This Ride Includes A Currant Bun

Now here's a reason to go to Dublin this weekend:

Alice Coughlan of The Wonderland Theatre Company is leading a guided tour of the streets, pubs and historic buildings in which the stories of James Joyce's Dubliners are set.

The ride is one of the many events taking place from now through Sunday to commemorate Bloomsday.  If you've read Joyce--or some earlier posts on this blog--or simply paid attention to your English teachers or professors every once in a while (ha, ha), you know that his most iconic work, Ulysses, takes place on 16 June 1904.  

Now even if The Wonderland Theatre Company is absolutely wonderful (Somehow I wouldn't be surprised if they are!), I'm not sure that they could do a guided tour of everything recounted in Ulysses.  Actually, I'm not sure that anybody should try to depict anything in it:  It's somewhere in that space between dreams that are so real and reality that is so vivid, so intense, that it seems like a dream.  Also, although it's been called a novel, I think it's more like an epic which can no more be turned into a movie than Song of Myself can be.  

But doing a bicycle tour based on Dubliners isn't the "next best thing" or a "default choice."  I have long felt that the best tour guides (at least, the best I've experienced) are storytellers:  They provide lively, illuminating narratives of the place you are visiting.  Sometimes I can remember those stories even better than the physical details of the place!

And what better vehicle, if you will, for leading the reader/listener/audience through such a story than a bicycle?

Hey, I could be tempted to go on WTC's Bloomsbury ride just for this:   "Tickets include a currant bun with the boys of An Encounter at Dublin Port."  

Now, even though I've done a fair amount of riding in a skirt--sometimes with heels--I think it would be a challenge to ride in that green dress Ms. Coughlan (at least, I assume it's her) is wearing.  Even more of a challenge would be looking as good as she does in it!  

Fun Fact:  Given the stream-of-consciousness style of Ulysses, it's easy to believe that he picked the date on which it is set--16 June 1904--at random.  Which is a roundabout way of saying that it's what I thought, for a long time.  However, it is, in fact, the date on which he met Nora Barnacle, who would become his wife.

Another Fun Fact:  Darina Laracy Silone, the wife of Italian writer Ignazio Silone, asked Nora for her opinion of Andre Gide.  And she got it, all right. "When you've been married to the greatest writer in the world," Nora intoned, "you don't remember all the little fellows."

Another Celt Blazes A New Path For Cycling--And Everyone

Now, on the day after St. Patrick's Day, I'm going to talk about another Celtic person in the world of cycling.

Unlike Sean Kelly, this person was from Scotland but lived in Ulster (a.k.a. Northern Ireland).  Another difference is that this person I'm about to mention never won any Tour jerseys or classics.  In fact, as far as I know, he never raced at all.  

But we should all be grateful to this person, who invented something that not only revolutionized (in every sense of the word) cycling, but the whole world. 

That last clue may have tipped you off.  Yes, this person's invention had to do with the wheel.  No, he didn't invent the wheel:  That came a few millenia earlier.  But what he did made the wheel--and the bicycle--versatile in ways no one could have previously imagined.

What's just as interesting is that this person not only was not a racer, he wasn't an engineer or a technical person.  In fact, he was a veterinary surgeon at the time he invented the thing I'm going to mention.

Early pneumatic tire.  From Dave's Vintage Bicycles

That thing was...the pneumatic tire.  Without it, bicycles are no faster than horse-drawn carriages--and wouldn't be able to traverse some of the terrain our bovine friends have trod for milennia. Ditto for automobiles:  They would have been all but useless, especially given the road conditions of around the time the gasoline-powered engine was invented.  And aircraft, at least as we know them, could not take off or land.

John Boyd Dunlop

 The man in question is John Boyd Dunlop.  As the story goes, his young son was prescribed cycling as a cure for a heavy cold.  Given the relative cost of bikes at that time, it took a pretty fair amount of audacity to complain that his tricycle--with hard rubber tires on iron wheels-- was uncomfortable.

No one knows exactly how Dunlop pere came up with the idea of bonding canvas together with liquid rubber to make an inflatable tube.  But he did and in 1888 he patented the idea--and, in the process used the word "pneumatic" for the first time.  

A local firm, W. Edlin and company, agreed to make casings for the new tubes and the following year, a well-known cyclist, Willie Hume, used the new tires to win a race at Cherryvale.  A paper manufacturer who was one of the spectators would buy Dunlop's patents a few years later.  By that time, he had moved to Dublin, where he manufactured bicycle frames in collaboration with a local firm, Bowden and Gillies.