The Doc’s eye for detail stops at bicycles – everything else is an insignificant blur, especially the garden
One of the first columns I wrote was about the typical cyclist’s garden. The grass growing above the windowsills. The nettles. The skeletons of the BBC Natural History Unit’s film crew who ventured in one night because they heard a rumour that the last living Tasmanian thylacine was in there somewhere, and then couldn’t find their way out. And, meanwhile, the garden’s owner is out racking up the miles and keeping their tan-lines sharp.
I was surveying my own jungle recently and realised that, for me at any rate, I only pinned down half the problem. It’s not just the time. It’s the astonishing contrast in approach. I have a dedication and an attention to detail in cycling that I simply can’t summon for anything else.
Look at it this way – Ispent two months building a rig for testing the efficacy of different chain lubes. I’ve also got at least three enquiries from organisations who’d like me to do some freelance work for them, and who are willing to give me money for it, money that I could then exchange for, let’s say, food. I’m unlikely to reply to any of them because I’m going to be filling in my lube-efficacy spreadsheet, which I’ll then be able to exchange for nothing at all.
I sometimes wonder what Mrs Doc makes of this. I have a focus on cycling that overshadows all. The contrast between ‘cycling Michael’ and ‘everything else Michael’ must be as aggravating as it is baffling. How can the same personality that wears the same T-shirt for three weeks also clean a cassette with a cotton bud?
I wasn’t even a cyclist when we met. I was a very promising, imaginative young lawyer. By the time I was 22 I’d already found a glorious loophole in European law, one that other people have been making holiday-home sized quantities of money out of ever since, while I’ve been measuring the thickness of inner tube valves with a Vernier caliper.
It’s not like my friend Bernard complaining that his cycling destroyed his chances of becoming chief executive of a FTSE 100 company – that claim is fatally undermined by the fact he’s not even very dedicated to his distraction.
Mrs Doc might have imagined that all was going to be well when I ended up with the opportunity to make a living in cycling. If bikes and riding them is something I’m so meticulous about, something I deeply want to do, then surely I was right onto a winner?
What this logic overlooks is that some personality types are irresistibly drawn to what doesn’t matter. Even if I�
