[FMAL-13] I fucking love bikes
Hello again and welcome to Fondue, or Maybe a Lake, and its truly sleep-deprived author, Bernard Soubry ! Let us take a brief pause while the old world dies and the new one is desperately trying to be born through contact groups and backdoor discussions, and talk about how much I love bicycles.
We’re at the point in the negotiations when people start talking about “surviving” the next few days. It’s incredible to me how much the term comes up, especially around COPs and other long meetings; there is very much a collective acknowledgement that what we’re doing is not only unpleasant, but unhealthy. And yet the only way out is through.
Some—of whom I have shamefully been a part in the past—hold it up as a badge of honour: this is how little sleep I got. This is the table I slept under. This is the horrifying amount of caffeine I consumed to remain conscious enough to watch people at a table talk to other people at smaller tables, and write down what they said.
There are a lot of tips from the old-timers on how to keep on throughout those horrifying-caffeine times. I remember reading a guide for negotiators once that recommended bringing a pillow to the venue, or stashing granola bars and fruit in your pockets when you go into a long plenary, or making sure you have a massage booked when you get back (which, um, gives you a sense of the kind of person who wrote that guide, I guess).
I have a different suggestion: next time, bring a bicycle.
Or, you know, rent one. I have no great useful survival tips, or even tips at all, for being inside these negotiation spaces, but the best thing I can suggest is to avoid thinking of it like a temporary time, or a vacation. When I get on an airplane and go to a different place for an exciting (eh) event, my first instinct is to treat it like something special—and thus to make concessions on what makes me happy in my normal life.
No running shoes, it’s only a week, or I guess I won’t practice music, or I can definitely be fine with standard hotel tea. This is a mistake, friends. The way through three weeks of low-sleep physical discomfort is to try to continue living as close to the way you normally live, even though you are not in the same place. Preserve what shreds of normalcy you can.
So, for me: bikes.
I have a little Brompton folding bike—16” wheels, dynamo hub, tucks under a desk pretty neatly. It fits as normal-sized checked luggage if I pop it into an IKEA bag with some cardboard. It is, admittedly, a very niche use of ten kilos, and serious real estate that I could probably use to bring, say, more than two shirts. But there is truly no more efficient weight-to-cost-to-joy ratio in my life than the trapezoid set on two wheels that brings me around this place.
I will leave the hotel later to go to the conference centre, and I will not take the tram with the rest of the delegates. I will pump my way up the gentle slope of the Rue de Montbrillant, and check out the electric-bike commuters and the scooter-jerks on the path. I will get mildly annoyed at Geneva’s terrible bike infrastructure, which doesn’t synchronize its pedestrian crossings, bike crossings, and traffic lights. I will probably stop and buy a smoothie. I will lock up with all the other cyclists who come in to work at the International Telecommunications Union and the UN Commission on Refugees, next to the electric recumbent bike with the giant solar panel on the roof. I will feel awake and a part of things.
And at the end of the day, when my brain has the texture of a pancake and the twelve hours I’ve spent inside are numbing both my sense of reality and my capacity for empathy, I will flick my lock back into the side pocket of my bike bag and set out into the night, and feel—for ten minutes or so—the wind on my face and the bumps in the road and the very real world.
God, I love bicycles. I’m so glad this one’s here with me.
Looking for my helmet,
B
Machines
Michael Donaghy
Dearest, note how these two are alike:
This harpsichord pavane by Purcell
And the racer’s twelve-speed bike.
The machinery of grace is always simple.
This chrome trapezoid, one wheel connected
To another of concentric gears,
Which Ptolemy dreamt of and Schwinn perfected,
Is gone. The cyclist, not the cycle, steers.
And in the playing, Purcell’s chords are played away.
So this talk, or touch if I were there,
Should work its effortless gadgetry of love,
Like Dante’s heaven, and melt into the air.
If it doesn’t, of course, I’ve fallen. So much is chance,
So much agility, desire, and feverish care,
As bicyclists and harpsichordists prove
Who only by moving can balance,
Only by balancing move.