THIS is totally the wrong time to be bike-less. Well, the wrong time in Yorkshire anyway, given the Tour de France frenzy.

You can’t open this newspaper without seeing pictures of people doing wacky or ambitious things by bike. Actually, I’ve been in one of them, but more of that later.

It’s inspirational to see all these folk cycling. As a consciousness-raiser, the Tour de France can only be good.

Providing we capitalise on the legacy, that is. For cycling to be a transport option for more people we need more safe cycle paths, more facilities, more education and more incentives. The French Transport Ministry has just launched an initiative that pays commuters an amount per kilometre to cycle to work. Sounds like a win-win to me.

And yet, here I am without wheels, my battered old bike having finally shuffled off its mortal chain and not-so-grandly departed to be stripped down for parts.

Or, possibly, to be painted yellow and strapped to a lamp-post, since we’re on the Tour de France route. Yellow bikes are already appearing above shops in Bishy Road, in preparation for the street party on 6 July. I guess spotting mine would add a certain jaune-ne-sais-quois. (Oui, pun intended.)

I got Bertha, my now ex-bike, from the excellent Bike Rescue in York in 2007, squeezing another seven years out of her before her wheels perished, so she had a good run. I was writing Confessions of an Eco-Shopper, my book on green living, and decided that I needed to get back in the saddle after a 20-year hiatus.

I found being on a bike again – this time in a busy city – scary, and my initial routes involved either left turns or dismounting, preceded by a plea to the universe to get me home in one piece.

Soon though, it became less scary and unexpectedly, exhilarating – I had forgotten the rush that cycling gives you – and, after a session with a cycle trainer in which I learned how to assert myself at junctions, it was also empowering. I began cycling to work again. My troublesome circulation improved, along with my physical fitness. I felt more confident. And – how brilliant is this? – I lost weight without eating less.

Those are the reasons I think cycling is brilliant. And since I am sitting here eating a chocolate biscuit, the sooner I get a replacement for Bertha, the better.

 

REGULAR READERS of this column may know that as well as being an environmentalist, I’m also a brass musician. I’ve only discovered how many brass players cycle since my travels in Bluebell the Brassmobile (a Volvo, natch) with my euphonium-playing colleague Bruce and his wife Wendy.

We’ve been delivering yellow conductor’s batons to brass bands around the county in preparation for our very own ‘Tour de Brass’ on 21 and 22 June, which is part of the Yorkshire Festival 2014, the cultural festival for the Tour de France.

Now, you might not automatically link bikes with brass, but by getting cyclists, many of them players, to deliver yellow batons for the concerts we’ve found a way - hence the photo of me with trombone and cyclist Mike Hughes in The Press recently.

Mike, who is 50 and a percussionist by training, is riding ahead of the official peloton on 5 July to raise £19,000 for Marie Curie. Prior to that he’s delivering batons to the bands playing in Parliament Street and Coppergate in York on 21 June before pedalling over to Ripon to do the same there.

Besides, you can’t celebrate Yorkshire culture without brass bands. Brass bands are the real deal, grass-roots peoples’ bands. Many have been going for 150 years and Yorkshire has more of them than any county in Britain. Plus, ours are the best. There are four Yorkshire bands in the top 12 of the world rankings, including the famous Black Dyke Band, which is playing a special Yorkshire Prom at York Barbican on 22 June as the highlight event of the Tour de Brass weekend.

If you think the Tour de France cyclists have got power, wait until you hear the lungs on this lot. They are Olympians. Yorkshire poet Ian McMillan, who is performing with them, says that having the Black Dyke Band behind him on stage is like sitting on the wing of a jumbo jet.

Oh, and we may just get a bike in there, too ….

Tour de Brass: www.brassedon.org or www.yorkshirefestival.co.uk