Crossing Europe on a Bike Called Reggie
By Andrew P SykesAmazon: £8.99 paperback / £1.99 Kindle edition (at time of writing)
Before going further, may I make a "little" rant about online reviews? (Yes, I'm fully aware of the irony, thank you.)
A common criticism I've found in many is "the author can't spell / it's full of typographical mistakes".
A furious condemnation then follows that concludes with "it's just not good enough! I paid £X.99 for this!"
The highest standards of professional literacy do not come cheap. And trust me, I know. As a trained journalist, my job is to read other people's written work and correct any mistakes (this is called subbing). Newspapers and magazines, both regional and national publications, are stripping out this tier of their respective workforces as an "unnecessary" expense.
To me it seems a little rich to castigate a self-published author, working no doubt as a one-man operation, for a few typos in their book when the corporate world is increasingly disinterested in paying for people to provide this service in a professional setting.
I only mention this to put things into the bigger perspective. Such mistakes are here to stay - and I promise you they are only going to get worse in the professional media industry - so, get over it. Rant over.
Getting back to the review, by the way, are there typos in Crossing Europe On A Bike Called Reggie? Yes, a few. Do they detract from it? Absolutely not.
What's important is the account of one man's idle fancy (he was sitting on a sofa watching an Olympic bike race, after all) that is turned into a reality: to cycle from Berkshire to Brindisi.
For me, the warm and entertaining narrative perfectly depicts the highs and lows that come from completing a seemingly impossible task.
The premise is simple and effective. A "fat, middle-aged" teacher decides on a whim to turn his lifelong cycling habit into a continental summer holiday. With the minimum of planning, he settles on a route following the Eurovelo 5, which as with all things bureaucratic is more notional in places than an actual reality. Despite the ups (the Alps) and downs (emergency repairs), it all comes right in the end for our narrator and his steed, Reggie the bike.
If you're expecting a technical guide offering a mapped step-by-step route, forget it. There's nothing like that. Think more a memoir of one man's journey into the relative unknown.
There are some truly heart-warming moments where the kindness of strangers helps to remind us that there are good people still left in the world.
This book captures that genuine sense of contentment that comes from the simple, physical act of cycling - to get out there, away from it all.
If you're looking for some gentle inspiration to fuel your bike-curious dreams, then reading Crossing Europe on a Bike Called Reggie might just be what you're looking for.
