Hi is this still available?
Robbie in Bournemouth

Interesting read, dressing similarly entirely optional.

https://apple.news/Ay9j7Pl0vQEaBFmNjMBW_2g

There’s a GPS link too ( almost hidden!)

https://ridewithgps.com/routes/55551051

I’ve ridden parts of this route and yes it’s the antidote to NC500.

Mark,
Just following on from your previous thread…… I have just bought another bike (alloy / carbon road bike, 700c wheels, very different to my Raven) and it is being sent to me by Parcelforce 48.  In a box 1.50m long and under 20kg it cost £18.25 which included £150 compensation.  So if you can get a cardboard bike box from your LBS and some old bubblewrap, sending your bike to it’s new owner means a little work but is surprisingly cheap.

Actually, I can, Andre...an Art-Deco cross between a full-sus Moulton AM-7 separable spaceframe and a Dursley-Pedersen.

You're so quick, Dan. I had to look up the Moulton AM-7 -- I came into cycling only in 1990 when I gave up the car altogether so it was before my time.

The Dursley-Pedersen is definitely of the same clay as the classic Citroens: exactly enough of sophisticated technology to serve a purpose, and the rest agricultural to last forever. I'm a big fan of the Pedersen, especially in the fat-tired recreation by a now sadly late German businessman.

I'm not so sure of Art Deco though. One didn't see Art Deco in Citroens when it was current as a dominant style, especially in France, say in the Traction Avant on the leather covering the door cards. Citroen never added anything merely decorative to their cars; everything had to serve a purpose, and, surprisingly for a car with so much original design in it, everything can be justified by engineering purpose, rather than as merely tacked-on design. It is, in large part, why the real Citroens have aged so well, why 'timeless' is the adjective most heard about the DS: there's nothing, like Art Deco, to fix it to any period; it is sui generis.

I think a case can be made that runs the other way, that Citroen set a certain tone that fed into art styles and movements. I've given up counting the movies in which a DS was used as a contemporary car in a setting far into the future, a symbol more than merely an artifact. My favorite is one of the Highlander movies where we see Christopher Lambert sitting in a bar looking out at a pall over a city, clearly a future environmental catastrophe, and then he gets up and walks out his car, a Citroen DS. There I burst out laughing -- it's just so hokey -- but not everyone is convinced the director intended self-parody.

You'll know that cycling has become an art form when a mainstream rather than a cult movie has a main character crack a joke about Peugeot bikes in the 1970s.

I loved Citroen cars, starting with the Deeeeee-Esssssse, of which I had several timeless DS starting with one I scored from the budget of a film I produced when I was still a student, and when I had the money for it, several SM, which I still consider the most pleasing grand tourer ever made, but it was so unreliable, you needed three to have one to drive while the other two were in the garage, and they each cost more than a Rolls (who licensed their self-leveling rear suspension). All the same, when it ran, the SM was such a cosseting, effortlessly capable car, I several times set ton-up averages overnight from London to Nardo in the boot of Italy without the passengers ever noticing something extraordinary was happening. When we returned from Australia, my wife was pregnant, and the Volvo I'd ordered to keep her and the child safe took months to be delivered, during which time I drove a GS that was on the lot of the used car dealer nearest the station at Cambridge, and I was sorry to give it back to the dealer when the wretchedly crude Volvo was delivered. Not that a Citroen couldn't also be crude: the DS, to the end, ran on an embarrassing tractor engine with pre-war roots, the Maserati engine in the SM was crudely cut down to a V6 from the known-reliable V8 (I had V8 Maserati too, in all three the then-current sizes, all bought secondhand, and you just couldn't kill them), a botch that ruined the car's reputation, and Citroen didn't have the money to develop the rotary GS, of which the one I drove via a day's detour to its final rest in a museum, a thrashed prototype with half a million kilometers on it, was what enthusiasts always expected a small English sports car to be--and were always disappointed, while at Citroen the French got it right more often than not. The whole of any Citroen, starting with the humble 2CV, was always at least twice the compass of its component parts, and oftentimes more, which was just as well because their ever-parlous finances dictated that models had to be kept in production for a very long time.

Can you picture the bicycle Citroen would have designed in the full flower of its technical imagination, running for the four decades from the Traction Avant in 1934 through the  2CV, DS and SM to the CX in 1974?