Feathers and fractals

I know I owe a couple of race reports, however let’s ignore the triathlons for a moment and reflect on this year’s inaugural Aberdeen Assault.

I posted about it previously — as is usually the case with LGC events, the route was carefully thought-out, considered in detail and ridden in advance to ensure it would be enjoyable, pleasant and practical.

Oh, no it wasn’t. They never are. All LGC event planning consists of me, some maps, Google, a few G&Ts and an over-riding sense of, “Fuckit, what’s the worst that could happen?”

I arrived at Kirkcaldy station on my recently polished Pinarello (that’s not a euphemism), where I met with my two intrepid companions, M & V. They admired my bike (who wouldn’t?) while I availed myself of the facilities in the Platform 1 waiting room, knowing that all the coffee I’d been drinking that day would mean I was going to be counting the miles to the next set.

It was M’s first night ride, first century, first ride on a new saddle. It was V’s first overnight century. It was my first ride of more than 30 miles in about 3 years. What could possibly go wrong?

Not much, as it happens. M & V showed an odd lack of desire to stop at The Ceres Inn for a wee dram, even though it was a beautiful evening and the beer garden looked friendly. (Can any Dumb Runners imagine not stopping at the Kirkhouse? It would be weird and wrong.) Dura Den was interesting — it has been closed to motor traffic ever since floods took out the road, but when I checked on the Fife Council website there was no listing for it, so I thought it would be open. Friends confirmed that it was closed to cars but bikes could get through. When we got there, the big concrete barriers left just enough room for a bike to squeeze onto what’s left of the road, and the signs saying “DANGER, KEEP OUT, UNSTABLE GROUND” lent a frisson of excitement. Bats swooped around our heads as we picked our way nervously past the orange fence lining the devastation, the gloom enhancing the prickling sense of moist verticality off to our left.

The waterfall, sadly, was invisible behind thick, verdant vegetation, but we could hear it.

Onwards, then, and up to Tayport and thence the Tay Bridge. I was pretty glad for V’s familiarity with the roads here — the car park I was expecting to appear on the right turned out to require a left turn first, so I’ll be adding that note to the route sheet for next year.

We stopped at the big Tesco’s on Riverside Drive for a rest break, where M bought snaplights and I bought beef jerky (having come amply provided with snaplights). After a slow start we’d got back on my tentative schedule, and were feeling good.

Swooshing through Broughty Ferry, we passed a few Herberts who had been pulled over by the police. I wasn’t sure if they’d been stopped for speeding or if it was a stop-point for random breathalyser tests. I asked the woman officer if we should stop too, but she waved us on. We were then onto the only part of the route where I wasn’t 100% sure of my directions, and, as always when the turn isn’t familiar, it seemed to take longer than I was expecting to reach the turn onto the Arbroath road.

There we found ourselves on a dual carriageway, but at 1am, in a group of three, with serious amounts of rear lighting, it was perfectly safe and probably one of the most enjoyable sections. Straight, clear, fast, and with the refreshing nocturnal chill that leaves your skin feeling like a shell over the thermonuclear core of your exercising metabolism. I love that feeling, and it’s one of the many reasons I do overnight centuries.

We stopped briefly on entering Arbroath to add some layers, as the chill was starting to become less enjoyable. M set his helmet down on the wall there, which was to have unexpected consequences later.

On the Dumb Run it was always dark, but with a faint orange glow just above the horizon. On this route the sun was a dirty stop out, and it didn’t ever get properly dark. We took the required jelly baby shot at 3am in Montrose, and the sky in this shot is only a little lighter than it had been an hour before:

I’d raced in Montrose only a few weeks previously, and had driven home via most of the route we intended to take from here, so we were back on familiar roads. We stopped again just outside Montrose to answer the call of nature, more bats flitting around our heads. I disturbed a badger in the undergrowth (sorry!) and M made a terrible discovery: when he took his helmet off there were slugs on his head. It would seem they’d hitched a ride in Arbroath. I don’t think they expected to end up the other side of Montrose.

The next section was a beautiful, undulating coast road up past St. Cyrus and Johnshaven, with bunnies fleeing from the verges. Into Inverbervie, then the slow climb up to the dual carriageway before a right turn and a fast, twisty descent into Stonehaven. Although Frood had agreed to come and bring us breakfast in Stonehaven, we agreed to press on in an effort to make it to Aberdeen before the rain hit.

The climb out of Stonehaven was the only serious climb of the ride. I made it with some swearing, and waited for M and V to catch up. M was suffering by this stage, not being the kind of person who routinely stays up all night (see, there are advantages to being an insomniac). V had gone into motivational mode, and I followed suit. I confess to a few little fibs about the lack of uphill bits in the next section (I’d never ridden it, but I knew we’d just done the only hard ascent, so the rest of it couldn’t count as proper hills). But we didn’t have far to go, and the rest of it was relatively easy.

Through the drizzle and the odd early morning lorry overtake, then down and down onto the South Deeside Road, where it was a flat run straight through to the beach. At the first sign that said “Beach” I started yelling “BEEEEEACH!” and kept yelling it every couple of minutes as encouragement, while biting back the urge to sprint hell for leather for the end.

We arrived at the Pirate Dolphin to find Frood waiting with bready comestibles and hot coffee, the absolute superstar.

Why do I do these things? It’s for that sense of cold skin around a hot inside. It’s for the banter. It’s for sights you would never see otherwise — noctilucent clouds above skittering bats, rabbits bouncing white and brown up the hillsides, hares accelerating across a field, a grown man wiping slugs from his head, crows calculating whether it’s worth stepping away from roadkill to let you by, bike lights shattering in dawn rain. It’s for the nocturnal silence broken only by the huff of breath and the ticking of freewheels, the hum of tyre on tarmac. It’s for running around a major supermarket at midnight in skintight lycra and socks, and no one paying a blind bit of notice because anyone shopping at midnight on a Saturday is a bit out of the ordinary anyway.

I do it because I get a primal sense of satisfaction from turning the pedals for hours on end. This ride provided all these things, and I’m definitely doing it again.

It’s a great ride, and with the regular Dumb Run crowd I reckon it would be a fast one. It’s an easier route, the scenery is fabulous, the midnight sun amazing, there are more bridges and the roads are quieter. It’s on a par with the Dun Run in terms of ride effort, and although we rolled to the finish at around 07:30, I think you could get to the end by 06:00 with fewer stops and more experienced riders.

I don’t know that I’ll never do the Dumb Run again — anyone who wants to do it can pitch up at LGC and ask for the route sheet, we don’t mind) — but the difference in light means that the Aberdeen Assault is now my favoured Overnight Summer Solstice Century.

Next year it will be on Saturday the 20th June at 8:30pm (20:30). See you there!

Originally published at Singularity. You can comment here or there.

A while back, despite firm resolution not to, I got into an argument on Facebook.

I know.

A fellow cycling enthusiast, one who prefers the Dutch model of segregated facilities (I KNOW) posted about numbers of people cycling. In what I considered to be a counter-productive generalisation, he made an observation that only a small sub-set of risk-taking males choose to cycle on the roads.

Statistically speaking, he might be right, for given values of “statistically speaking”, “sub-set” and “choose”. But it rubbed me up the wrong way, because it’s not a small sub-set of risk-taking males who choose to cycle on the road. I cycle on the road, even when there’s a path available (I find paths inherently more hazardous). I’ve got quite a track record of persuading other women to cycle on the road, too. Frood cycles on the road, and while he’s male (in the strict, biological sense), he’s no risk taker.

I promise these are not risk-taking males. Plus, that’s my Pompino in the middle of the shot.

In fact, the majority of people I know who cycle on the road don’t do so because they’re risk takers, male or female: they do so because their assessment of the risk is much, much less than that of those who insist it’s too dangerous.

People are not going to be encouraged to cycle by the assertion that the only people willing to cycle on the road are risk-taking males. My experience of encouraging others to start cycling suggests that it’s much more effective to explain risk assessment and mitigation in detail. Ride so people can see you; behave in a way that’s predictable (i.e. like traffic); understand that the vast majority of drivers really don’t want to hit you; and pay attention because not everyone else on the road does, but understand that’s mostly because they’re Clarkson-wannabes or desperate to get home because their children are being menaced by a hungry, angry, peedo lion and the house is on fire, which is pretty rare, and here’s how to deal with them.

Of course, that doesn’t support the argument that cyclists absolutely must have fully segregated facilities before even contemplating putting a leg over a top tube. Still, no argument looks all that great when it’s demonstrably false from the get-go.

Cyclists who choose to cycle on the road are not a small sub-set of risk-taking males, although they may include a small sub-set of risk-taking males. They’re mostly people who have looked at the hazards, availed themselves of relevant mitigation strategies (lights, positioning, behaviour, vigilance, route choice) and decided that it’s a relatively safe activity.

Including me.

Originally published at Singularity. You can comment here or there.

There are a few things I have argued about so many times that I have now reached a state of acceptance regarding my inability to change the fact that not everyone agrees with me.

I originally started off refusing to argue about gun control. I’m so far past arguing about gun control I can almost pretend there’s even a disagreement to be had. More recently I’ve had to give up arguing about certain things to do with cycling, and as a result feel no inclination to post on cycling fora any more. Posts on cycling fora seem to fall into the same broad categories: the helmet debate, red-light jumping, use of MP3 players while riding, where to ride this week/next week/on holiday, charity rides, campaigning for cycle path installation, whinging about idiots who think we should pay “road tax”, which bike to buy and which saddle to choose. Anything else is either some sort of stupid game thread that goes on for a million posts and is utterly pointless, a series of posts about cake, or a thread about Victoria Pendleton’s arse.

I know this comes across as rather grumpy, but take away the finer nuances or the political argy-bargy that results in moderation wars and this is pretty much what’s out there.

Here, then, are the opinions I have honed through years of argument, reading, research, experimentation and experience. Feel free to disagree, but don’t assume that my failure to engage with an argument on these topics is acceptance of your opposing viewpoint. Because it’s not. I just cannot be arsed.
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Hope that clears that up. I’m off to get me another lemsip.

Originally published at Singularity. You can comment here or there.

Last week I was asked to participate in a focus group for the CTC, which was something of a surprise — on telling Frood his response was: “What, you? Haven’t they learned anything?”

I was quite pleased, really, because I’d started giving up hope on the CTC. As far as I’m concerned they’re still pretty much the only organisation out there doing what I want a cycling organisation to do: campaign for the rights of cyclists to carry on doing what we’ve always done, i.e. ride on the road, and campaign proactively for our right to do so without fear of being squished by inattentive car drivers. I used to be a Right to Ride rep, but gave up when they started softening their attitudes towards segregation and falling for the old “some provision is better than nothing” gambit, which in my opinion is the most dangerous trap for a cycling campaigner. The moment someone told me that it was okay for a local authority to fail to maintain road standards suitable for cyclists because there was an off-road, shared-use path, I was out of there.

Then there was the charity kerfuffle. For those who don’t know about this, the CTC didn’t used to be a charity. It was a member’s club, like the AA or BSAC, which made sense to me. I paid them a certain amount of dosh and in return I got certain member benefits, like third party insurance, as well as the comfort of knowing the organisation was out there promoting the interests of me as a cyclist, and of other cyclists out there. Then they decided to become a charity. In my mind this makes them more like Greenpeace — not necessarily a bad thing, but I’m not sure how they square member benefits and their commercial wing with being a charity; and the offered explanations were opaque. Not only were the explanations opaque, the rather impolite way the two sides of the debate went about garnering votes didn’t merely lose my interest, it flung any curiosity or investment I had in the process out of the window then stamped on it repeatedly with boots covered in dog shit. If I hadn’t been absorbed in other matters at renewal time, I’d probably have cancelled the direct debit.

I wasn’t pleased to be asked to participate in this group because I thought it was a recognition of the things I’d said way back when (I doubt that the CTC knows I was one of those asked to participate): I was pleased because it meant that finally they were doing something to make it look like they were paying attention to what their members had to say about them, and about what their members want from them.

There’s a first time for everything after all.

We had to complete some homework before the group, part of which was to create a collage representing what cycling means to us: a collection of pictures depicting our involvement in cycling and the emotions that cycling evokes. What was most interesting about this was how similar the results were. There were four of us in our particular group, all of us members, three men plus myself. Our ages ranged from 24 to 40 and we were pretty diverse in terms of careers and how much cycling we do (although I did note that we all fell fairly neatly into the “white, middle-class” demographic). All of us talked about independence, freedom and sense of achievement, as well as a streak of non-conformity.

Here’s my effort (click for a big one in a new tab):

Cycling is a big part of my life. I had to cherry-pick memories to represent concepts: moments that are the distillation of hours of adventure.

From left to right, top to bottom.

Frood ahead of me on a trip to Lincolnshire. I was sick that day. Horrendously so. I was in the early stages of acute bronchitis and my heart rate was through the roof, hovering at around the 190 mark even at a meagre 15mph because I couldn’t extract enough oxygen from the air. It was like being at altitude. But I did it, Frood sitting ahead of me the whole way so I could draft him (with the added side-benefit of being able to stare at his bottom).

A wine bottle label, for the aesthetic element. Cycling isn’t just about function, it’s about form. There’s nothing more beautiful than something that is not only artfully designed but also does a job, and I’m not just talking about the bike. You can keep your stick-thin models and bodybuilders who are as weak as kittens. I like my women athletic rather than anorexic, and my men strong rather than muscular.

Cake. Blueberry muffins. Need I say more?

Shackleton, on the banks of the Tay. I was riding home from a training course that day, 40-odd miles, just for the hell of it. I do that sometimes. Having a bike means that travelling for business can be fun rather than a chore.

Peregrine, Campag chainset gleaming in the sun. You cannot possibly tell me that this isn’t beautiful. Look at it!

A velvet fist concealed within an armoured glove. This is the other side of cycling: the assertive, occasionally aggressive side. Not everyone likes this part of it, but I kind of do, and I’m not going to pretend it doesn’t exist. I will, however, note that it doesn’t have to. You don’t have to be a superhero to commute to work, but if you like the feeling of being one, well, that option exists. You can ride at a sedate, steady pace and get to work with your hair in place and your work clothes ready to go; or you can put on lycra and a fierce grin and traffic jam like it was sport. Cycling is whatever you want it to be.

Jelly babies on the bridge at dawn during DRV. Cycling can be an adventure, and it can be doing silly things with like-minded people and having experiences you couldn’t have any other way. It’s about seeing things in a way you wouldn’t ever see them from inside a car, and about getting places under your own steam at a pace that can surprise you, often fuelled by little more than sugar, water, and a sense of determination.

Max, with the Bob Yak, and the fish flag, sitting outside our old flat in Kirkcaldy. Think that you can’t carry much on a bike? Think again. I can carry masses of stuff with that sucker. The Bob Yak even features as a hinge for a piece of plot in one of the stories I’m working on (minus the fish flag, I have to say).

Munky, snoozing on a train. The bike is the only means of independent transport you can carry with you on other forms of transport. How awesome is that? This also represents the happy, physical exhaustion that comes about after a decent ride. He’s surrounded by some smaller images representing the occasional sense of outrage and gobsmacked bemusement engendered by other road users.

Fingal, fully loaded at Inverness station. You can carry your home on your bike, if you’re happy to call a tent a home. You can strip your life down to the bare essentials of shelter, food and a means of cooking it, water, the clothes you stand up in and a spare set; and, in my case, a notebook and pen. You can pack all of this on a bike and you can go wherever there is a road or track to take you. Unlike walking, however, on a bike the weight is shifted by a geared mechanism, so you can pack a few non-essentials like fishing gear, snorkelling kit, espresso maker, art materials, beer…

I really like beer.

There’s my mum and dad, talking to someone we met in Tentsmuir Forest. I don’t ride off-road much because I have no 3D, but I really, really love riding fire trails and easy routes with my parents. Cycling is the one activity that they like as much as Frood and I do. Well, that and hillwalking, but mum and I both have issues with old foot injuries that make walking any distance quite hard. Cycling can be a family affair, and it’s something people can enjoy for many years. The lack of jarring impact makes it ideal for those with dodgy joints.

More Dumb Run shots. It’s the adventure thing again, and the achievement, and the ability to find enjoyment in ridiculous conditions. Yes, we will beast ourselves up those hills and dare the midges because there’s Merkins Farm at the top, and that’s funny. It doesn’t matter that it’s 3am and pissing down, we’re already at Linlithgow and it’s not much further to go until the bridge and oh! My bike looks like deep sea plankton! How cool is that?

Some random stuff. A smiley face (a screenshot from Death Machine, as it happens. I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions). Me, fettling. I can do my own maintenance. I’m wearing very little and yet it’s one of the few photos of me I actually like and in which I think I look okay. Cycling does that for you. Stitch, drooling over the shiny, which is what I do whenever a Campag catalogue arrives in the post.

Tank Girl is more about attitude than anything else. I can’t really explain this one. It’s all about the feeling.

The next picture is the Burton’s factory on my way to work. I am tortured by the smells of biscuits wafting from that place when I ride past. You don’t get sights, sounds and smells in a car the way you do on a bike. I keep thinking I should write to Burton’s and ask them what biscuits they’ve been making that day to see if what my nose tells me they are making is what they are actually making. Because that would rock.

Beer, noms. ‘Nuff said.

More mountain biking with Frood and my parents, and then Fingal sitting outside a police box in Edinburgh. Two forms of transport that are bigger on the inside than you think from the outside and can take you places where you’ll see things you could never have imagined and didn’t expect.

Yes, that is a Doctor Who reference. Just roll with it.

One of the questions in the focus group was about what the CTC should be offering its members: what one thing could they do that would make a difference. Cycling is all of these things, and more. It’s adventure, it’s freedom, it’s transport, it’s mobility, it’s a state of mind and a state of body. There is no one thing that the CTC can offer its members that will make a difference to each member.

Except for one thing: keep fighting the good fight to make sure we can carry on doing this thing we love, and have the freedom to do so in a way that makes us happy, whether that be traffic-jamming to work or taking the kids out for a leisurely Sunday afternoon pootle along a fire trail. As long as the CTC is doing whatever it takes to make sure that I and other cyclists like myself will be able to make many more pictures like this one, they will continue to receive my membership fee every year. That’s all I want from them. Nothing more.

And certainly nothing less.

Originally published at Singularity. You can comment here or there.

I took this shot when collecting Munky from Waverley Station on his way up for the Dumb Run. These double-layer cycle racks must be pretty new because I hadn’t seen them before. Mind you, I use Haymarket most of the time and am rarely at that end of Waverley even when I do use that stop.

I think this is a great way to store bikes. They can have a natter while their owners are away doing whatever it is their owners do, and the individual storage units keep them sufficiently apart to minimise fighting. Mine have a tendency to get into arguments when left stacked together and there’s no one around to keep an eye on them, which I assume is because they’re bored and have already said everything there is to say to one another. I’m pretty sure Blackbird has been chewing Fingal’s bar tape recently.

I notice there’s a bike there with pink wheels, which is rather swish. I’ll bet that one’s quite precious, in a princessy way. The sort of bike to complain about vegetables in the bedding.

“It’s perverse.”

Originally published at Singularity. You can comment here or there.

At 20:00 hours tomorrow night, a number of cyclists equalling n, where 3 < n < 13 (as far as we know) will set off from the foot of Dumbarton Castle on our annual cross-country trip to the Royal and Ancient Golf Course of St Andrews on the east coast.

The ride takes after the much more famous Dunwich Dynamo, another annual nocturnal ride to the beach. A friend of mine, who runs the hugely successful Friday Night Ride to the Coast, observed recently that what makes a successful ride is the story, and the writer in me agrees. The Dun Run is successful because it has as its beginning the ultimate British conurbation of London, and wends its way through increasingly rural environs until it reaches the very opposite of a city: a village that no longer exists, having been swallowed by the sea.

The Dumb Run also tells a story, albeit a very different one. The divide between Scotland’s west and east is more than geographic. Dumbarton and St Andrews are the start and end point not just because they were handy. We travel from a place that both has the castle with the oldest recorded history of any stronghold in Great Britain and more recent industrialisation in the form of shipbuilding, to a quiet, picturesque town in one of the most visited parts of Scotland, which has the country’s oldest university. We travel from a land of grey ironworks and steel to a place of green grass and sandy beaches. The Clyde is nuclear submarines and religious rivalry played out on football pitches; the Forth is fishing boats, academia and princes falling in love.

The journey between the two travels a narrow corridor of quiet A-roads running through the heart of Scotland’s industry: further north it’s all tourism, shooting estates, salmon fishing and distilleries, with the exception of Aberdeen. Here Scotland’s population is concentrated, and we purr through in the night with nothing to show of our presence other than quiet laughter, the whirr of chains and the ticking of freewheels.

This isn’t the most scenic countryside Scotland has to offer, but it’s dark, so who cares? By the time the sun comes up we’re in Fife, which is prettier by far.

The Dumb Run is my favourite ride of all time. I love the Dunwich Dynamo, don’t get me wrong, yet the adventure has gone out of it. It’s not a question of if you’ll make it, but how fast. The challenge isn’t in making it from start to finish but in getting to the front of the queue at the feed stop, finding a place on the coach for the return trip, or getting your bike back without damaging it.

The Dumb Run is insanity on wheels. The first 30 miles has midges, the weather is cruel, the itinerant Buckfast Zombies more likely to throw stones than to cheer; the only feed stops are service stations — the coffee machine has been broken in one of them for the past 5 years and the other might not let you in at all.

We have only one rule: nobody gets left behind. That’s what makes the difference. This ride is a shared experience. It’s contending with the elements as a democratic collective; supporting one another with practical application of sugar and caffeine, banter and beef jerky, whisky and cake.

There’s no way for me to explain what makes this ride so good. You have to do it. You have to be there. You have to experience the highs and lows and the sheer preposterousness of it.

It’s not too late to join in. And if you can’t make it this year, check back on Sunday, when the date of DR VI will be posted.

Originally published at Singularity. You can comment here or there.

My first ever internet forum was…

OK. Almost my first.

Almost my first ever internet forum was the sadly-defunct UC-UK (that’s Urbancyclist-UK), which I joined when I was still living in Oxford. It was an email list — what back then were called bulletin boards weren’t terribly popular as we preferred discussions delivered direct to our email boxes. It’s a whole other discussion as to why fora became more popular, although I would venture the suggestion that it’s a matter of numbers. Email groups are good for one or two threads in which tens of the most vocal members are involved. Fora are good for hundreds of active threads from which thousands of members can pick and choose.

I’ve been a member of one internet cycling community or the other ever since; a rare example of a female who cycles on the road and who is an assertive participant in internet discussions about cycling.

OK. We’re not that rare. But we do comprise a remarkably small proportion of the virtual cycling population.

One of the things I’ve noticed throughout my long experience of cycling fora is the inevitable tendency of male posters to respond to female discussion threads with blatant, unapologetic lechery. While a man could post about choice of saddle to avoid prostate problems without worrying too much about other posters joining in just to make comments about his tackle, it’s impossible for women to have a discussion on a forum about female-specific issues without men posting innuendo. In the last such thread in which I participated one male member thought it would be appropriate to post a suggestion that he sexually molest any female cyclists on his next club run.

I’ve had enough of that sort of nonsense. And I said so. Repeatedly. I suspect the laddish atmosphere that can prevail in cycling communities is what puts a lot of women off taking part.

It’s something I’ve taken to doing relatively recently. A lot of the time I feel like a killjoy, like I’m taking it too seriously. I’ve certainly been accused of taking things too seriously and over-reacting — of having a hair trigger — on numerous occasions. But it’s simply that I’m pissed off with having to tolerate comments from the lads, as one forummer once put it. I’ve even been told that if women want to discuss female-specific cycling problems we should get our own private forum, and if we don’t get our own private forum then we should put up and shut up about it.

Boys, as they say, will be boys.

Given the paucity of women taking up cycling, anything that is likely to make them feel unwelcome, in my opinion, should be stamped on and stamped out. Those of us who have the inclination and confidence to take a stand on these things should do so. It’s appalling that any woman should be made to feel she’s over-reacting or being a spoilsport for demanding a similar degree of respect and consideration to that given to the men.

I’m delighted to end this by saying that the thread in question generated some very useful discussion and led one member to express pleasure in the number of ladies present. Don’t feel bad about demanding respect, girls. No matter how foolish, out of order or hypersensitive you may feel expressing your desire to have a perfectly ordinary conversation without being interrupted by the sort of comments that would familiar to Benny Hill, I can guarantee there are other women there who will be grateful to you for making the effort.

Nip it in the bud and maybe the message will start to sink in.

And guys? If you wouldn’t go up to a bunch of women discussing something in a tea shop and interrupt them with whatever you are about to post to a forum thread, because you’d look like an idiot and a creep and a pervert, don’t post it (although if you would then it’s your call). Also, if a woman objects to something you’ve posted, don’t immediately assume she’s over-reacting but check your language. All we’ve got to go on is what you’ve written.

Remember, too, that “it’s just a bit of fun” is really, really lame if not everyone agrees with you.

I don’t want anything too ambitious, just the opportunity to share my experiences as a female cyclist with other cyclists without wondering whether the next post in the thread is going to ignore the cycling element in favour of sex.

Originally published at Singularity. You can comment here or there.

I’ve been watching Doctor Who on DVD lately, and at the weekend I saw the Forest of the Dead. I expect I’m the only one who felt the episode utterly failed right at the end because the amazing River Song — adventuress, criminal, Mrs Doctor — finishes her existence as mum to three children who will never grow up: the eternal mother.

It is possible to have a career and have kids, although by no means easy, but not every woman wants that, and River Song never struck me as the sort of person who, with an entire virtual reality at her fingertips, would settle for a life of taking the kids to the park and reading them bedtime stories; and it bothers me even more that this was in a programme ostensibly for children. I hate the idea that little girls are being told that you can have your career as an archaeologist and run around adventuring, but at the end of the day what will keep you happy is looking after children, even though they can’t possibly have been made with the man you love (what with him still being alive and out in the real world).

Kids aren’t stupid. They absorb these messages.

There seems to be an idea, somewhere in cultural consciousness, that what women really want to do is stay at home and make babies; not get all oily and discuss gear ratios or whether Batman is more of a psycho than Rorschach. We want to have babies and ultimately we’re only interested in and good for things that are in some way related to the making of and caring for babies. And that hopelessly outdated idea is being perpetuated by happy endings that involve a bedtime story and a goodnight kiss.

I suppose this is also what bothers me about the way those who want to encourage girls onto bikes go about it. There appears to be a de facto assumption that girls aren’t interested in bikes. It is related, I think, to the de facto assumption that women can’t write horror or science-fiction, or don’t like playing games like Bioshock.

I wrote the following piece about the love of bicycles back in 2004 — 6 years ago, FFS. I think it bears saying again, because I still feel the same way.

( tl;dr )

I don’t think that women need anything special to encourage them onto bikes, or to write horror, or to play the sorts of computer games that are traditionally thought of as being for boys. They just need people to stop telling them that the one thing in life that will ultimately make them feel fulfilled and happy, no matter what else is available, is caring for babies.

Get told something often enough and it’s damn hard not to start believing it.

Originally published at Singularity. You can comment here or there.