E-bikes! Love them or hate them.
Or both.
For me, it depends whether I am riding one at the time. When I am doing that, I love them.
When I am clawing my way up the far side of the accurately named Hill Road in the local patch, out of gears and on the pointy bit of my saddle, and I get passed my a midlife mother and her lovely teenage daughter, I have to admit to a bitter hatred of anything that plugs in.
Especially if one of them is halfway down her cassette and doing about fifty rpm because she doesn’t know any better, and the other one is wearing a hoodie and cutoff jeans and isn’t even slightly pink in the cheek.
They have the excess oxygen to say a cheery hello, and then disappear into the distance, or as far as I can see in my state anyway.
When I finally arrive at my target, a pleasant downhill trail leading to another arduous climb, I see a young fellow standing off to the side of the trailhead, surveying his kingdom. I mutter something pithy about e-bikes, and he gives me an understanding smile as if to say, yeah I know.
Because my mind was on e-bikes, and the indignities and general unfairness of modern life, I didn’t think much about the young fellow, until much later on.
That is when I recalled that he may have been wearing an ancient pair of Nzo Sifters. Immediately I was disappointed in myself for not having taken a photo of him. I cart a phone around with me, could have done it in less than a minute, if he was up for it.
So it was great to be hailed by a group at a lookout on Sunday. Our legal advisers and their mates were stopped to look out, and among them was the young fellow with the ancient Sifters. Turns out he is Didi, the son of our friend the lawyer, and his shorts are hand-me-downs from his dad.
My initial thought was the shorts were older than their new owner, but he is 15 and the shorts were made in 2006, when he was about two.
Anyway, Didi was happy enough to be in a newsletter, and he is happy enough with his shorts.
Soon he will grow (like his dad did, but possibly in a different direction) and they won’t fit him any more either. He will get new ones, we hope, and maybe the old ones will get handed on again for some more laps of the forest.