Fun, fitness and fashion? On yer bike

IT’S 30 years, and the last deep recession/depression, since the then-British conservative MP Norman Tebbit effectively urged Britain’s unemployed to ‘Get on yer bike’, and go look for work instead of rioting.

For the last nine days, bike action, and peaceful riots of colour, worked to take over Cork city’s streets during the Cork Cycling Festival, an almost random gathering of bike-based activities and art events which has gathered pace and a happy momentum over the past four years.

It has helped reclaim the roads for cyclists, boosting cycling’s profile and efficacy, in a range of bespoke bikes, trikes and unicycles. It has also done it in clothing and garb as varied as high fashion, in protective skirts made from upcycled tents salvaged from Oxegen, in Edwardian era-garb on retro High Nellies, as well as in simply sensible high-viz day-glo colours: plus, of course, in naked Irish flesh, laid bare, proud to be pink, white and mottled blue.