The £400 question, redux

I don’t go out to spend £400 every day. I know some people do, especially in our credit-card wielding, guilt-free, devil-take-my-credit-history society - but I don’t. Particularly on stuff for me.

(Sure, I’ve blown wads of cash on ordinary, necessary, socially acceptable things like sofas and beds. We did a lot of that when we got to Brighton… but ever since then we’ve been good. Well, fairly good. Plane tickets don’t count, right?)

I just don’t go on shopping sprees of any sort of size. In fact, I feel guilty buying stuff on sale these days. So after I recovered from the shock of my wife-remembered savings, and I figured I should get myself down to the bike shop and put my money where my mouth was, that’s when it suddenly hit me. I was thinking about spending £400 on a bike. An object which, last time I checked, was something that kids rode around on, perhaps with brightly coloured tape tied to the handlebars.

Okay, alright, I couldn’t exactly claim ignorance of bikes living in Brighton. Y’see, one thing I noticed in the last week was… er… bikes. They’d always been there, around me (and in much higher numbers than I ever saw in London) but now I was interested, and that made all the difference. Now I watched them as they went by me, noticing the makes and models; checking out the different accessories, whether the owner had a helmet or not… even locks. I was getting myself prepared, mentally. Trying to understand this new world.

But the fact is even with these mental gymnastics, thanks to the wife I got caught on the hop on Saturday. Result: I wasn’t fully prepared to go shopping. Or rather, I wasn’t quite prepared for the expenditure. I hadn’t justified the whole thing to myself, in that terribly masculine way where we talk about the subject for ages, read a bunch of magazines and websites and then finally end up buying the first thing we see in the shop.

That’s why it took a long while to finally get up the courage to go down to the bike shop, sidle up to an assistant and admit “I’m in the market for a, uh, bike.”

It didn’t help that I actually had two bike shops to choose from, one of which I could see from my bedroom window. Well, the rear of the shop anyway; Baker St Bikes, which confusingly is on York Place. On Saturday mornings and some weekdays we could see them working on bikes in their rear yard, and I’d craned my neck to see the stack of Ridgeback boxes out there that very morning. I figured considering my proximity, if I didn’t buy there it’d sort of be like ignoring a neighbour that’s invited you over for a barbecue in summer. Like that’s ever happened.

It was Amanda who suggested I go to Sydney Street Bikes, though “Just because they’re cool”. Indeed they are - imbued with that laid-back Brightonian attitude, symbolised by the ’show bikes’ that often sit on the road outside the shop. As of Saturday there was a bike styled like a New York cab sitting there, all black and yellow with fat tyres that looked six inches across, and a £350 price tag.

As I walked past that bike I was certainly hoping I’d get out of there with a bike that cost less than that. I did - just about….