Icons: Ever Ready lights
In darker times, these feeble lamps almost cut a path through the gloom
Cycling at night has always been a chancy affair. On today’s busy roads, and given the attitudes of some drivers, you need all the illumination you can get. Fortunately with modern battery and LED technology, you can festoon yourself and your bike with hyper-bright flashing lights so you stand out, and cut through the gloom with beams of nearsearchlight intensity.
A few decades ago, we didn’t have to contend with so much traffic, but we did have our own problems. Mainly, we couldn’t see where we were going. This was because bike lights were universally completely rubbish. Unless you wanted to fit a dynamo (and we didn’t — that was for tourists and vicars and the like), there was really only one mainstream option: the Ever Ready light set.
Only option
Ever Ready had been making bike lights, and the batteries to power them, for many years, but it’s the chunky grey plastic-cased 1970s and 1980s versions that really took off. That wasn’t really because they were any good (although the rear one was reasonably effective) but because that’s all there was in Halfords. They sold so many that Ever Ready/halfords could even afford to sponsor a professional team in 1990.
Heavy duty
Our esteemed editor used Ever Ready lights for his paper round back in the day: “They may have been crap, but they got me through my Sunday morning paper round for two years,” he remembers fondly. Well, he remembers anyway. But if he’d done his calculations, he might well have found that in any given week he didn’t actually start making any money till Wednesday, because those lights didn’t just eat batteries, they positively devoured them. Big, heavy C-cell batteries too, and despite the plastic case, the lights themselves were flipping heavy. Which meant that once mounted onto a fork or front dropout mounting, all that mass was just waiting for the first bump so it could cause the mount to slip and the beam — such as it was — to drop to within a few inches of the front tyre. That didn’t happen over every bump, of course. Sometimes the lens and bulb fell off as well…
Bending the truth
Not that it made that much difference which direction the front light was pointing, because when you switched it on, you were effectively bending the rules of physics. As everyone knows light, like time triallists, only travels in straight lines — you can reflect or deflect, it, but normally you can’t bend it. Nevertheless, countless cyclists over the years have observed the curious phenomenon of light coming from the front of the Ever Ready light, and then appearing to droop feebly onto the floor a few inches in front of the lens.
In theory for that to happen, you’d need to be in the vicinity of a black hole. Although perhaps some of the fearsome potholes back then could have exerted sufficient gravitational pull to have the same effect. Stephen Hawking would have known.