ON A BICYCLE MADE FOR TWO

Paul Taylor describes

an outing with the Tandem Club

MRS Thatcher famously and predictably conceives of the Good Samaritan as a being a Thatcherite capitalist. Having found myself the other Sunday on one of the south-east region runs of the Tandem Club, I can safely say that, capitalist or not, the Good Samaritan would almost certain- ly have been a tandemist. Tandemists, as they never tire of telling you, are carers and co-operators.

Neither my wife nor I had ever been near a tandem before. I am sedentary to the point of immobility, with a tendency to think of the Great Outdoors as being that nasty cold bit between home and the off-licence. Yet here we were, embarking on a 45-mile round trip from Reading to Stonor Park, via Henley. Another snag was the fact that my wife is several inches longer in the leg than I am. Whenever she pushed off at the front, therefore, my pedals at the back started rushing round madly in craven compliance with her will. My feet, meanwhile, feeling somewhat left out of the decision-making process, dang- `Is it a black-out or a white-out?' led panic-stricken above, like a couple of bashful morons trying to dive into a revolv- ing door. Whenever she experimentally changed gear (which she did often and without a word of forewarning), it felt as if the bike were going into sudden coronary collapse. Co-operation is not, I think, quite the mot juste. I spent the first quarter of an hour, as we cycled from Reading Station to the meeting point at Ray and Wendy's dream home in Early, with my eyes tightly shut and my mind void of everything except chronic anxiety. I could think of more dignified places to die in than Read- ing shopping centre on a bicycle made for two.

With us were our friends, Vicky and Jay. Somewhat bizarrely, since they are highly educated and literate, the only periodical they actually fight over is the Tandem Club Journal. When it arrives once every two months, scuffles break out over who gets first read. It was burrowing through five years of back numbers of this magazine that had made me want to meet some Tandem Club members in the flesh.

The Tandem Club of Great Britain was founded in 1970 to help people procure ever-scarcer spare parts for their pre-war tandems. (In those unenlightened days only one bike-manufacturer, Jack Taylor of Stockton-on-Tees, continued to make tan- dems.) The Club and the Journal have, from these humble utilitarian beginnings, expanded to encompass an entire way of life. When the physical fitness boom took off in the Seventies, cycling and tandeming came back into style. The Journal has the charming amateur look of a little school magazine. Indeed, its contents read as though written by people who for some reason or other have been arrested at the Enid Blyton stage of psychic development. There are technical articles ('Pedalling through pregnancy'), advertisement col- umns (bereaved or divorced people seeking new tandem partners), and news of orga- nised runs, but the bulk of each issue is taken up by tandeming couples who send in massive, galumphingly jocose and relen- tlessly specific accounts of their personal expeditions, which focus in detail on every puncture, breakdown or gear problem. They apologise if there aren't enough of these to spice up the narrative.

There's a tremendous yearning in these stories for a pastoral, prelapsarian world of sunshine-bathed conviviality and foam- ing tankards and sleeping in barns pro- vided by obliging rubicund farmers and making one's own entertainment and the romance of the open road. Tandemists seem to spend a great deal of time convinc- ing themselves that on their 'steeds' (a word characteristically culled from the diction of chivalry) they are magically enabled to re-enter such a lost world. Here is one entirely typical extract:

The sun was now shining in the clear blue sky, the lush green Border pastures were glowing in the luminescence of this crisp March afternoon, and newborn lambs were marvelling at the sight of the first tandem of spring! We spstained a rear-wheel puncture near the bottom, despite our 'Tuffy Tape' puncture protection. Kevin, unperturbed by the delay, produced his tin whistle and sat behind a dry stone dyke playing a lively selection of jigs and reels. Our confidence in `Tuffy Tape' was restored when we found it was the unprotected sidewall of the tire that had been pierced by a sharp stone or something — the makers do only claim that their product prevents 90 per cent of all punctures.

It's an effort to believe that this was written in 1985.

The first thing that struck me when we reached Ray and Wendy's house was our sartorial abnormality. Around us, all the tandeming couples were in violently col- oured acrylics — cycling trousers with low, sensibly padded crotches that looked like jaunty, sportif nappies and streamlined tops with map-pockets in the small of the back. Husbands and wives were dressed identically. A pair of identical twins was not. There were Tandem Club logos every- where. For our part, Vicky and Jay looked like a couple of Royals on a skiing holiday, while Sue and I were wearing the clothes we decorate the house in. Still, off we all set in the direction of Twyford.

The tandemists were very nice to Sue and me, as we were novices, and said that we only had to say if the pace were too fast or if we were getting left behind. The though occurred to me that this would be rather difficult if we actually did get left

behind, as there would be nobody there to tell. But we were soon to find that the organisers of runs wait at all major turnings for stragglers and greenhorns such as ourselves, or the old. We were slower than the old. One of the things the tandemist holds against 'solo' bike-riders is that they are always spoiling for a race or a record time. Your echt tandemist, like the Good Shepherd, waits for the slowest, most errant sheep. Towards the end of the day, Sue and I enabled upwards of 40 tandem- ists to exercise this virtue at length in the pouring rain.

Iasked Vicky whether the husband and wife teams ever swapped partners or ends of the tandem, given that they make such a lot of fuss about how 'sociable' tandeming is. She'd never seen it happen, she said, and put it down to the fact that people are so vain about their own model that they wouldn't derive any pleasure from sitting, except in an extreme emergency, on some- one else's. Pete, the club chairman, in- formed me at lunch that the divorce rate among tandemists is 'well below the national average'. I expect most of them are too worn out for adultery. He also seemed anxious to convince me that there was a higher percentage of PhDs in the Tandeming Club than in any equivalent sporting body. What fun for everybody that must be.

The one and only accident of the day seemed to bear out some of the tandemists' claims to moral superiority. A very nice if rather ample lady momentarily lost her steering and came off the road, taking herself, tandem, and blind 'stoker' hus- band careering into someone's thorn bush. The someone emerged from her house hotly on the warpath. She was so busy demanding compensation for her minimal- ly damaged undergrowth that she didn't take the trouble to notice that the poor man was blind and visibly shaken. In fact, she spent several fruitless minutes waving a pad and pen under his nose. The tandem- ing couple were charmingly apologetic.

On we toiled through the Berkshire countryside — Wargrave, Lower Assen- done and Middle Assendon (names that gain a certain poignancy when you're feeling saddle-sore). Then, after a punishing hill and an exhilarating free- wheel down that felt like flying, there was lunch in a pub garden near Stonor Park. Time to test that famed sociability. In the Tandem Club Journal, pub owners are graded according to their tandem-

tolerance and their indulgence of the tandemists' fetish for eating home made sandwiches in pub gardens. Denial of this is made to seem like an offence against life itself. Needless to say, tandemists are constantly being disillusioned. 'Turning north toward Stirling,' one lamented, 'the day produced its first wrong note when the landlady of the pub did not let us eat our sandwiches in the public bar. So much for the old hostelry welcoming the weary traveller!' (There are many rhetorical questions of a similar, despairing and elegiac nature, e.g. 'Are modern capes more fragile than those of yesteryear?') After lunch, the pleasure began to wear off for me. Our bottoms were so sore that every bump in the road was agony. I was beginning to find it rather spooky that nobody had once mentioned anything ab- out the scenery or the buildings we had passed, even though they had all talked non-stop about their tandems. After a lovely morning, driving rain set in. Our route along the towpath at Henley was mucked up by the crowds who were watch- ing the National Canoeing Contests (some- thing which Ray hadn't bargained for). `And to think,' I heard one disgruntled canoeist muttering, as he tried to negotiate his canoe past a line of indomitable tan- dems, 'that this thing only happens twice a year.' You'd never catch a tandemist being so rude. Worse luck.