Three Red Bicycles and a Musing

Nothing quite like red bicycles, is there? Strange, that.

One of the books I'm reading at the moment is Nothing to Be Frightened Of, by Julian Barnes. It is an autobiographical work about the author's fear of death, which has nothing at all to do with bicycles or streetstyle. Nevertheless, one passage in the book struck home one of the sub-conscious reasons for continuing to produce this blog featuring the beautiful citizens of Copenhagen on their bicycles.

Barnes experienced a fear of flying for a period in his mid-twenties but he cured himself of it, quite unexpectedly, at Athens airport. He was a day early for a flight home to the UK and he camped out in the airport.

"To kill time, I went up on to the viewing roof of the terminal building. From there, I watched plane after plane take off, plane after plane land. Some of them probably belonged to dodgy airlines and were crewed by drunks; but none of them crashed. And this visual, rather than statistical, demonstration of the safety of flying convinced me."

There is little statistical proof that cycling is dangerous anywhere in the world, which is brilliant. But perhaps the visual demonstration of the beauty and safety of cycling that is this blog will convince readers, wherever they may live, that cycling is a normal, potentially gorgeous and safe form of transport. The 'Style over speed' motto coined here on the blog is, if you think about it, a fine traffic safety slogan.