for the best travel and tourism don’t go there alone: stick with the very best friend you’ll ever know.  The one who will stay with you come thick and thin, up a hill, down the dale, never talk back nor snap the observation you are getting it all wrong, going in the wrong direction.

It’ll be you who will drop them, you’ll be the fickle one who’ll eye some other, you’ll say, beauty. They may get a bit deflated with that of course, won’t show it of course even come the day when you change your mind to pick up where you left them; hey, they’ll be ready later, waiting. That’s the bicycle for you.

They’ve got feelings you know, for all that honesty and love they do with smiles for miles. No matter what the weather they’ll put up with everything you try to avoid with a short-cut or the ruts you never spot: yet they feel. No doubt you’ll overload them, hand out a bit of a thumping in the park up, but because they’re your best friend they won’t be telling on you.  They’ll sit there knowing you’ll never get to saying sorry – well, to them anyway.

So what has the bicycle done for you?

Only good, if you really got around to thinking about it – and just how well your best and honestly performing friend helped you out on that last trip, right. All without you even thinking “thanks dear friend, I couldn’t have managed it without you”. Leaning there against the wall, left to their own devices now you’ve arrived the steed you’ve not cared to feed, even with a thank-you.

None of the other riders around you would have heard you quietly muttering, would they! Times happened when your friend under the saddle would have noticed you’ll go Baa Ahhh at sheep at the road verge. Moo ooo to a heifer or two, go Quack-quack by the village pond. And don’t say you don’t do that cos there’s not a bicycle rider this side of Timbuktoo who would believe you.  And anyway your best friend know that’s your fun side coming out: not that you say much to them.

To forget that remarkable , even the mostly friendly silent tenor, you’ve had with you for the ride, isn’t it sad you forget to even murmur an appreciation for  all those humming tyre tunes that’ve helped make your day.  Bicycles may not have much of a voice of their own, yet don’t they just sing loudly for the tourist in us: our wanting after heritage, checking the story from far times, edifices drawing us in for the looking back. All of that added to the happenings and the places where we can join, see, appreciate – often not so very distant, yet bringing a newness to our beingThere experiences.

That is only one of the things the bicycle will do for you.  And there they are, some hanging by a wheel on a hook in the garage, whilst the latest friend is sitting waiting by the front door . .  .

Sitting in the bookshelf meantimne is the ‘Burnham Boy’ book from Feed A read .com written about the early times (those when a fixed wheel was often your best friend for slowing down or stopping in the wet!) There are stories and happy faces in a bunch of Essex cycling friends who lived on the Dengie peninsula. We all had bikes which went to autopilot on the road for ten miles. Oh, cows in the way not sheep.