Take a Bike

First published in the Western People on Monday.

The last Government introduced a bike-to-work scheme on New Year’s Day, 2009. It isn’t discussed much, the country being preoccupied with all the other things that happened under that unhappy regime, but the bike-to-work scheme has been a roaring success. Like the plastic bag tax or the smoking ban, it’s one of those small things that has made life exponentially more pleasant than anybody could have guessed it would.

The reason the bike-to-work scheme has made life more pleasant is because cycling is an excellent way to travel. It’s clean, it’s cheap, it helps keep the condition off and it’s really surprisingly soothing and good for clearing the head. And best of all, cycling is one of the few forms of exercise that everyone can engage in.

Anyone can cycle a bike, from those lean athletes who are half-human being, half-greyhound, on through ordinary people of all shapes and sizes, all the way down the evolutionary ladder to the pathetic likes of your humble correspondent, who once nearly pulled a hamstring playing snooker in the old Eglinton Club in Galway.

Cycling has always been part of the culture in Ireland. In the 1940s and 1950s the bike was the only way to get around – petrol was rationed during the war and people had no money to buy cars when the war ended – so if you wanted to travel, you went by bike. You may have grown up listening to people who cycled thirty or forty miles to the Reek, shot up in their bare feet, got Mass, scampered down again and another thirty miles home, not a bother on them. In “Over the Bar,” his iconic memoir of the GAA, Breadán Ó hEithir recalled cycling from Galway to Dublin and back with his father, going to see the All-lreland Final.

The bikes, of course, are different now to what they were. Going into a showroom – which is what they call bikeshops now – can be a little intimidating. What you thought were phone numbers are actually prices, and the price of even a lock can go into three figures.

You look at the bicycle itself, and you find out it’s got three times as many gears as your car, the frame is carbon rather than steel and the posture you have to adopt to cycle the thing is a lot like that of a man who bends down to pick up a fiver, gets a crick in his back and is then stuck like that. It’s not what you call dignified.

For the sportsmen it’s heaven of course. A bike for any occasion or terrain, built to order down to the last detail. But for the ordinary Joe, or the sort of goose who could do a cruciate playing cards, they’re not very dignified. And that’s without even talking about the lycra outfits that are the uniform of the serious cyclist.

Dignity was the original reason behind the greatest of bicycle designs. The great age of the bicycle was at the end of the Victorian era, and the Victorians had certain ideas about a person’s dignity, ideas that did not include having a person spinning around country roads with his or her rump raised in the air like the snowy peak of Nephin.

The classic design of the bicycle had the rider sitting up straight in the saddle, in the correct posture for ladies and gentlemen. The handlebars were well above saddle and wrapped back, like folded wings on a bird, to ensure the sitting position. The posture even gave those old bikes their famous nickname – the high nelly.

There was a particular way to mount them, that seems less common now. You mounted from one side, got the thing rolling and then either stepped through the looped frame if you were a lady, or bent forward, swung your leg over the saddle and across to the other side if you were a gentlemen. There was a tremendous elegance to the movement, possibly an echo of how stately, rather than fast, the journey would be.

The high nelly bicycle was always painted black, with the sometime exception of a small white rectangle on the back mudguard. Instead of carbon, the frame was made of iron and steel.

The best part of the high nelly was its saddle. The bike might have been slow and heavy, but sitting in that saddle made it all worthwhile, as it was treble-sprung – a great big hairpin spring at the front, and two fine big cylindrical springs at the back, just under either side of the hips. Sitting on one of those saddles on a flat road or spinning down a hill was like floating on air. Uphill, you had to get off and walk most of the time, but you can’t have everything in this life.

The high nelly was built to last, and last they did. Even in the ‘eighties, as the racing bike with its narrow saddle, aerodynamics, dropped handlebars and multitude of gears quickly rendered the old bikes obsolete, you still saw the old people cycling around on their faithful old bicycles that may have seen service for twenty or thirty years, if not more. There wasn’t that much to break on those old bikes and what did break could be fixed.

The high nelly would suit sportsmen cyclists badly. They’re too slow for the racers, and too big and heavy for the mountain-bikers. But for a relaxing spin around the country, taking in a spot of air and scenery and maybe a quiet pint by the fire of some convivial hostelry, you can’t beat them.

It’s not easy get an old-style bicycle, but it’s not impossible either. There’s a company in Limerick that repairs and refits old high nellies, or you can buy a new bicycle by a British manufacturer called Pashley. Pashleys are old style bicycles that sell under the glorious names of Guv’nor, Clubman, Sovereign and, of course, Britannia.

Or you can return to the bicycle showroom, spurn all the latest carbon models, throw your arm around the curate and say look, would you have such a thing as a Raleigh Varsity in the house at all? His face will fall, as he’d be much happier selling one of the pricey ones, but he’ll go far down the back and come out wheeling a fine black bike, with swung back grey handlebars, a carrier for the messages and even a bell. The saddle isn’t the armchair it used to be, but otherwise it’s a fine machine and recommended to all. Happy trails.

The Irish Pub

First published (PUB-lished - ho, ho) in the Western People on Monday.

The trailer for a new documentary film about the Irish pub has just been released online. Movie trailers can often flatter to deceive, but this one looks like a gem.

The movie, called The Irish Pub, will be released on the fourth of October, and it documents and celebrates that cornerstone of Irish life that is the local pub. If we were Italians, we would perhaps drink thimbles of coffee while meeting our neighbours and discussing events of the day. France is noted for its street cafes, where the impossibly chic drink the impossibly expensive. But the Gael goes to the pub, for better or worse.

There are those whom drink doesn’t suit and are well advised to stay away from it. But for those who know that all things have their season the pub is a place of enchantment and wonder. If its time has passed, due to changes in culture, legislation or whatever else, we will have lost something of ourselves.

What is a pub, anyway? Is it just a place that sells drink that can be consumed on the premises? We have a notion that pubs in Ireland have been the same since old God’s time, but this isn’t true. The pub is like Gaelic football – always changing, and yet always remaining the same.

The lounge bar of the 1970s was the equivalent of the handpass in the football of that era. An interloper from another culture, designed to make the ancient pastimes more modern and appealing but interlopers that appear very strange now when we look back on them, either on TG4 Gold or bootleg boxsets of The Riordans.

In the 1970s, the lounge was as linked to the pub as the fig in the fig roll. You were very unlikely to find the one without the other. The lounge was for women or men who had washed themselves before the last full moon. The pub was for the rest of the populace. You turned left or right, according to your station in life, and drank fancy lager or old-fashioned beer and stout according to where you were.

Evolution has seen the lounge bars wither and die, and they are little mourned. The mixing of the sexes is to be encouraged and celebrated – we understand each other so little in the first place that we can’t get to know each other well enough, and a soft touch of the hard drop is great social lubricant. Unfortunately, the lounge bar, that used to be part of a pub, has mutated into an entity of its own.

It would be an insult to bars to call these places bars, as opposed to pubs. It would be more accurate to call them venues. And they’re all very well, if you like eating your dinner off a board, standing up with your arm curled around your drink to protect it, and my Lady Gaga blasting out of speakers in every blessed corner of the rom.

But don’t tell me you’re in a pub, because you really aren’t. Venues have their uses – not least of which is mopping up people who wouldn’t be much fun in a place that didn’t have enough mirrors for their needs – but pubs they’re not.

The establishments featured in The Irish Pub movie are not like this. Drawn from all over the country, including our own most excellent Leonard’s of Lahardane, with the bar on the left and the groceries on the right, the movie celebrates all that’s best about the Irish pub.

The trailer, which is only ninety seconds long, features soundbites from barmen and bar owners talking about their pubs. And they all understand that one fundamental thing about pubs that so many people don’t understand. Drink is important in a pub, of course, but it is the company that’s paramount.

There was a coffee-table book published a few years ago about the Irish pub, with lovely pictures of Victorian architecture in places like the Stag’s Head in Dublin or The Crown in Belfast. And that’s all fine, but you can’t really call a pub a pub unless there are people in it. Otherwise, it’s just a room, like any other.

For rural people, getting to the pub is an issue. It’s hard to get there and harder to get home but there is no good in sitting by yourself when the long winter draws in. We read soft chat in papers about buses for rural areas, but people don’t always realise just how expansive a route that would be. A helicopter might cover the catchment area, but I wouldn’t like to be the man or woman who has to valet the chopper after it’s been spinning people full of porter around Erris in the black dead of night, buffeted by winds from the broad Atlantic.

So why not try a bit of lateral thinking and introduce a bike-to-pub scheme, along the lines of the bike-to-work? The government pays half the price of the bicycle provided the buyer commits to using it for getting to and from the pub, where he or she may enjoy the social interaction that is unique to the culture. It would apply only in otherwise isolated rural areas where a reliable taxi service is an impossibility.

Of course, there are certain dangers inherent in cycling under the influence. The M4 is no place to be full of pints up on a bike with articulated lorries whizzing past. However, if a person were to keel over on a country road, the whitethorns and whins would first ease his fall, and then sober him up a biteen as the bushes did their thorny work. If anything, he or she would be better for the experience.

The bicycle, once so much a part of rural life, can return to the country lanes once more as the nation tops up with a few creamy ones after a hard day’s work and then cycles merrily home, bell tinkling all the way.