The love of my life is made out of steel. It has 21 gears. Three don’t work. Two I don’t use. And one is my personal favourite. My gear. The middle chain ring, two down from the top on the right lever. The gear I’m always in when life is singing to me.


I love my bicycle for one reason above any other. It puts me in places that make me scream at the sky. But for the birds who scream back or scram because the screams scares them, they go unheard. My bicycle takes me to places far away from humans.


It shows me the world in a way that nothing else in the world can. A reciprocal agreement. Without me it gathers dust in some darkness in need of air for tyres and oil for parts. Without it I’m more ignorant, more angry, more narrowminded, more impatient, more stubborn, and definitely more sad.


Staredowns with sunsets, high-fiving daybreaks with frozen fingers, struggling to the tops of mountains, free-wheeling into ravines, getting lost and found and lost again. Of silence you can hear. It takes me places and gives me experiences and happinesses I can’t find anywhere else. All of this from the simple revolution of pedals, the teamwork of man and machine.


My bike is my favourite teacher. Lesson one: go and see the world. It is not a second wasted. It is an extender of time. It is food for thought. Oxygen to lungs. It is seeing the back-end of other countries and their cultures, seeing the turn of nature, in the continual throes of movement. So much more than crossing a land-mass on a bicycle.