Will Self: PsychoGeography

I yearn for a fixed-wheel bicycle - it is the very epitome of my mid-life crisis. For those of you not familiar with such a contrivance, let me elucidate. With most bicycles you can free-wheel with your feet on the pedals, but with a fixed-wheel you have to pedal all the time. The chain is directly connected to the sprocket, so in order to brake you pedal slower - or even backwards. You see quite a number of people riding fixed-wheel bicycles in London, and they all have certain things in common: they are young, fit, and obviously have no preoccupation with mortality whatsoever. They believe they are going to pedal for ever.

Cycling through heavy traffic with no means of arresting your onward rush save your own legs, must introduce a peculiarly Zen cast of mind. The fixed-wheel cyclist has to be constantly attuned to the myriad, random possibilities of the urban thoroughfare, while at the same time feeling his translation through space as a constant muscular phenomenon. This 1:1 ratio, means that fixed-wheel cycling is the closest you can get to being a robot while still being sentient. The bicycle itself is stripped down to its most basic elements - wheel, frame, chain - while the rider's mind is empty of all save the marvel of its own inertia.

My conversations with ex-fixed-wheel cyclists have tended to confirm my suppositions. They give it up, they say, because it's impossible to pay any attention to their surroundings while straddling such a nerve-wracking vehicle. I can't verify this by talking to people who are still doing it, because they're virtually incapable of communication at all, but lost in a trance in which they apprehend the traffic flows outside of space and time. Perhaps they can actually "see" the truck before it lurches out of the side street, or the arc of the cab before it performs an extempore three-point-turn? What else could explain their willingness to pit Lycra against steel?

It all puts me in mind of a short story I once wrote (so much does nowadays, another function of the midway point) called Waiting, in which a secret cabal of London motorcycle couriers are in thrall to a seer called Carlos. Carlos can do what I think the fixed-wheel cyclists ought to be capable of. Simply by observing the traffic flow on one road, he can extrapolate an entire mental picture of the road system of London, complete with all its jams, queues and chance contretemps. The followers of Carlos become privy to this arcane method, and so never have to wait for anything.

It's the curse of the speculative writer to see his fictional creations cancelled out by the prosaic march of time. The global positioning satellite systems - which now sucker on to even the most battered and lowly of cars - are the plastic form the mystic cabal has taken. Why it is that the authorities haven't proscribed devices which encourage drivers to stare fixedly at a tiny screen featuring a schematic representation of where they are, rather than looking at the real world, is beyond me. Or rather, I understand the commercial realities only too well: just as with the mobile phone, until there is total market saturation, there will be no check placed on the use of GPS in cars.

By then, far from having created a population of lean ascetics, whose total orientation confirms their state of oneness with the world, we will have spawned an entire generation of obese fuck-wits, who won't have the slightest idea where they are, once de-coupled from their navigation systems, and levered from their warm leatherette. Where they are - or even, what they should do. At least the old-fashioned road map placed the onus of arrival on our own cognitive abilities; now we are beginning to abrogate all responsibility. Paradoxically, the long and tortuous drive away from mass transit systems and towards the "freedom" of the private car, turns out to have been a circular tour. With GPS and on-board computers soon to be "doing" the driving, everyone on the road will be in possession of what is effectively there own rail system. A mono-carriage train, running on a track lain for that journey alone.

We are tug boats gone crazy, with no idea even if we are in a safe harbour, or churning up the soil! We are dragging the rusting hulks of the past into the shiny future! We are speedboats that have quit the water to describe loop-the-loops in a dark sky near to the end of history! The seagulls - those fixed-wheel cyclists of the sky - are ripped away from their thermals by our crazy jigging, and stare at us, at once terrified and contemptuous.

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