He walked into the Hand in Hand, sheathed in sweat, like a heroin junkie after a very bad fix. As Paul Blezard staggered towards the bar for a pint, one of the chaps made a rather scornful remark about his fitness. Or the lack of it. Wrong again. He’d just ridden an electric bicycle up the hill to the pub with a flat battery.
I do boring things like go to the Congo or Colombia, but I wouldn’t ride an electric bike with a flat battery up to the Hand in Hand. That would be foolish.
Still, we got nattering and he showed me the bike. It was dark and the bike looked and felt heavy and clunky. I showed a modest amount of interest, so he offered to organise a trial for a few days. Nothing ventured, blah blah.
We met near Richmond station. He demonstrated the features of the bike, the red, yellow and green lights indicating battery life and a green button that looks exactly like the ‘don’t touch that’ button on Cyclops’s motorbike, the one Wolverine pinches in the X-Men film.
Off I slog up Richmond Hill. The traffic is irritating – vans, cars and people. I hit the ‘don’t touch that button’ and an electric milk float whirr sounds from the back wheel. I surge up the hill, accelerating away from the traffic. You still have to pedal, but it takes the slog out of it. By the top of Richmond Hill I feel that the e-bike, as they call them, is a fantastic invention, like having a silent rocket attached to your back wheel. The kind of thing you dreamt about when you were a little boy.
Paul catches up and he takes some snaps of me and then I’m off, accelerating uphill to Richmond Park, whizzing past deer and a horse-drawn grass-cutter driven by two smashing black horses, and taking a left across the belly of the Park, with not a car in sight, zooming across one of the great open spaces in Greater London. The electric motor gives you a speed on the flat of around 15mph. All you have to do is turn the throttle on the righthand handlebar grip. But pedalling helps and I bombed across the park, doing a fair impression of Billy Whizz.
I made it so quickly and safely I allowed myself a treat of a bacon sandwich and a Styrofoam cup of tea at the park caff, and studied the bike close-up. The one I borrowed would set you back £1,226. That’s a bob or two in anyone’s money. But the bike-to-work scheme allows you a hefty chunk of that back – if you’re working.
It’s no lightweight but it doesn’t feel dramatically heavier than the Boris bike you ride round town on. The key difference in looks is a thick metal block, the battery, which slots in behind the seat which powers a motor in the back wheel. The electric motor just helps you pedal. Hit the button and the power surges and you zoom along.
Of course, the more you use the e-power, the more you drain the battery, which is what reduced Paul to a sweating wreck. But he had, I think, just ridden from Godalming, some 25 miles away, so he half expected the problem.
You charge the bike by taking out the battery and plugging it into the mains for the night. The downsides are obvious. In central London somebody might nick the bike, so you would have to take out the battery, and unless you have a secure office that could be a faff. But the upsides are easy – cycling uphill and the silly but nevertheless genuine pleasure of going faster, more silently, than you have every right to do.
There’s some research that says that more people use the e-bike more regularly than a normal bike. I’ve no way of verifying that, but it sounds true. I’m just playing with this one for a couple of days, but this morning I zoomed up to Wimbledon Common and back and zoomed around the park on it. Bertie the hound – half whippet, half silly lady’s handbag pooch – came along for a laugh, and watched in astonishment as I rode off very fast. He lurched into Star Trek warp speed nine and overtook me. But the thing is, he had to work at it, and that made me laugh my head off. It’s heavy and I’m frightened about what might happen when I forget to charge it, but I am very tempted to buy one. Old as I am at 53, the joy of having a rocket-powered bike is still real enough.
By John Sweeney,
an award-winning journalist and author, currently working as an investigative journalist for the BBC’s Panorama series.
Merlin electric bike supplied by JuicyBike.
Article reproduced with permission from John Sweeney and JuicyBike.
Photos ©Paul Blezard Journalist & Photographer
