By Kathryn McNicoll<\/p>\n\n\n\n
How long do you expect your bike to last? Maybe 10 years? 20 years? How about 65 years? Jan from Jericho has had the same bike since she was 9 years old. It is a heavy green Phillips bike with no gears: Jan calls the Phillips bike the Rolls Royce of bikes. It was second-hand when she got it so the bike is even older, probably nearly 70 years old. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
She got the bike in order to cycle to school in Hampshire: later, in the mid-1970s to 1990s, she worked in London and used it to cycle to work and to meetings in and around London for years. Was she considered odd? Jan seemed a bit surprised to be asked that question: the bike was a workhorse, her normal mode of transport and, besides, cycling around London then was not a problem as there was so much less traffic. She recalls going home late one night by taxi with the bike in the back: when the taxi driver was helping to get the bike out he noticed it was a Phillips and got very excited.\u00a0\u2018Oh girl it\u2019s a Phillips,\u2019 he said.\u00a0 \u2018I had one when I was a boy.\u00a0 You look after her, she\u2019s gold dust.\u00a0 She\u2019s a real antique.\u2019 This was really the first time she realised it was something special.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The bike was stolen once in about 1991 (she had already had it 35 years by then) \u2013 and then miraculously reappeared chained to a lamppost outside her daughters\u2019 school. She was working full-time then, but happened to have taken that afternoon off, so was on pick-up duty \u2013 and there was her bike. No doubt as to whose bike it was \u2013 it was her bike all right: the front wheel was buckled but that problem was quickly made good. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
She was given an e-bike when they lived in Steeple Aston as the hills there are so steep, but now she lives in Oxford she doesn\u2019t need it any more to cycle round the city: her Phillips seems to handle all that Oxford can offer. Once you get on it, it \u2018goes like the clappers\u2019 she says. She tends to keep to safe places to cycle: she can get to Botley for shopping pretty much off road. However, the Woodstock Road is not pleasant where it narrows, and the Iffley road is nasty with cars parked in the cycle lane. And why, Jan asks, when there was lots of space to do so, were there no cycle lanes in the new housing developments around Bicester to make it safe and convenient for the new home-owners to cycle around? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Jan is rightly very proud of the fact that her bike is all genuine Phillips \u2013 except the pedals. A kind mechanic recently changed her old worn pedals, but she kept the originals and carries them around in her basket \u2013 they are still with her. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The whole family cycles: her husband and her two daughters are all dedicated cyclists too. Perhaps this dedication is down to the faithful Phillips that started it all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By Kathryn McNicoll<\/p>\n
How long do you expect your bike to last? Maybe 10 years? 20 years? How about 65 years? Jan from Jericho has had the same bike since she was 9 years old. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":8531,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"cybocfi_hide_featured_image":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[6,4],"tags":[5,7],"class_list":["post-8529","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","category-on-yer-bike","tag-blog","tag-on-yer-bike"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cyclox.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8529","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cyclox.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cyclox.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cyclox.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cyclox.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8529"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.cyclox.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8529\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cyclox.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cyclox.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8529"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cyclox.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8529"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cyclox.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8529"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}