Flight of the Bromptons

I’ve been down to Brighton this weekend for the Cycling Embassy AGM which, as well as many other things, functions as a sort of annual Brompton owners’ gadding about society.*

Others will write in more detail about the events of the weekend, but suffice it say that the sun always shines on the Cycling Embassy AGM, except when we’re foolish enough to hold it in Manchester, and even though the BBC Terror Centre was predicting that the entire country would be washed away in apocalyptic floods on Saturday, by the time the participants had assembled at Brighton station, the rain had gone and the sun was about to come out for what was to prove a glorious weekend.

Naturally, we spent most of it in various meeting rooms but there was plenty of time for the pub too and I have to say that all the best meetings end with the die-hard participants (and their Bromptons) eating fish and chips on the beach as the sun slowly sinks into the west.

Today, all I had to do was get myself and the Brompton home, which meant transferring between Victoria and Euston. I considered taking the tube, but somehow, however daunting London traffic can be, it’s never quite as daunting as lugging the Brompton down the endless corridors that make up the average underground station.

I’ll draw a veil over the full horrors of the cross-London journey: put it this way, it did more in 30 minutes to remind me why the Embassy needs to exist, than the whole of the preceeding weekend. But it did have one high spot as I got to pedal down the length of the Mall on my very British bike, inadvertently photobombing tourists’ snapshots of Buckingham Palace. Indeed, with the Brompton rapidly becoming the London bike of choice, perhaps I was actually providing a spot of authentic local colour. How long before someone on a Brompton – ideally a smart city gent – becomes as much an icon of early 21st century London as a punk in a phone box was in the eighties?

* This is unfair. We mainly go on very serious ‘infrastructure safaris’ where we look in great detail at bollards** and only incidentally have informal rolling Brompton races down a particularly tempting ramp.

** indeed we were so busy looking at bollards that we completely overran and ended up missing the World Naked Bike ride***

*** insert your own joke here, I’ve left you plenty to work with