~~
Saturday 19th 37-43F rather cloudy. I hardly noticed the storm. All thanks to a more southerly track and favourable wind direction. Still too dark to check for possible damage. The smudged moon is scudding along in the west behind the clouds. Venus hangs low in the south east. Some field flooding on my walk. A bird of prey circled. Probably looking for breakfast.
One of my old bikes which I shall be advertising for sale. Genuine vintage with proper lugs and relaxed angles. Not one of the modern, welded items.
These bikes were once popular with shops and tradesmen for carrying goods and tools. Or beer crates. I regularly see them parked outside town houses with a beer crate tied onto the rack. Some have racks mounted front and back. Room for two beer crates!
These days these bikes are often used outside a shop. Perhaps with flowers in a basket, to attract attention. Sometimes with a decorative modern shop sign on the advertising plate.
I will clean it up a bit before trying to sell it. It has been trapped at the back of the shed for years. The backpedal [cruiser] brake now needs updating with an added front brake. To match a recent change in the Danish law. Whether stirrup brakes are still available I have yet to discover. It would be a great shame to lose the character with modern wheels. The balloon tires add suspension and load capacity.
________________________
A later drive to the shops showed almost every hollow in the landscape was full of rain water. The usually invisible streams were all brown, rushing and often close to overflowing. The edges of the roads and sometimes the whole road were flooded at frequent intervals.
They were pumping a hollow of deep water on the main road up to the motorway. Sadly the workers hadn't thought to put up a warning sign before the last junction. So the long queue of cars had to turn round individually in a narrow dead end with half the road taken up by the queue!
My long wheel base, bulk carrier, Long John cycle. Modern versions are known as cargo bikes. Again, mine has only a backpedal brake. Rod steering with a bit of slop in the joints adds a hint of excitement to downhill journeys. These things weigh a ton! They typically sell for £5-600 equivalent.
The large and heavily built basket would carry luggage from the train station to a hotel or private address. Or deliver meat, bread, fruit, vegetables or parcels. Many villages had a dozen shops and workshops in the not so distant past. Local deliveries must have been quite popular. Riders were mostly young men.
They were designed to carry significant weights! One hundred kilograms is sometimes neatly painted on the rack. Only one gear suggests a fair amount of pushing up inclines. You see them being ridden both briskly and very skillfully in Danish cities. Even by teenage girls. Which I saw in Odense on my last visit. The sheer width of the basket requires a lot of practice on the typically narrow cycle paths. But then, child carrier trikes are also ridden in large numbers in Danish and Dutch cities. It's all a matter of practice.
I have just discovered there are LongJohn websites with all the details for identifying manufacturers and dates from the frame stamps. Only after 1942 was it required to date and number Long Johns. I had originally planned to use it for shopping in the village but it proved quite a handful on the only time I rode it. I was much keener on riding trikes at the time. So did not persist long enough to become adept.
_____________________________
Out in the wilds this morning I passed a field of scruffy grass. It was tightly packed with a mix of geese, gulls and rooks. All so busy having a feeding frenzy they never looked up. A couple of smaller trees, with wet feet, had fallen over here and there. Otherwise this last storm was more about heavy rainfall than damaging wind speeds.
~~
No comments:
Post a Comment