On the Road Bike

by Ned Boulting

  It had been surprisingly easy to achieve, getting the Tour to London. Cheap, relatively, and uncontroversial: an idea so simple that it seems perplexing that no one had managed to bring it to life before Ken Livingtone’s administration pulled the Lycra rabbit out of the aero helmet.

  One freezing December day in 2011, just as the mayoral election of 2012 was gaining momentum, I was finally invited, after some badgering, to share an audience with Ken Livingstone at Labour’s London headquarters in Victoria. I arrived by bike, filled up with a sense of appropriate sustainability in my transport choices, to be met by an enthusiastic political aide, a chap called Joe. He had no idea where I could lock it up. ‘We don’t normally get people visiting by bike. I don’t know what to suggest really. Do you want a cup of tea? Ken’s waiting.’

  ‘Yes please.’ I said, trying to look (or at least feel) like a hard-bitten political hack. I left my bike chained up to a lamppost outside, and untucked my jeans from my socks.

  Ken and I had a little previous. Not that he’d remember.

  The last time I had interviewed Livingstone was in Paris at the end of the 2007 Tour. He was a little bit the worse for wear, and slurring his words. London’s mayor, after an extremely boozy lunch at the Jules Verne restaurant in the Eiffel Tower, had just been shown a Vélib, the Parisian bike hire scheme. He was impressed, and no doubt emboldened by the sunshine and the volume of Pauillac swilling around inside him, declared to his staff that he wanted the same thing for London. And so it was that the Boris Bike was born. The incoming mayor would later inherit a project hatched over lunch near the Champs-Elysées in 2007.

  We interviewed him about it. Or at least we tried to.

  Woody had to fabricate a fault in the sound and ask him politely to do it again, in the hope that it would be less slurred the second time around. It wasn’t, he wasn’t. So we thanked him politely and watched on as he swayed his way back to the Tribune Présidentielle to catch Floyd Landis parading the yellow jersey.

  Now, a few years later, and with Ken Livingstone no longer in power, I was sitting in a bland meeting room with a giant 3D Labour logo pinned to the wall opposite an oil painting of him in his last mayoral incarnation. The man himself was wearing an off-white suit to match his off-white suit in the portrait. He was in the middle of an election campaign and he struck me as looking completely knackered. Before we got started though, he summoned up the energy to lambast the state of journalism, and the state of television generally, after I told him what I did for a living.

  ‘There is a general degradation in the reporting world, and television is a tide of crap, with nothing you want to see.’ I nodded my agreement, and smiled apologetically, writing the words ‘tide of crap’ in my notebook.

  He continued. ‘Anyway, that’s my rant about the decline of your industry. What can I do for you? I don’t know what we’re going to talk about really. I don’t do bicycles.’

  ‘I’m not sure this is going to be of much use in your campaign. I have no idea when the book might get published.’ I felt it was best to be honest. I saw his aide look up from his BlackBerry and then glance at his watch. Besides, I was way outside my comfort zone, having no idea how to interview politicians, and felt that the best way to get beyond the spin of an electioneering career politician was to confess that I had no intention really of putting any of the interview into the public domain.

  Yet none of this seemed to bother Ken Livingstone. Not even the glaringly obvious reality of the fact that he had granted half an hour of his time to talk to no one in particular on a subject he knew little about, and cared for still less. An hour later, we were still talking, even though our starting point had been inauspicious.

  ‘You’re not interested in sport?’ I ventured.

  ‘Absolutely completely uninterested.’ He smiled that famous wide-mouthed grin back across the table, delighting in his perversity. ‘When I was leader of the GLC, I had only ever been to one sporting event. The mayor of Lambeth took me to a test match at the Oval, and I fell asleep.’

  He was never that kind of outdoorsy type. He’d never been bothered. His city of birth wasn’t made for it. ‘In the 1950s, 60s and 70s London’s weather was very much wetter than it now is.’ Livingstone recalls a London of his youth that seems to echo with post-war drips from gutters and the stifling swish of wet mackintoshes on buses. It was a black-and-white world, where most people aspired to buying a car. Not a bike.

  ‘It was a thing about status. You wouldn’t have a bike. Losers had bikes.’

  Yet, despite his bookish reluctance to join the boisterous masses on the games field, Livingstone did, at some undefined point in his Tulse Hill childhood, briefly have access to a pushbike. And he rode it, too.

  ‘My parents wouldn’t let me and my sister have a bike because it was too dangerous. So I used to borrow my mate Dave’s. I thought I was getting somewhere in demonstrating to my parents that it was safe, and then I ran into the front of a car and staggered home all covered in blood and after that I didn’t have a chance. So that was that.’

  His flirtation with the bicycle went straight from short-lived to non-existent. These days, he has other ways of keeping fit; he tells me with not inconsiderable pride about how much weight he has lost. ‘I’ve lost a stone and a half as a combination of campaigning against evil incarnate . . .’ (Boris Johnson, it seems) ‘. . . and walking the dog. My doctor almost had an orgasm when I had my annual medical.’

  But cycling? No way. ‘There are so many Jeremy Clarkson clones who’d just run over me and say it was an accident. “Oooh, was that the mayor? Sorry about that!”’ And with that imagined assassination attempt, the former mayor of London throws his head back and roars with laughter.

  But, he protests too much. Things did change during those years, and, wittingly, or unwittingly, his administration played its part. It’s odd. Here I am playing at being a political journalist, full of ‘balance’ and ‘caution’ and ‘pinches of salt’, determined to see through any blatant politicking, and I find myself trying to remind him how well he did. Something tells me I am no Paxman.

  ‘Cycling had dwindled to the absolute minimum you can get, in terms of the number of people cycling and the quality of the experience. It was the all-time low point.’ His team are keen to arm me with statistics about GLA budgets and TfL surveys. But frankly, the numbers don’t make the hair stand up on the back of your neck, not like the memory of the London Grand Départ does. It is to that subject that I wish to return. Although, Livingstone’s recollections of schmoozing the ASO officials from Paris are, perhaps understandably, sometimes a little hazy.

  ‘The old guy who was just giving up and handing over to Prudhomme, who was that?’ He is talking about Jean-Marie le Blanc, the legendary director of the Tour, who was just about to retire when Livingstone bought the Grand Départ.

  ‘Jean-Marie le Blanc,’ I remind him. His face lights up.

  ‘Yeah, he was great. Working with them was a joy. You had a rule [with the Olympics] that you could only take the IOC members out for one meal during their visit. And so that had to be with the Queen, not down at my favourite Indian or something. But with the Tour officials we went out to a restaurant, we drank too much, we had a good laugh. It was such a pleasure to work with them.’

  ‘You took them to Le Pont de la Tour, didn’t you?’ I had been told that they had eaten at the same place Tony Blair had chosen to impress Bill Clinton. Bernard Hinault, the five times winner of the Tour de France, had flown in especially for that particular piece of negotiation. ‘Do you remember that dinner?’

  ‘Yea-ah.’ He looks a little vacant. ‘I don’t recall . . . it blurs. I think they carried me out at the end of it.’

  He goes on to tell me that Boris Johnson had failed to take up the option of a return to London for the Tour de France in 2010 or 2011.

  ‘Why didn’t he?’ I ask. This is the first time I have heard this.

  ‘Because he’s lazy. That’s why.’

&
nbsp; According to Livingstone, they’d ‘shaken hands on it’ with the organisation of the Tour. (The next day, in a fit of journalistic diligence, I telephone the Conservative Assembly member Andrew Boff, who has special responsibilities for cycling, and ask him if this is true. He tells me he has no idea, but he will find out, and get back to me. I hear nothing more from him. After a month, I chase him up by email. He never replies. So I guess we’ll have to make up our own minds about that.)

  I have one more soft question to ask, and, even as I ask it, I think I know what the answer is going to be.

  ‘What is your proudest contribution to cycling in London?’

  Ken Livingstone thinks long and hard about this. Then he answers. ‘Transparent bike sheds.’

  I start scribbling notes.

  ‘We wanted kids to start cycling. So we worked with schools. The real problem is you’ve got to have somewhere to put the bikes, so we offered schools bike sheds. But there was a real resistance from them because they imagined everyone getting pregnant behind the bike sheds or doing drugs. That’s where the teachers all got laid at school, you know? People who are teachers now had their first sexual encounters behind the bike sheds, when they were at school! They weren’t having the old-style bike sheds. So we actually built bike sheds that were transparent.’

  ‘Spoiling everybody’s fun?’

  ‘Yeah, yeah. That’s my favourite cycling story out of the eight years.’

  Not the Tour de France, then.

  I thanked him, got him to sign a copy of his book for my father-in-law who detests him, and took my leave.

  CHAPTER 10

  THE MEEK AND THE MIGHTY

  I ONCE HOSTED an event at which I had to interview two bike riders who had completed circumnavigations of the planet Earth. On the face of it, this is fairly remarkable. Or so you might think.

  One had ridden all the way round the world simply because he’d wanted to. The other, an environmental activist, had done it with some sort of charitable agenda, which involved raising awareness of solar power or a similar thoughtful endeavour. To my great surprise, and considerable disappointment, I found their stories quite deadening, although I marginally favoured the account of the bloke who just did it because he could. They had traversed vast tracts of the planet alone, on a bike, and yet they had returned to the fold of us mortals with a few holiday snaps and long list of reasonably interesting encounters, rendered somehow dull in the retelling. A snake in Morocco. A terrible toilet in India. Hitting a cow in Texas. Some skirmish with border guards near China, which they had patently obviously survived otherwise they wouldn’t have been standing there next to me at a trade fair in Surrey.

  Amazingly, these self-appointed adventurers had turned an astonishing achievement, a colossal enterprise, into something you had to follow on a PowerPoint presentation, wondering how many more pages there were to reveal. Perhaps I had misjudged the mood, but the general shuffling in the auditorium suggested that they’d lost their audience by the time they’d crossed into Iran. The mean-spirited green-eyed amateur rider in me railed at their good fortune in having been able to devote a year to such a singular and, yes, pointless, pursuit.

  It is with a certain amount of resignation that I read of the charity rides, however noble the cause (and they are often extremely noble). Be it Land’s End to John O’Groats, London to Paris or simply Round The World, this is a burgeoning pastime in Great Britain. Cycling seems to have embraced this impulse more widely than other sports. The moral legitimacy of the sponsored act of sweaty endurance, well, who could argue with that? Ever since that somewhat less-than-honest chap Lance Armstrong struck fundraising gold with his Livestrong bracelets, the charities have started to mine the same seam. It clearly yields dividends.

  It has become a peculiarly British phenomenon. These islands in particular are home to a bewildering array of causes. Over recent years the proliferation of organised charity-sponsored fundraising rides has ballooned beyond measure. They take out adverts in the broadsheets. They plaster themselves over Tube stations. They loom at you from illuminated bus stop signs. Timelines on Twitter sometimes silt up and grind to a halt with the relentless re-distribution of worthy causes. Just Giving tweets and emailed links to fundraising pages have become the new virtual ‘chugging’.

  To be, it seems, is to fundraise.

  They are all chasing the same money, surely. The marvellously self-delusional, comfortably seated cyclist (for there are many of them) is easy prey. The charity fundraisers have worked out their demographic and established that every office with, say, ten or more workers, will by now, statistically speaking, have at least one cycling nut who would leap at the chance of spending four days riding to Paris to see the final stage of the Tour de France. Then the rest of the office, if only to get the cycling nut off their case, and to avoid having to speak to them about it endlessly in the canteen, will feel obliged to chip in online, probably donating at least fifty pounds each. That’s five hundred pounds for the chosen cause without even turning a pedal.

  The rider will sweat, and will love every drop of it. It will be a morally unimpeachable one-week pleasure/pain cruise.

  Recent trends in celebrity endorsement have upped the ante considerably. It is now virtually unthinkable to launch a charity bike ride without the presence of at least two members of the 2003 World Cup winning rugby team on board, or failing that, a footballer/comedian/TV presenter or two. People are clamouring for a bit of the charity action. From hospices to homelessness, cot death to Alzheimer’s. The great crises of western life find expression here, with cancer taking centre stage.

  Therefore this conversation would be distinctly unorthodox in 2012: ‘I’m thinking of riding to the South of France.’

  ‘Great idea. Who’re you doing it for?’

  ‘Me.’

  I can’t say I knew Ian Meek well, but the last I saw of him was in a pub in Leeds railway station in April 2012.

  It was lunchtime, and busy with travellers grabbing a pint and a pie, as well as regulars, who for some reason had chosen this noisy, darkened Wetherspoons to drink themselves wobbly one weekday morning.

  I made my way through the crowd towards Ian. Sitting at a high table in the middle of the pub, and joined by his wife Sally Anne, he had changed significantly to look at since we’d last met. He had the same soft smile, the same infectious chuckle. But the scar on his right temple was unavoidably prominent and he now wore two hearing aids. His eyes were sometimes watery and, every now and again, his cheery features would suddenly, visibly, wilt and he would look very tired.

  But otherwise he was in good spirits. Just recently, he had seen his psychologist, who had been concerned that Ian had started to brood, to turn in on himself. The doctor had been surprised to see him smiling.

  ‘What’s changed?’ he’d asked.

  ‘I’m back on my bike,’ Ian beamed back at him.

  ‘Is that the only thing?’

  ‘Yes. I’m back on my bike.’

  There had been weeks, very recently, when he’d been unable to venture out. As our conversation twisted and turned into life, he recalled those dark days when the doctors had told him (not for the first time) to leave it alone.

  Then Ian tells me, to my considerable alarm, that a telephone conversation with me had turned things around. It seems I’d told him over the phone to ignore the doctors and do what he wanted to do, not for a minute expecting him to take my half-baked advice seriously. I had only said it because it sounded like the right thing to say, what I would have wanted to hear in his situation. But, however it came about, and whatever my accidental role in it had been, it seemed to have worked.

  ‘I used to be too frightened to even go and get my hair cut. I wasn’t me. I would never have had the confidence to come into a place like this and meet you and buy a drink. But now I’m back to being me, and it’s all down to me getting my bike out and riding to my sister-in-law’s with my nephew’s Easter egg. It’s put the biggest smile on my
face ever.’

  And to prove it, he smiles. Broadly.

  ‘My mum was worried. She said, “Who did you have out with you on the ride?” I said that God was by my side. She said, “Well God ain’t going to pull you out of the water is he, when you go straight in the river?”’

  He splutters with mirth. It’s hard not to join in. And somehow, the Bristol accent of his youth has seeped through into his laughter.

  He grew up the son of a carpenter and a nurse in Yate, near Bristol.

  ‘I used to have a Commando with cow horn handlebars on it. I used to go everywhere on that thing. One Christmas, Dad said, do you want a racer? And he got me a Raleigh Winner. It was the most amazing present ever.’

  I laugh with Ian at his memory of this, in the particular way that near-strangers (this was only our second meeting) can only do over a shared heritage, in this case the horrifying cliché of a seventies childhood. Although I never had a Commando, the ‘bovver boys’ in my village all rode them. The saddle was long and, like a motorbike saddle, turned up at the rear. The handlebars were modelled on a Harley Davidson. They had attitude, but as a means of getting you from A to B you might as well have been on a clown’s bike from the local circus.

  It didn’t matter to Ian. He loved it. When he was eighteen, he and a bunch of like-minded mates discovered mountain biking the first time it became popular. They took the train into Bristol with their savings and each came away with a new bike, which they rode all the way home.

  His was a Specialized Rock Hopper. I nod as he tells me this, even though I have not the faintest idea what one of those should look like. I get a more accurate picture of how young Ian must have looked rattling through the Forest of Dean on his frequent overnight stays in the woods when he tells me he wore a Toshiba Polka Dot jersey. ‘It was horrendous really.’ This time, I nod with a little more conviction.