IRELAND is damp and dreary at this time of year.
The Irish, perhaps more than most, think it almost treasonous to speak ill of the homeland.
Perhaps that is part of the reason why winter is so depressing, it comes with the repression of the impulse to complain about forces that make us who we are, the landscape, the wind and the chill in the bones.
This is a time for indulging counter measures, indoor pleasures, a hot whiskey by a log fire, or just a long day in bed with a good book.
I would like to be out on my bike but the weather isn’t right for it. And yet the bicycle is a favoured symbol of Irish rural life.
The Bushmills Inn on the north coast has an old black bicycle at the entrance repurposed as a floral display.
The marvellous big Brooks leather saddle is busted through, the handle bars are rusted and the tyres flat. Yet it appeals as an authentic relic of rural life past.
Which is surprising in such a hilly landscape. But cycling an undulant coastline is a lot more pleasant than plodding over tedious flat land. You puff your way up those hills to earn the thrill of soaring down the other side.
Two wheels, one country, many drumlins (Art: Jim Robins)That is why, for me, the best cycling country is County Down. This is called the basket of eggs because of the drumlins, little rounded hills, presumably smoothed out ten thousand years ago by ice when this country was under the extended Arctic.
There is another one of those ornamented bike in Clady, on the Tyrone Donegal border, just outside Strabane, propped against a shop wall.
The rural Irish understanding of the bike, expressed in these displays, is of an obsolete work tool, like the spinning jenny which is also seen as a relic of an arduous way of life well behind us. It can evoke nostalgia because we don’t have to suffer enslavement to it any more.
But it saddens me that the bike is seen that way.
It is quaint now because you don’t have to get up on it on a cold morning any more and feel the chill of the metal on your inside leg, or the brush of a stiff leather saddle more intimately.
I have seen in west Donegal a farmer roll down the hill of main street on a winter’s day with a milk churn dangling from a handlebar and him draw one leg over beside the other on the pedal and jump off to brake by skidding on ice in his wellington boots.
I love my bike, but there was nothing sentimental about cycling when it was crucial to making a living and getting about.
For me, however, there is always a feeling, when I get on a bike, that I am at play, even when there is purpose and urgency about it.
And I see, these cold mornings, that there are still people traversing the city on their own two wheels. Many of them use the bike because they can’t afford to drive.
There is still that distinction between the bike as fun or a functional instrument, and yet these workers on their bikes are fitter and even warmer with the exercise than those of us walking into the drizzle from the bus stop or car park.
My father was a cyclist. I have one of his racing cups on a bookshelf in my study.
He won it, I believe, for the midsummer’s day race between Derry and Limavady in 1950. But even he had a cold regard for the machine.
When I was small he took me and two brothers on his bike to school, one of us on the handlebars, one on the bar at his knee and one on the parcel rack behind the saddle.
I doubt he did this often for it was terrifying for a child to be sitting in any of these positions. I recall only the discomfort of the handle bars moving under my bum and the dread insecurity.
I never got a bicycle for Christmas because my da thought it was too dangerous for boys to be out in the traffic of 1950s Belfast, so I was always borrowing bikes from friends, telling them I had only to nip down the road and would be back in an hour.
Then I would take the bike up to the Glen Road and soar down Shaw’s Road or Kennedy Way building as much speed as my wee pumping legs could muster, till the wind was drawing tears from my eyes and streaking them across the sides of my head.
It’s a wonder I didn’t kill myself but I rarely fell off a bike.
I have tumbled a few times and known that slow motion, detached observer effect when you are in the air and out of control. But on balance (get it?) a biking life is a better life.
We are now at the time of year when the holiday ads are on tv. They will urge you to go to Turkiye or to Portugal but I fancy this year getting back on the bike I have neglected through the cold months.
Maybe I’ll see you along the road.
