When you’re going on a long bike ride, there are many things to consider. Distance, scenery, potential cafe stops – and of course whether there is a pub at the end where you can click-clack your cleats across handsome flagstones and guzzle frosty pints while horsing down their entire supply of Scampi Fries. All these things were entirely unguaranteed when fate decided my long ride would be to follow a David Bowie song lyric.
It was mid-2016, Bowie had just passed, Prince too, and, well, it seemed like the country was in an irreversible aquaplane into a ditch full of sodden vegetation and division. I wanted out, not of Europe, but into it. And it was the Starman’s journey of the mind that would take me there. One day, just as I’d started mournfully singing his classic ‘Life on Mars?’ I passed my bike in the hallway – and an unexpected route presented itself. “See the mice in their million hordes, from Ibiza to the Norfolk Broads”. The lyric was, for Bowie, a sneer at mass tourism, but to me, in my ready-to-burst midlife crisis, it demanded to be cycled. I undertook the ride over six weeks during autumn 2016, and wrote a book about it. Now, 3,000 miles and nine years later, here are six reasons why everyone should ride a song lyric.
