TALKING SHOPS

Being able to carry so much on his bike means Rob Ainsley’s Strava heatmap should centre on Tesco...

For the real cyclist, cargo doesn’t need a car. I’ve shifted some comedy loads by bike in my time. A fridge, a hat stand, a pool table, a life-size metal reindeer...

Car-free cycle paths link my home to useful locations like supermarkets, builder’s merchants, council tips and cemeteries, so all bases are covered. Such as Homebase, which we plied during its closing down sale. Biking that bargain 12ft curtain pole home felt like jousting.

When I moved to York, getting a bike trailer proved a revelation. It’s not the sort of child-/dog-pod pulled by eco couples, or the homemade wooden crate favoured by men with long grey ponytails. Mine’s a square, practical, two-wheeled black thing you could imagine following a 2CV in 1970s Provence, piled with turnips. It folds too, collapsing easily with the wheels coming off – an unsettling metaphor for me and my life – so can go on a train.

It’s helped turn the chore of atticclearing for elderly relatives into a bike ride. Would you like to take this, and that, they asked. We kept saying yes. They were delighted, until it transpired they’d understood ‘....home, as a gift’ and we’d understood ‘...to the dump’. Because it was just useless old junk you couldn’t give away, such as top-of-the-range iMacs from the early 2000s.

My trailer’s probably my favourite piece of bike kit. Who needs a cargo bike? We recently snagged a nice set of garden furniture on Freecycle – the website for donating unwanted stuff – thanks to our instant reply, knowing we could pick it up right then on the trailer. All we need now is a garden.

It enables epic shopping trips, too. No need for a car when we want 24 two-litre bottles of 17p fizzy water. (We tried that with online shopping once and it didn’t work. They delivered the one bottle they had in stock, but still charged £5 delivery.)

Biking that bargain 12ft curtain pole home felt like jousting

In the Netherlands, of course, bikes are the default way to shop. The standard front basket in Amsterdam is a beer crate. Not here. The road bike boom makes some believe the maximum load of a bicycle is a Garmin and a banana. Indeed, British Truckers, whoever they are, recently tweeted confidently that getting two bags of shopping from Tesco is not possible on a bicycle. A twitter squall ensued. Nearly 30 per cent of HGVs travelling on the road are empty. Evidently, so are the heads of some of their social media people.

For me, bikes are the ideal way to shop. Especially now the trend is away from big weekly shops at one megastore, and more towards top-up trips and bargain-hunting opportunism round several supermarkets.

Doing that by car? Dreary, cumbersome and stressful. We turn our grocery runs into cycle micro-tours. Coming back a new way from Tesco on a country lane recently, we found a private riverside nature reserve we’d never seen before, and were invited for tea by the owners. We spent a lovely few hours with them, chatting in the sun. Until we remembered all the frozen stuff in our panniers.

Don’t have a shopping bike? Maybe you should. From £280 you can get an Elephant, a reconditioned former postie’s bike ( elephantbike.co.uk). With chunky rear rack and enormous front tray, it can take a week’s shopping for a family of four, or perhaps for one teenager. In addition the company sends one to Malawi, so you help someone out too. Well, 2-for-1 deals seem appropriate in a supermarket context. My shopper’s actually my default bike, my workhorse: a Specialized Crossroads with quakeproof kickstand, bombproof rear rack and vast Ortlieb panniers,plus trailer towbar, obviously, and mudguards. Apparently it rains sometimes in England. Enough for a truckload of shopping in fact, @britishtruckers, and unpolluting when running empty. It also has enough low gears and a good enough ride – chunky 35mm tyres – to use for camping and ‘gravel/adventure’ touring. It’s rock-solid, like much supposedly ‘ripe and ready’ fruit from big supermarkets. Mainly because the front suspension’s been frozen since 2008. Anyway, see you at the checkout. I’ll be the one with the ironing board.