CityCyclingEdinburgh was launched on the 27th of October 2009 as "an experiment".
IT’S TRUE!
CCE is 14years old!
Well done to ALL posters
It soon became useful and entertaining. There are regular posters, people who add useful info occasionally and plenty more who drop by to watch. That's fine. If you want to add news/comments it's easy to register and become a member.
RULES No personal insults. No swearing.
Very colonial and a tad anti-Semitic for modern readers. HOwver, in chapter five of The Thirty Nine Steps, The Adventure of the Spectacled Roadman, Richard Hannay, disguised as the Roadman, for reasons too intricate to go in to, says to the German spies the following
It's you and your muckle cawrs that wreck my roads! If we a' had oor richts, ye sud be made to mend what ye break.
Slightly colonial but not at all anti-semitic Scots foresters were forbidden from dragging timber on Wade's military roads shortly after they were built as the trunks ploughed the gravel off them.
Later in his 'career' Richard Hannay also indulges in bicycle theft, pinching a film-maker's bike in Mr Standfast.
@mandopicker he borrows But does not return a bicycle n the thirty nine steps too. No bikes in Greenmantle.
I read a rather terrible but engrossing Buchan pulp novel on holiday this year, "Castle Gay". I forget what happened except it was heavily formulaic, recycled a lot of his other ideas from other books, was heavily class-centric, had a strong whiff of British moral and cultural superiority and being a "foreigner" made you instantly suspect (you can always identified a "foreigner" by appearance alone in Buchan novels).
A bicycle was borrowed and destroyed in the book, although a £10 postal order is promised to replace it.
The enjoyable aspect of the book was a view of rural life before mass motoring and telephony changed the world forever. It really slows down the pace of a thriller and you get a totally different sort of adventure if everywhere has to be reached on foot or by steam train and you can outrun the telegraph system.
Dorothy Sayers' The Five Red Herrings also contains some bicycle-related shenanigating. Plus, set in Galloway. Oh, and lots of nitpicky train timetable stuff if you like that kind of thing. Not that anyone here would, of course.
@Kaputnik - I rather enjoyed Dickson McCunn, an interesting character for Buchan.
Not your derring-do type (Sandy Arbuthnot, Dick Hannay or the slightly dim but jolly good-egg Archie Roylance). Nor the Buchan-a-like lawyer/MP Edward Leithen.
Witch Wood and John Burnet of Barns, both historical novels, are my favourite Buchan works, along with his excellent biography of James Graham, Marquis of Montrose. No bicycles in any of these as they hadn't been invented and I can't see the hardcore Calvinists in these books going for that sort of thing, although I could probably see Montrose employing bicycle-mounted infantry to good effect (as Colonel Von Stumm uses in the hunt for Hannay in Greenmantle).
(I confess to being a member of the John Buchan Society...)
@mandopicker, is the John Buchan Society still run by the man from bridge of weir? I struggle with the colonialism and the anti-semitism but like the pace in the 39 steps. Greenmantle very long winded. Not so many women in his books. Am I right?
I rather like The Free Fishers, probably my favourite Buchan, the anti-foreigner retoric is toned down more to a general suspicion of all things not "local", being set in a time when most people would never have wandered beyond their home town or county or valley. Nanty Lammass is also perhaps the most scholarly and open-minded of Buchan heroes?
As I mentioned above, with foot, horse and sailing the fastest way to move about, and no modern technology available, it really improves the pace of the novel and how things can unwind.
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