Cyclogeography: Journeys of a London Bicycle Courier, Jon Day (Notting Hill Editions 2015)
I’ve never read George R.R. Martin, but I like this quote by him: “A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one.” That applies to a world of sword and sorcery, but it also applies in this world. Film can show you what a life is like from the outside; books can tell you what a life is like from within. Reading Jon Day’s Homing (2019), you’ll learn what it’s like to be a pigeon-racer; reading his Cyclogeography, you’ll learn what it’s like to be a bicycle-courier:
When I became a bicycle courier I found that I loved cycling for my living. I loved the exhilaration of pedalling quickly through the city, flowing between stationary cars or weaving through lines of moving traffic. I loved the mindlessness of the job, the absolute focus on the body in movement, the absence of office politics and cubicle-induced anxiety. I loved the blissful, annihilating exhaustion at the end of the day, the dead sleep haunted only by memories of the bike. – p. 3
A film could show you some of that, but it couldn’t tell you what it feels like from within. And here’s something that a film can’t show you at all:
You learn the secret smells of the city: summer’s burnt metallic tang; the sweetness of petrol; the earthy comfort of freshly laid tarmac. Some parts of London have their own smells, like olfactory postcodes. The Shisha bars on Edgeware Road haze the area with sweet smoke; the mineral tang of Billingsgate fish-market wafts over the Isle of Dogs. – p. 6
But Day was an aspiring academic as he rode his bike and, just as he does in Homing, he mixes literature, film and art into his tales of life on the road. So Cyclogeography is a map as well as a memoir: it maps the culture and philosophy of cycling, all the way from Flann O’Brien’s strange and disturbing novel The Third Policeman (1967) to Will Self’s short story “Waiting”, which sounds dull even in the description. But there’s more to cycling than cycling, as it were. The bike runs parallel with the car in more ways than one. Both bikes and cars are like blood-cells speeding along the veins and arteries and capillaries of London, partly autonomous, partly constrained by the anatomy of the city. Some cyclists acquire what taxi-drivers call the Knowledge, the intimate familiarity with London’s geography that allows you to navigate swiftly and surely from any point to any other. Frank, one of the controllers at the courier-firm Day worked for, had acquired his Knowledge like this:
He had been expelled from school at fourteen for stealing mopeds, he once told me, and spent his teenage years as a scholar of the city: joyriding cars and motorbikes down its alleyways and cul-de-sacs, learning every back road and aerial walkway, every park and passage and byway and rat-run. He used this mental armoury first to evade the police and later, more legitimately, as a taxi driver. – p. 39
Then Day adds this beautiful little Ballardian touch:
But after a few years on the road, he realised that he preferred his mental map of the city to the real thing, and so he retreated to the office to live in it at one remove, traversing London vicariously in his imagination.
Frank’s controllees still preferred the wheel deal: as Day says, “Most couriers are young, male, and slightly lost.” (p. 28) Or a lot lost, and glad to be so. Some are hiding from the police or not just riding but being ridden by drug-addiction or mental illness. It’s a dangerous and demanding job. Day loved it, then got out and wrote this short book. There’s a lot in it: free-wheeling and free association. Day is an academic now and in a particularly dangerous (but undemanding) field: EngLit. But he doesn’t write like a typical academic and there’s no ugly jargon or pretentious cultural theory, despite the appearance of Debord and Self. Writing should be like riding: smooth, well-balanced, following the contours of thought and reality with grace, efficiency and ease. That’s what Day has achieved in Cyclogeography.
Previously Pre-Posted on Papyrocentric Performativity…
• Homing in the Gloaming – a review of Jon Day’s Homing: On Pigeons, Dwellings and Why We Return (2019)
Papyrocentric Performativity 