(Queen reference for my dad.)
At 8:56, my housemate left for his 9:00 lecture. I was still in bed. I assumed this was an accident (granted, one that he repeated almost every day) until I went to mock him for what I thought was his religious lateness to morning lectures but turned out to be a deliberate choice as he attempted to claim that no, he still gets there before the lecturer starts. ‘I cycle, don’t I.’ Two months in to term, I’m walking home from Teaching and Learning in rain that is so wet that I could throw a bath bomb in the air and start shaving my legs when the same housemate cycles past me. The road is long and I watch him enter our house (the dry and warm house) while I’m still waiting at the crossing and the rain enters my socks, and in the decades between Joe and I walking through the front door, I have cursed him and his stupid bike and vowed to get one myself. And that is how I came to get a bike. Out of spite.
I rented a bike from the university, my parents brought me a helmet because they love me more than I do, and I can now cycle to the Physics Building in six minutes. There is not a Friday morning that I do not walk into my seminar and announce to Maisie the exact time I left my house and the precise number of minutes it therefore took me to cycle here. I drop ‘I cycled in’ into conversations like people do ‘my boyfriend’ or ‘my year abroad’. Overtaking slow walkers is a pleasure, overtaking all walkers is a joy, overtaking fossil-fuel-burning engine-driven cars on a bicycle is the single biggest source of my sense of power and entitlement. And my calf muscles have never looked better. Cons: cycling anywhere beyond the east side of campus demands either a full cardio workout or defeat, because campus is nine months pregnant with hills.
Whether you want to cycle back from a house party at 4am in storm Boris, refuse to ever get on a bike in your life, have one that will sit in the kitchen all year for you to ride one time, somehow manage to fall off a stationary bike, or just want to live your Oxford student dreams (my housemates epitomise the sliding scale of cyclist enthusiasm), get a bike and enjoy the only time in your life when your commute can be six minutes (for four, if you’re Joe) long.