Why Writers Should Ride Bicycles — Einstein, Potholes and the Fine Art of Procrastination

There is a theory, usually attributed to Einstein, that life is rather like riding a bicycle: if you want to keep your balance, you have to keep moving.

This seems reasonable until you remember that Einstein presumably didn’t live in a place where the council had dug up the cycle lane.

As a member of the Shepway Vox Team, I went out on my bicycle yesterday because I had an article to write.

This may sound illogical.

It is.

But writing is full of activities which would get you dismissed from any properly organised profession.

​A surgeon who announced that he couldn’t operate because he needed to cycle twelve miles and stare at a cow would probably attract questions.

A writer can do this and call it research.

I’d spent an hour at my desk trying to think.

Nothing happened.

This isn’t strictly true.

Several things happened.

I discovered that my stapler contained no staples. I found a receipt from a petrol station I couldn’t remember visiting. I worked out that the small mark on the wall wasn’t a spider after all.

None of these things seemed likely to sustain 800 words.

So I got the bicycle out.

Cycling has one enormous advantage over sitting at a desk.

Things happen.

At a desk, the wall remains a wall.

On a bicycle, within ten minutes you have been overtaken too closely by a van, shouted at by somebody whose grievance is not immediately clear, swallowed an insect and encountered a road sign which appears to have been designed by somebody who has never visited the road.

This is material.

After three miles I had thought of absolutely nothing.

After five miles I had developed a strong opinion about potholes.

After seven miles I had forgotten the potholes and was thinking about cheese.

By nine miles I was hungry.

This is another advantage of cycling.

Whatever intellectual problem you begin with is eventually replaced by lunch.

I stopped outside a village pub.

An elderly man was sitting at a table with a pint and a dog.

The dog looked at me.

The man looked at the bicycle.

“You’ve come on that.”

It wasn’t phrased as a question.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

This seemed unnecessarily difficult.

“To get here.”

“You could’ve driven.”

“I wanted a bike ride.”

He considered this.

“Where are you going?”

“I haven’t decided.”

He nodded.

“That’s cycling, that is.”

I sat down.

“What do you mean?”

“If you know where you’re going, you’re getting somewhere. If you don’t, you’re having a bike ride.”

I took out my notebook.

He immediately looked suspicious.

“What are you doing?”

“Writing that down.”

“Why?”

“It was good.”

“It wasn’t.”

“It was quite good.”

“I’ve said better.”

“Recently?”

“No.”

I wrote that down too.

This annoyed him.

“What do you do, then?”

“I’m a writer.”

“Ah.”

There are many different sorts of “Ah”.

There is the “Ah” of sudden understanding.

The “Ah” of mild disappointment.

And the “Ah” people use when they discover that somebody apparently able-bodied is drinking beer at eleven thirty in the morning on a Wednesday.

His was the third kind.

“Shouldn’t you be writing?”

“I am.”

“You’re sitting outside a pub.”

“Yes.”

“With a bicycle.”

“Yes.”

“Not much writing involved.”

I explained that I did quite a lot of thinking on the bicycle.

He looked at the bicycle.

Then at me.

Then back at the bicycle.

“What part does the thinking?”

I said this wasn’t quite how it worked.

The idea, I explained, was that when you’re trying desperately to think of something, the brain refuses to cooperate.

You sit there commanding it to produce an idea.

The brain responds by remembering the theme tune to a television programme from 1987.

But give it something else to do — steer around a drain cover, avoid a tractor, wonder whether the black cloud ahead contains rain — and it quietly gets on with the original problem when you’re not looking.

“Like husbands,”

he said.

“How?”

“Ask a man to fix a shelf and he won’t do it for six months. Stop asking and one Sunday he’ll suddenly do it.”

“That’s actually very good.”

The notebook came out again.

“Oh, don’t.”

I wrote it down.

He turned to the dog.

“You see what happens?”

The dog appeared to have seen it many times before.

I mentioned the famous bicycle remark attributed to Einstein.

The old man thought for a moment.

“Was he a cyclist?”

“Yes.”

​“Proper cyclist?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Did he have all the gear?”

“I don’t think Lycra had been invented.”

“Then he was a proper cyclist.”

This required explanation.

Apparently there are two kinds of people on bicycles.

There are people who ride bicycles.

And there are cyclists.

People who ride bicycles wear trousers.

Cyclists wear clothing which makes them visible from the International Space Station.

People who ride bicycles stop at pubs.

Cyclists stop beside hedges and consume something from a silver packet which contains all the nutritional properties of wallpaper paste.

People who ride bicycles say, “It’s a bit steep up there.”

Cyclists know exactly how steep it is, how long it is, their heart rate while climbing it and the average wattage produced by a Belgian they’ve never met.

“Which are you?” he asked.

I looked down.

Ordinary shorts.

Old bicycle.

Pub.

“I appear to be a person on a bicycle.”

“Good.”

“Why?”

“Cyclists don’t stay for another pint.”

So I did.

By the time I left, I had acquired several observations about dogs, marriage, fluorescent clothing, village buses and a lengthy story involving a wheelbarrow which I’m reasonably certain had no ending.

I still didn’t have an article.

I cycled home.

About three miles from the house something peculiar happened.

The opening sentence appeared.

Then another.

Then the shape of the whole thing.

I stopped beside a field and wrote furiously in my notebook while two cows watched me.

This was probably the most productive moment of the day.

Which raises an uncomfortable possibility.

Perhaps the bicycle isn’t a way of avoiding work at all.

Perhaps the desk is.

At a desk I can waste an entire morning while appearing industrious.

On a bicycle I can spend an entire morning appearing to waste time and come home with an article.

No sensible employer would tolerate this system.

Fortunately, I don’t have one.

I got home, put the bicycle away and sat down at the computer.

The article was virtually written in my head.

All I had to do was type it.

Then I noticed the mark on the wall again.

It might, on reflection, have been a spider after all.

The Shepway Vox Team

Journalism For The People NOT The Powerful