Held by traffic lights on Old Kent Road, a green blur zips past. The fading taste of blueberry begins to let go and so do I. Vape smoke briefly provides cover for the blur to reappear. Darting out from the pavement, a Lime bike veers into the junction as its rider tries to navigate three cars in a charming, elegant way. Wildly illegal and highly dangerous, the manoeuvre itself is less concerning than his Nehru jacket.
Unbothered by the inconvenience caused, he alternates between the pavement and road before disappearing round a corner. Back at the traffic lights there’s blueberry-infused disbelief at the utter selfishness of it all. Someone shouts at me from behind as a sharp honk wakes me up. Green. The lights are green. Sitting back on the bike, my right hand barely grips the handlebar with the green vape claiming permanent priority.
Unable to invent two extra fingers, the bike’s centre of gravity gets away from me. It lurches sideways and I slip, hand rising in apology, cheeks aglow, and eventually the wheels are put back in motion. As he drives past, the cabbie hurls light abuse my way.
A fleet of Lime bikes has colonised a corner by Elephant and Castle roundabout. Clumped together like London’s five remaining smokers seeking refuge from the elements, they obscure a shopfront as an older man stares at them despondently. Held again at red lights faithfully draining the cylinder, I watch a stream of people cross the road and make some tenuous links to pass the time. Vapes and Lime bikes? Obviously related. What’s going on?
Batteries? Yeah, that’s it. Batteries. It’s not batteries, everything has batteries. They’re convenient? No, that’s offensively dull. Tell me some more about these batteries. Are they convenient though? For who? What does that even mean without context? It would be convenient to steal money from a bank, for me anyway. Or if my shopfront was hidden from view by some electric bikes, that might not be so convenient for me. Unable to move the fleet of privatised transport alone, the older gentleman calls into the shop for assistance. Joined quickly by a youth voter wearing glasses, they drag the bikes away from his frontage.
Heartened by the mutual cooperation on display, my vaping is done long before the lights turn green. Good for them. The roundabout is circled agreeably before an amble up Borough High Street. Stopped at a zebra crossing, a respectable-looking executive splays one palm in thanks and sucks on a green and orange plastic cylinder held in the other. Wild with glee, it’s punished immediately as the light changes to the colour of my little plastic limb and another honk arrives.
At London Bridge I dismount and, drawing breath to my lungs with an air of quiet melancholy, the taste of burnt coil assaults my mouth. My pod hath run dry. Resolved not to smoke the electronics again, a fresh replacement pod is sourced within seconds from my rustic brown bag I like very much. There was a regrettable period in which the electronics really were smoked out of necessity if you catch my drift. Resolved never to get back there again, the taste of blueberry is welcomed home as sheer Pavlovian convenience makes my mouth water.
The Thames’ muddy waters roll and foam as I sit on a bench. It is convenient, I suppose. You don’t need to prepare anything, there’s no need to unfurl a little piece of thin paper or stuff it with flammable plant matter to deprive your brain of oxygen. You don’t even have to inhale the contents of an eventually lethal blaze to get a dopamine hit. In fact, there’s no smoke at all now. Only the constant ejection of blueberry aerosol.
Gone is the lingering taste of burnt tobacco haunting your mouth or that of a potential love interest. Who misses shuffling off to a small, partially covered area when it’s raining? Assaulted by the elements, dirtying your nails, papers clasped tightly like a tastefully dressed border official, filters cascading to the floor, mumbling vague affirmations to prove you’re still listening to somebody whose name you’ve forgotten. Conversation in absentia, lost entirely to how beautiful rain is when illuminated by light.
But with new benefits come new costs. Low-level camaraderie faces an extinction-level event. Vapes are now clutched tightly as solo instruments or shared by packs of friends as the city dissolves into smaller and smaller groups of personalised isolation, like a corrupted Animal Crossing save where all the characters are defensive and hostile. Where once someone might have asked for a paper, filter or even some tobacco if they were really in dire straits, now the portable charger reigns supreme in a lonely, fluorescent court.
On the horizon, a family of three stroll down the South Bank. Vaping with a brief sense of shame, the significant aesthetic costs of the art form come flooding back. For example, it is clearly true that it’s impossible to vape in a cool or stylish way. The vape itself negates it. Maybe this is the post-crash generation’s equivalent to second-hand smoke. Vaping is a low-status game. As the evening fades and what remains of the sun jumps across the water, the young family stops behind me.
Aerosol tumbles from my mouth in a graceful manner and the wind snatches it away. Chin resting on my palm, staring at the waves, there’s no indignity in saying that I love vaping. I do. It’s silly, it’s fun and I love it. It’s ironic, harmless and it’s always in my hand. If I could stop, which I can, then I would. But I can’t! What does that say about me? Or, to plumb even greater depths, what does your vape say about you? With flecks of plastic missing and a battery long degraded by neglect, my vape speaks for us both.
A child kicks my bike. No immediate criticism arrives. His parents are only a few yards away and he drifts back towards them to deafening silence as their eyes meet mine. Incredulous, pointing my index finger accusingly at the bike, my quest for justice comes to nothing. One parent shrugs as though it’s my fault. Less relaxed, the other gently clutches their phone as though I’m a linen-wearing thief, roving around the capital stealing phones on a hybrid bike built for a child’s proportions.
They walk off. I’m fuming. If he kicked a Lime then sure, no problem, give them one from me. But unfortunately, I own this bike. It hasn’t been leased from a conglomerate. I can’t drift around the city as I please, cycling without a trace, leaving the carcass on whatever street corner the camera on my phone deems acceptable. If you lock your bike up in the city then you make a claim on it, navigating huge spaces in public to find a spot where it’ll be safe for a while. But you can’t guarantee it will be because, just as you make a claim on the city, it makes a claim on you. Tethered to a location you need to return to and which later you do, filled with curiosity and dread to see whether it’s been liberated by a chancer with an angle grinder.
Maybe owning a bike is one form of adult responsibility, like a pre-school for acquiring an asset. Much like how the brief life of a childhood guinea pig or hamster helps to prepare you for the varied and longstanding difficulties of adult life. That being said, despite Crunchie technically being my pet, I did very little to look after the little guy and left my dad to look after him. So it wasn’t really training in that sense. What I did was train myself in the art form of watching an older man pick up my teenage slack. When we buried Crunchie in the garden, Dad said a few words as he wiped away a mix of rain and tears under a dark autumn sky, concluding by calling him a “nice thing.”
So owning a bike confers about as much legitimacy as my teenage care for a guinea pig. A few months ago I got the bike serviced and the guy who did it was good enough to let me watch. After nearly a decade of neglect and misuse, the bike and I put the past behind us. There was something extremely satisfying about watching him go to work and reassemble old faithful. As the grease and dirt were wiped away and parts were inspected, cleaned or replaced, I thought about Crunchie, my dad and maintenance imbued with affection.
Maybe it’s dependence that creates the relationship and maintenance that allows it to develop. ‘To grow’, as they say. Once the lock’s clicked and you’re tethered to a railing or stray lamppost, that mutual claim is made, the link is there. Will it be here when you come back? Who knows? Someone might give it a little kick.
The family is long gone now, as is the sun. Lock back in hand, I wrap it around the frame of my bike and prepare to cycle home. No wonder Lime are rolling in it. Private-public transport has no use for this kind of 20th-century sentimentality. They’re too agile and modernising for my Luddite consumption habits, they’re like New Labour 2.0, offering an unflinching, round-the-clock service to paying customers and paying customers alone.
On Newcomen Street, a pack of Limes have colonised a narrow walkway. Hypnotised by the inanimate arrogance of it all, I stop and dismount to drink in the moment. It tastes of blueberry. Hang on Connor, my internal New Labour spokesman says. Instead of getting on your high horse about private-public transport, why don’t you hire them all and cycle down the road one by one? Go on, shift the bikes on your dime if you care about the fucking walkway so much! I do hope we can count on your vote at the next election.
Working together in a moving display of cooperation, a mother and son liberate themselves from the walkway by moving one of the bikes. Staring gormlessly at them from a distance throughout the entire process, watching along like it’s the first time I’ve been outside the house, I think I may have learned a valuable lesson. Maybe.
Here I am parroting corporate propaganda to defend my own selfish vape habit by association, bringing back Lime disease with Labour. And two people move them out of the way, and without moaning too.
A few seconds of welcome silence arrive. Swept up in a gust, a pile of leaves scatters further onto the road and is cycled over immediately. Two people on Limes mount the pavement only to be separated from each other by a third, separate Lime they nearly crash into, parked squarely in the middle of the pavement.
On New Cross Road Nina’s voice begins to fade, gently at first. I wouldn’t normally wear earbuds. They’re a bit too fiddly and delicate for me. However, they were a good deal and I needed them. Needed them? In what sense? Didn’t need them. Strong word. Happy with the space and distance between us, I weave around the 21 as Nina really starts to get away from me. Quickly, then all at once.
“Who knows where the time goes?” she sings as the earbud on my right side comes loose, dropping straight onto the road where it’s crushed immediately by the number 43. The last I see of it, it slips under the wheel and is largely wires already. In shock, I cut onto Troutbeck Road and mount the pavement in a broadly safe manner. As the bike is laid to rest, an older man in a nice shirt blindsides me, shouting at me for mounting the pavement unsafely. Nehru jackets hang heavy on my mind.
I broke my headphones earlier. Not the earbuds, a pair of wired headphones which got caught on a doorknob. Nightmare, no? So I cycled to Sainsbury’s and bought some more. I could’ve got them again, after all they are the same headphones I’ve always had and I like them for a reason. But they weren’t available until tomorrow. Could I wait? No. So I got the earbuds instead as a compromise candidate. Well Connor, then you must have got them insured at least, a shrewd character such as yourself working on issues of consumer harm at a national level. You’d know that it protects against exactly these abnormal circumstances and all at the very reasonable cost of £2.50.
Nina Simone brings a stunning emotional climax to my left ear. I didn’t buy insurance. Obviously. Quite stunned by it all, air jets from my nose in a horrible snort laugh of confusion. “Wow,” I say out loud. An older lady pushing a trolley regards me with suspicion. I’ve gone through two pairs in one day, you know. Not even one day actually. Two pairs in about three hours. Buses and bikes of all varieties drift past as the blueberry sour raspberry hangs heavy in my mouth. They’d run out of blueberry as well. This is Sainsbury’s fault.
You can’t swan around like a two-wheeled island of private liberty forever, can you? The bus ended that fantasy. Driver probably didn’t even have a clue what happened. Crushed it accidentally. Even Nina wasn’t committed when push came to shove. She opted out, didn’t she? I thought we were cool. I lost another pair of headphones a few years ago and didn’t listen to music outside or in transit for a month. It was amazing, I’d never felt more settled in myself and connected to the world.
After that month I never did it again.
So it’s fine, I say to myself. Just get some more. Maybe even some insurance this time. And this blueberry sour raspberry monstrosity is fucking horrible. Not even a real flavour. They’ll have blueberry in Peckham.
On Tottenham Court Road two weeks later, a cycleway is blocked by a familiar figure goading me in broad daylight. Dismounting the bike and laying it down, before the wheels stop spinning that Lime bastard has been returned to his herd on the kerb only a few feet away. Rewarded with blueberry congratulations as I pick up the bike, I think it’s safe to say I’ve earned that roll-up later.
Connor Davis is a London-based researcher and essayist. He writes about politics, memory, culture and everyday life, usually starting with things that catch his attention. I Shall be Released is his first published essay. More of his writing can be found on his Substack.
