Book Review: Freewheeling - Essays on Cycling

When the tailwind’s behind you, something about cycling lends itself to reflection. During the lockdown I borrowed a too-short Raleigh from a friend, which became both my nationally rationed exercise and my change-of-scene machine. It peeled my forehead off the wallpaper, set a happier pace for my thoughts, spokes whisking up the artery roads. The only thing that could interrupt was a Megabus, the avoidance of which left my arm with a Tissot watch embedded in it. I’d only been thinking about Vanessa Redgrave. But that’s what cycling does to you, in a way that other modes of escape don’t - you can’t get away with a daydream as a truck driver.

Getting that feeling into words isn’t quite like ‘dancing about architecture’, as the expression goes, but the translation is not an easy one. Daunt Books’ new collection of essays, Freewheeling, aims to do it. The operative part of the title is ‘free’, and that’s the thread which pulls the twelve pieces together. What is it about pedalling that makes you feel like the clips have come off your wings?

Perhaps it’s that sense of grounding in physical space; Imogen Binnie takes this approach. Before realising she was trans, she has been ‘white-knucking my whole life, dissociated from the shame’. Bringing her childhood BMX back to New York becomes a route to embodiment and lends her the courage to stop retreating into herself - ‘I remember that first light changing’, she writes. 

Binnie’s essay opens the first section, ‘Cycling in the City’; the second section, ‘Cycling Through Time’, expands the book tonally. Mina Holland’s paean to the Peloton adds a sprig of humour, comparing herself favourably to her childhood hamster Gordy, who is never happier than when trapped on his wheel, going nowhere. Nottingham’s Jon McGregor offers a piece written in the second-person with all the narrative brio of his best short fiction, braiding together two character-forming experiences; helping a mother contend with a stay in hospital, and exploring the topography of Norfolk on a bike.

There is phenomenal work throughout - Ashleigh Young’s ‘The Gasp’ is as emphatic a piece of writing as you’ll come across this year. The Lycra-clad commuter has become a stock character - why would you want to mark yourself so goofily apart from everyone around you? ‘The Gasp’ digs deeply into the why of cycling. Some impulse of self-flagellation is never far away, a ritual purging of energy - ‘on better rides…I’ve felt almost grateful for the hill, as if the effort is scrubbing me clean’. For Young it’s also a way to keep the gentle responsibility of youth, having learned to be scared of driving as a child. She learns to drive for the sake of her ageing mother, but that’s a mark of compromise with reality. The joy and the license to daydream comes from putting your bum on the saddle.

Freewheeling isn’t only a love-letter to the thing in your shed. It digs into the force of will you'd need to commit to riding a Victorian invention along the left of an A-road, offers anyone pootling along in the gutter the reassurance that they’re not alone in their martyrdom. The writing here has enough lightness of spirit to whip out on your morning commute (not, I'd recommend, while pedalling). But the essays have also been judiciously chosen, have an aerodynamic focus, and you'll speed through them. Maybe that's what unites good writing and good cycling - as Peter Golkin put it, both books and bikes 'move people forward without wasting anything'. If you’ve ever narrowly dodged a Megabus, this'll pump your tyres up again.

Freewheeling is available from Daunt Books.