Category: Life on bikes

One of the things about being responsible for small people, and liking a quiet life, is that I have become a lot more conscious of what a human body needs in order to function. All of us need sufficient food, drink, sleep and movement. Nine times out of ten when one of the kids has a meltdown and we run through this basic needs checklist, there’s a contributing factor. The kids are even starting to be able to recognise this in themselves, which makes conversations about early nights after difficult days a lot smoother.

If I’m honest, I’m much better at managing this for the kids than I am for myself. When the kids were small and waking up several times in the night, the biggest challenge was sleep (for everyone, but especially the grown ups!). At least as babies they could always be relied upon to nap in a bike seat, a fact we made copious use of during lockdown when we needed to get the baby to nap three times a day, manage our own exercise, and make time to play with the preschooler. It was a constant multitasking exercise in trying to make sure that the ways we were spending our time were meeting different needs for different people simultaneously.

Thankfully now they are older sleep is much less of an issue. In a packed week, the first thing that slips is movement for me. Given a choice between clean clothes for everyone the following day or a walk in the sunshine it often doesn’t feel like much of a choice. This is one of the reasons I’m glad that we are a family that cycles – doing the school run by bike builds a bit of movement into my day every day and helps keep me happy.

I’m grateful too to see the boys starting to set good habits of their own. Young children naturally move a lot through the course of the day, but I can see that as they get older there will be far more demands on their time in terms of school, homework and other focused activities that require them to sit still for many hours a day. Like us, they will have to become a lot more intentional about making time to move their bodies.

Our current school run is about a 10km round trip. When my husband is taking them, he uses an acoustic triplet, which means the kids are able to be active too. I am less strong, and less confident in balancing them if they wriggle, so I ride an electric long tail with a super low centre of gravity, where they are just passengers. But Fridays are special – we have a bit more slack in the schedule and Mr Seven is allowed to ride his own bike to school if he’s ready early enough. We never have to nag him to get going on a Friday morning!

I’m hopeful that when they are teenagers getting about by bicycle will be second nature to them.  We’re taking a multi pronged approach to safety – they will have been riding on our bikes and observing our road positioning for years, we will help them plan the safest way between the places they want to go, and we are campaigning (through Kidical Mass) for better connected cycle routes across Reading.

And, who knows, maybe one day they might have little people of their own and find themselves struggling to meet everyone’s basic needs with a newborn around. Perhaps they will be grateful to find (from the other side) that a bike ride is a great way to get a baby to nap whilst its parent also gets some exercise.

Somewhere along the line growing up I learned that there are some topics that it’s impolite to discuss in casual conversation – most notably religion and politics.  To those weighty items I would also add that I am reticent to discuss my feelings as a cyclist about road safety. I have STRONG feelings on the subject, and I do not want to subject my (lovely, well meaning) driving friends to a breathless tirade. So, Dear Reader, I thought I’d subject you to it instead (since you are here voluntarily and can leave when you like).

1. Remember how vulnerable cyclists are. The best visual I ever saw explaining safe passing distances first showed a hand being slammed down hard on a table close to a hammer, and then showed the reverse. 🫱🔨 Only one of those things made me wince, and I bet you would have the same reaction. The cyclist is the hand, your car is the hammer.  Don’t risk our lives just because it feels safe to you inside your car to be that close to us.
   
2. Be a bit more chilled out about cyclists when you’re driving. I particularly hate pulling up Peppard Road going away from the Last Crumb. The road there is not wide enough for a car to safely pass a cyclist (you can tell this, Dear Rider, because the separate bike lane doesn’t start until a little further up). The number of drivers who CANNOT BEAR to wait twenty seconds to get to a safe passing place is ridiculous (I am better now than I used to be at road positioning to stop this happening). Yet, when it is other cars (instead of bicycle traffic) causing the (much longer!) delay coming down that road they all manage to queue nicely without trying to rear end each other.
   
3. If you are in a SUV and you cannot generally give safe passing room when overtaking cyclists, then get yourself into a narrower car. There’s no need to hog that much of the road. Same goes for the drivers coming down Peppard Road who feel the need to keep one set of wheels permanently in the bike lane, thereby making it unusable. Almost all of our road space is allocated to cars, stop stealing the little that isn’t.
   
4. Always, ALWAYS look all around you before pulling away from stationary. It gives me a little mini heart attack every time I see a car lurch forward then stop just before hitting something as the driver clearly decided to do their mirrors check AFTER they started moving. That should never happen.
   
5. Stop parking your car on pavements and in bike lanes. ESPECIALLY on Henley Road where all the houses have massive driveways and many schoolchildren commute along the path. If you don’t have the fine control of your car to manoeuvre it safely into your driveway please turn in your driving licence immediately.

I suppose I don’t say these things to my friends because they are all lovely, well meaning people. However, I also suppose every driver who has ever close passed me, or undercut me on a roundabout, or parked their car in a bike lane or on a pavement is probably in most circumstances a lovely, well meaning person with lot of friends. Perhaps if it became more acceptable to talk about these things we would see less of them.

April’s ride featured two councillors from different parties riding on our tandem, Daisy. Daisy is the only bike in our family “fleet” that has a name that’s stuck. She’s been with us longest, and, although (or perhaps because) she was bought second hand about two decades ago when we were both fresh faced students, she’s probably the bike I’m most emotionally attached to.

It’s been a while since I rode on her – at the moment “my” seat is usually configured to bring the pedals high enough for a four year old, which means if I tried to ride her it wouldn’t be very comfortable! Seeing two adults on her bought back memories from our earliest days of cycling together, when there were only two of us, and I was rather less keen.

It was the early 2010s. My then-boyfriend had convinced me to try out camping (a first for me, I came from a decidedly indoorsy family). He had found a suitable campsite in Dorset and suggested we get there by a combination of National Express bus and bicycle. I nervously agreed, on the basis that he would be in charge of logistics and route planning.

Travelling by coach with the tandem was an…interesting…affair. The bike had to be dismantled and the pieces wrapped in bubble wrap before it could be loaded into the coach hold, which added a fair amount of time to the journey. Even more interesting, however, was the route between the coach stop and the campsite.

I suppose I should have been concerned when my partner showed me his printed out map and explained his plan. “Look, it’s suggested three cycling routes. The first is long and flat, the third is short and hilly, and the second is somewhere in between. But LOOK there is another route which it hasn’t found which is even shorter so we’re going to do that.”

(Yes, Dear Reader, this is the man who currently plans the Kidical Mass Reading routes. I promise he has developed some common sense in the last decade and a half).

I think my favourite part of the journey (at least now that it’s just a fun story from the past) was when, having just pushed the bike up a long 17% hill on foot, we stopped in a village to check directions for the rest of the journey. The lady looked at us, and, like a character in a sitcom, just shook her head and said, “Ooo, I wouldn’t have come this way.”

Nevertheless, both we and (spoiler) our relationship survived the trip. We had a lovely holiday, and amended our bus ticket home to go from a stop closer to the campsite. After that experience, any bicycle camping we have done with the kids have been (a) actually glamping, not camping, (b) combining trains+bikes not buses+bikes and (c) had me on my cargo e-bike. But, hey, maybe as the kids get bigger we’ll get more adventurous.

For now the tandem mostly gets use ferrying Mr 4 to and from his Friday afternoon Kindermusik class. But one day, when the kids are bigger, it will be converted back to two adults permanently. I imagine my husband and I will still have a use for good old Daisy long after the kids have left home and the newer, shinier, kid carrying bikes have found a new home.

I don’t, however, think I will ever again agree to a tandem bike camping trip in Dorset.

My four year old has a gift for starting conversations with everyone. No one he does this to seems to mind, but my inner British person cringes a little whenever he bypasses Proper Social Protocols and does something completely unsanctioned like talk to a stranger on a train.

To bring him a little bit more in line with normal behaviour I have taught him an acceptable opening sentence. “Hello-my-name-is-Sebastian-what’s-your-name?” tends to come out in one breath, sometimes so fast that it has to be repeated, but at least the proper introductions have taken place before he starts demanding to know what the person did that morning or similar.

We recently went to France and it transpires that “Bonjour-je-m’appelle-Sebastian-comment-t’appelles-tu” also works perfectly well for making friends, even if that’s all the French you know. Kids in general often surprise me with how effectively they communicate even if there isn’t a shared language. I suppose it shouldn’t be that unexpected – after all, we all start off with all of our communication being non verbal. One year olds can perfectly well make themselves understood through a combination of noises, gestures and facial expressions.

🇧🇪 🇫🇷 🇩🇪 …

From the outset, Kidical Mass Reading has had a good representation from multi-lingual families. Many European countries are rather more advanced than the UK is in terms of cycling infrastructure. When people have grown up knowing the impact of good cycling infrastructure campaigning for the same here seems to be an easy sell. The predominant emotion that I’ve heard from them around this is sadness that they aren’t yet able to offer their children the same freedoms and independence that they enjoyed so much themselves.

Our boys’ first “Kidical Mass friends” were the children of one of the other organising families, two wonderful girls who are very similar ages to our kids. The family is German, and late last year an opportunity came up for them to relocate to Bonn (which is much closer to their extended families) which they (sadly for us) took. Unfortunately (for us) they seem to be very happy there and show no signs of coming back, so when my other half’s work took him that way recently over half term we took the opportunity to go out with him and visit them.

The kids hadn’t seen each other for about six months, and we wondered on the way over how long it would take them to rediscover the friendship they’d had before. The answer was that within twenty seconds of reuniting they were halfway up a tree together. Kidical Mass friends really are the best friends.

We enjoyed hearing all about their Kidical Mass experience in Bonn – a very well attended affair, with hundreds of riders and police marshals closing down junctions for the ride to pass through. We were a bit envious, but at least we could boast about our Father Christmas ride (their rides don’t run through Winter).

The cycling infrastructure in Bonn is much more advanced than it is here – my husband’s observation having been there a few times for work is that you can cycle in the direction you want to go and mostly it just works. Meanwhile, here in Reading, our route planning sometimes involves Google street view. Still, our friends were able to point out plenty of things that could use some improvement – I guess a cycle campaigner’s work is never done. 

If you too would like to help campaign for better cycling infrastructure in Reading (and possibly make some new friends whilst you’re at it) please do join us for our next rides on 20th April.

My Dad likes to play the long game. I don’t remember this, but I know (because he tells me at least once a year) that the first thing he said to me after I was born was, “In eighteen years you are going to leave home, and I promise that both you and I are going to be ready for it.”

I’d like to think that I’m a bit better at living in the moment than my Dad is, but I understand the sentiment and why he thought it was important enough to say to a newborn. It is our job as parents to help children grow into competent adults, and that’s not something that happens overnight when they turn eighteen. Freedom needs to be given to them gradually, in baby steps, as they are ready for it.

🧒👦📮

Our kids had a small milestone recently. They are seven and four, and I asked them if they wanted to go out together without a grown up to post their letters to their friends. The post box is a two minute walk away. We live on a quiet street, with footpaths connecting the houses and a small communal garden. Cars are relegated to a road around the edge, away from the houses, and there is no through traffic. After agreeing some ground rules (hold hands, the older one is in charge of deciding when it’s safe to cross the road, look both ways, don’t run) they decided they were up to the challenge. They came back having safely completed their mission and absolutely delighted with themselves.

The space we live in shapes how we live. We know many of our neighbours because we see them heading out on errands, gardening, or walking their dogs, and the boys stop to ask questions. Where are you going? What are you planting? Can I stroke your dog? The space is pleasant to be in, and peaceful, and encourages conversation. It won’t be long until the boys can go out and play in the communal area without me hovering next to them.

🧒 🚙 🚚 🚗 🚙 🚗 🚐 🚗

One of our Kidical Mass friends lived on a side road off Oxford Road, and her experience of life outside the front door could not have been more different. There are cars parked down both sides of the street, often blocking the pavement. There is nowhere to encourage neighbours to linger and socialise, and nowhere for children to play. The traffic on the main road is fast, and there aren’t traffic free alternatives. (In unrelated news, she’s recently moved).

How many years does an environment like that add to the point when a child can have some freedom and independence? Measures to bring down the speed and volume of traffic in residential areas would make a huge difference to the safety and quality of life of our kids.

On 20th April Kidical Mass Reading and Wokingham will both be running rides. These tie in with two very important action events, an international Kidical Mass one and the UK based Safe Streets Now. We want to raise our voices to make a clear statement. Our kids deserve safe bike infrastructure. They deserve safe streets. Allowing them to experience independence when they are ready for it should be a priority.

If you agree with us, do come and join us for a ride.

Maths was my favourite subject as a kid (and I still love it now). One of the interesting problems I remember learning about is the Prisoner’s Dilemma. The premise is this: you and a pal are suspected of wrongdoing. You are taken into separate rooms and questioned. If both of you say you didn’t do it, you both serve a short sentence. If both of you say you did do it, you both serve a medium length sentence. But if one of you admits to the crime and the other does not, the one who talked goes free and the one who didn’t fess up gets locked away for a really long time. What should you do?

The mathematically correct answer to the dilemma is this: if each prisoner acts solely in their own interest, they will always turn each other in, even though they would be better off if they both kept quiet.

Sometimes I think that the choices people make around transport modes are a kind of prisoner’s dilemma. Except the losing option if we all act solely in our own interests is “large parts of the planet become uninhabitable”.

“There’s so much traffic on the road that I wouldn’t feel safe riding a bike.”

If everyone who could ride a bike to get where they were going chose to do so, the roads would feel a lot safer for all of us.

“I drive a big car because I feel safer around the rest of the traffic.”

When I walk my children through car parks I have to remind them to stay extra close to me around SUVs, because the drivers are so high up they might not be able to see them.

“There’s no space for dedicated bike infrastructure on our roads because they are too narrow.”

I agree, our roads are narrow in places. If I were queen for a day I would bring in legislation around bringing down vehicle width. When I’m on my bike, I really feel the difference between being overtaken by someone in an SUV or someone in a smaller lighter car.

I gave you the mathematically correct answer to the prisoner’s dilemma above. However, I’ve always felt that the actually correct answer is to associate with the kind of people who won’t turn you in. I also reckon the morally correct answer (leaving aside the issue of the crime committed at the opening of the problem) is to be the kind of person who is willing to do what’s right for your friends.

We are in a climate crisis. I know you all know this. I do think we see more and more bikes on Reading’s roads as the years go by. I’m grateful to all those people who make the sometimes difficult choice (I know we don’t have the best infrastructure yet) to travel this way. The more people make that choice, the easier it will be for others to do the same.

So, Dear Reader, if you want a new year’s resolution but haven’t yet settled on one, how about this?
When you travel, look at the options reasonably available to you and consider as a factor the impact that your choices make on other road users.
When your car reaches the end of its life maybe a car with a smaller footprint would be sufficient to transport your family.
Perhaps public transport is viable for your commute.
Maybe some of your journeys could be moved to active travel.

And if, after all of that, you sometimes find yourself on a bike in Reading, do pop by to join one of our rides.

Winter is here! Those of us who cycle with children know that a cold child on a bike is a very bad thing. Mostly because we love them so much and don’t want them to suffer, but also partly because they can get extremely whiny.

The quote in the title of this article is from the version of 101 Dalmatians which I watched as a kid (you will be kind, Dear Reader, and not attempt to do the maths on my age). Without the “my tail is froze” line which I have deleted it’s a pretty good summary of the list of complaints we’ve had from our kids over the years (though it is missing fingers, which is fair enough as dogs don’t have them, and actually ours have never whinged about their noses). I thought I’d share something about how we have addressed them.

Firstly, keeping the child’s body warm. They don’t get as much wind chill as we do (being somewhat sheltered behind our bodies) but they aren’t doing exercise in a bike seat so we tended to wrap them up pretty warm. We loved an all-in-one snowsuit, right up until the point of potty training when suddenly the ability to undress quickly becomes REALLY IMPORTANT. After that, we went waterproof dungarees (sometimes called puddle jumpers or puddle busters) over a warm coat. No gap for wind chill, but they can still be peeing in a bush on the side of the road 10 seconds after pulling over.

For feet, we tried all sorts of shoes/socks/boots combinations, but the thing that really solved it was snow boots – the fluffy lining made their toes very cosy. For their ears, we found a thin but warm woolen “elephant hood” could fit under their helmet and kept their ears toasty.

Now, if my husband and I had only ever bought the older Kidical Mass Intern into the world, this article would end, “and for hands, gloves”, and that would be the end of it. So aren’t we all so glad that the younger Kidical Mass Intern came along to make all of our lives so interesting?

Around the age of two, the younger Kidical Mass Intern decided that Gloves Were For Losers. So I would put them on and start cycling, then he would take them off and throw them away, then shortly thereafter (but, crucially, long enough that we’d moved down the road and the gloves were no longer anywhere to be seen), he would start crying because his hands were cold. He also, for a short while, did this with his shoes. Being his mother is one of the greatest joys of my life, but it is not always a joy in every single moment.

Even from here, as I write this several weeks before you are reading it, I can hear you thinking, “Hasn’t she ever heard of mittens on a string?’ Of course I have, Dear Reader, and it was there I turned next. Unfortunately, it transpires that many manufacturers of mittens-on-a-string do not make them with the idea in mind that children are actively going to attempt to dismember them. The younger Kidical Mass Intern is quite strong, so we lost quite a few pairs of gloves that way. The strings, of course, stayed safely inside his coat, but that was cold comfort.

When I finally found a pair with a strong enough string to stand up to him I found a new problem. Gloves are tricky to put on, when you’re two, He would take them off, and (grudgingly) leave them dangling off his arms, then yell that his hands were cold. I knew that he couldn’t get the gloves back on unassisted. Our monthly gloves bill had at least gone down, but I was now pulling over every few minutes.

So, finally, I ordered him a muff – an item I associated previously with Laura Ingalls Wilder books and flower girls at posh weddings. It was SUPER warm. I could tie the string that was meant to go around his neck to the back of his child seat so he couldn’t throw it away. He could operate it himself, so I didn’t need to pull over (or feel guilty if I didn’t) to help get it back on when he took it off.

Now, for the million dollar question. Did that keep his hands warm? Nope. But it did stop me feeling guilty about it as I knew he had the option to tuck his hands safely away at any point that he chose. What actually solved the problem (as with many things in parenting) was time. When Winter came around again and he was a year older it finally made sense to him that cold hands could be avoided by keeping warm things on them. HURRAH!

If you want a Winter bike ride opportunity to test out your child weather-proofing plan, do join us for a circular ride from Reading University Campus at 2pm on Sunday 14th January.

Has your child outgrown their old bike or never had one? Would you struggle to be able to buy a new bike? Would you regularly use a child’s bike to cycle as a family?

Then our workshop is for you! Kidical Mass are excited to be partnering with Avanti Cycling and Stumbles Cycles to offer 6 children, and their carers, the chance to learn how to build a bike! 

On Saturday 25 November, from 1:30, we’ll be running a 3-hour workshop at the Weller Centre in Caversham, where children will learn how to put a new bike together. They will also learn basic skills, like: repairing punctures, tightening breaks and adjusting their saddle height. Participants will learn how to check bikes and the basic bike fixes, as well as being involved in building their very own bicycle.

We’ve got places for two 8-9 year-old and three 10-11 year-old, who do not have bikes and will use them. The cost of the session will be £30. If you fit in with the criteria yet cannot afford this, then please contact us.

When you’ve grown out of your bike, or if you don’t end up using it as much as you thought, then get in contact with us and we’ll help unite it with another child who will use it.

We’d love it if the bikes could go to families that might not otherwise be able to afford a bike, so if you know someone who would fit this, then please share with them.

Avanti will also offer a free post-workshop training session to families who come, so they can learn to cycle together safely as a family. Of course they’ll also be invited to Kidical Mass rides, to meet other families that cycle. We really want to be able to help as many children cycle as possible, so please do tell us what else we could do to make that a reality. 

If you’re interested in being involved, email admin@kidicalmassreading.co.uk and we can send you the booking form and details. Please let us know if you can’t make it any more, so we can make sure another child can get a bike.