This summer I will mainly be reading books by H.G.Wells. I started with a wonderful - if lesser known - novel entitled 'Wheels of Chance: A Bicycling Idyll'. It is an engaging romance set against a cycling tour of the south of England in the early part of the last century. In the end our cycling hero Mr Hoopdriver fails to get the girl, but the bike changes his life.
H.G.Wells himself was a keen wheelman and I especially liked this description of the central character's style of bike riding:
'He did not ride fast, he did not ride straight, an exacting critic might say he did not ride well - but he rode generously, opulently, using the whole road and even nibbling at the footpath...He doubted his steering so much that, for the present, he had resolved to dismount at the approach of anything else upon wheels'.
No comments:
Post a Comment