was persuaded on Tuesday to go for a bike ride for fun. Our route was from Notting Hill, through the back streets to Kensington Gardens, Hyde Park, St James’s Park and home by a similar route. For fun!
It certainly might have been fun. To have the freedom of all those beautiful gardens and lovely streets, with a light breeze in your face in golden light on a warm August evening, is by all but the most sophisticated standards a great pleasure. It is also good exercise, for those who feel they should worry about such things, and as a means of transport bicycling is quite astonishingly fast and quiet. I was riding a borrowed, state-of-the-art, fold-up Brompton machine, a triumph of British design and technology, and I was as impressed as a child by its beauty, its lightness and the astonishing feats of which modern bicycle gears are capable. What’s more, modern sports technology means that no girl these days needs to worry about overdeveloped calves. I also had every chance of a shower afterwards. Even so, it was all a nightmare
