.turning to the dark side

Like every car driver, truck driver, bus driver and pilot, I started my career on wheels on a bike. I hope cyclists remember that, and also remember how many other petrolheads are also cyclists. The world is too subtle to be carved up into factions, which just make us put mental labels on one another, resent each other, and squeeze the other out at traffic lights. In that spirit of non-labelling, amongst other things, I can now also confess to having on my driver’s CV a stint on that most mental of 1980s anti-icons, the Sinclair C5, Sir Clive’s moment of madness that will be carved onto his headstone. But also the vehicle in which I had my first foray into powered driving.

There may be some younger city cyclists unfamiliar with the unique charms of the C5, which was a low riding tricycle that relied partially on reclined pedal power for locomotion, made of molded plastic, steered by standard handlebars mounted under the knees. Right from the outset, this is an unnatural position, and we all know that you can still get a bike these days that relies on a variant of this arrangement. But let’s not kid ourselves. Those bikes are awful, and riding them is madness.

As was the C5, which gave its rider a vantage point of about 20 inches above the tarmac, with no integrated sidespray protection or ballast, the latter of which I’ll come to in a minute.

As a youngster in 1985, I was quite keen to have a go whilst holidaying in the relative safety of Millport, off the west of Scotland, famed in Scottish lore as being a haven for occasional cyclists. With a thriving hire trade, most families would circumnavigate the island’s single perimeter road, the traversing of whose 10 and three quarter mile circumference would constitute their only exercise for the year. A local entrepreneur believed as Clive did, that the future was three-wheeled, and tried to supplant the bicycle with the new low rise, tricycled wave of the future. In a converted villa turned into a B&B, his back garden was now car park to 25 or so of these monstrosities. My brother and I turned up bright and early one Sunday morning, in our innocence mistaking his gin soaked, unshaven hungover demeanour and grumpiness for tiredness.