a space until I’ve moved to the front of the bunch. I cast a wide loop around a pedestrian on a zebra crossing, grabbing the side of a bus to pull myself through a gap. Cycling in traffic like this is an opportunistic business, part instinct and part analysis. You have to navigate the flow with the detached concentration of a boulderer addressing a climbing problem.
***
Physically, the work is grindingly hard. On an average day you’ll cycle 60 to 100 miles, deliver 20 or so packages, and earn maybe £3 a package. On a good day you’ll break £100. On a fixed-gear bike such as mine, with a gearing of 49/17, that amounts to around 29,000 complete pedal revolutions a day. On an average day you’ll earn 0.003p for each turn of the cranks.
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http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/may/01/my-life-cycle-courier-london-cyclogeography
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/may/25/cyclogeography-review-jon-day-cycle-courier-london
http://www.nottinghilleditions.com/books/cyclogeography-journeys-of-a-london-bicycle-courier/215
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