Brilliant poster from Georgia Perry for my new project: the ‘Winter B-icicle Challenge’.

A reluctant biker’s letter of love to her bicycle

I posted an ode to bicycling on my other site. Here’s an excerpt:

A friend of mine is a smoker and told me that when she was younger she always put shit on people who smoked. “Hello, cancer? Are you guys fucking retarded?” that sort of thing. And the thing is, she says, that even then she knew, in her heart of hearts, she was a smoker and would one day take up smoking. Hilarious, and weirdly fatalistic.

That’s how I feel about biking. Even though my parents never taught me to bike, and I had a horrible accident and was even afraid of it for long time after that, I have always been in love with the idea of biking. I would always look jealously at those sitting atop two wheels, riding away without a care in the world. I thought it looked so romantic. Especially when I was in Barcelona and it was a beautiful Spanish guy with long, curly dark hair and his lovely, sun-kissed girlfriend sitting one-sided on the back.

And now that I am actually biking that previously unrequited love has turned into something real. I have developed a relationship with my bike that exceeds those I’ve had previously with intimate objects (such as my laptop or smartphone.) When my friend – the one who gave me the bike – said to me, “you never have to worry about your piece of shit getting stolen” I felt bad that my poor bike had to hear such horrible talk and loyally told said friend (loudly so the bike could hear) that my bike was wonderful and even if what she said was true it only meant me and the bike were destined to be together forever.

The other day I sailed down the wide and empty bike lanes of Chang An Lu, waved hello to the giant portrait of Mao Zedong as I passed by the Forbidden City, and thought how jealous all those drivers must be, stuck in bumper to bumper to traffic. It pains me to see the encroachment of car culture into a city that was once so heavily dominated by bicycles.

I am formulating secret plans of how to make bicycling in Beijing hip again.