AN APPROPRIATE BICYCLE - Pt. 13: PROVENANCE, PART 2

Almost desperate to find just a trace of evidence pertaining to the bikes Carlos manufactured (or rebadged), I launched a final search-engine offensive, but this time in French.  “Carlos road bicycle steel” translates as “acier de bicyclette de route de Carlos”, so I ran a search on that, but without the preposition ‘de’ in case it proved grammatically restrictive.

            My reward was an advertisement on vieux-velo.com from someone selling an old Carlos bike, with everything but the wheels for €650!  The notice read thus:

‘Je vends mon cadre de vélo de route de marque CARLOS, modèle 1983, entièrement COLOMBUS; tout équipé sauf les roues, de taille 55 dans un état correct.  Convient parfaitement pour une conversion FIXIE, par exemple.’

Or in other words (and I have translated the advert literally because, first, I don’t speak French and, second, because I thought the verbatim translation held a certain charm):

‘I sell my framework of bicycle of road of brand CARLOS, model 1983, entirely COLOMBUS; very equipped except the wheels, of size 55 in a correct state.  Is appropriate perfectly for a conversion FIXIE, for example.’

You’d have thought that this would have pleased me, but you’d be wrong. The Carlos in question was too early a model to be comparable to my own, and was built using Columbus tubing, whereas there’s no indication that my Carlos has been hewn from such reputable a material (although it’s not impossible). But it did get me thinking about how the French might refer to their classic bikes: vieux means old, and velo is a more informal alternative to bicyclette. I tried running a search using the words ‘acier velo route Carlos’ and found another image on the website ‘Vélotaf’ (a French web-forum concerned with cycling, similar to our Bike Radar, perhaps?) which looked like a good match. The frame appeared to be identical in form, although the components were quite different. But, lacquered in blue, I couldn't help thinking that this Carlos looked rather cheap, and the accompanying thread shed little light on the company’s origins, let alone the quality of their produce.

I think it’s probably time to let go of my obsession with Carlos’ provenance...

 

 [Carlos in Blue]

Unpleasant things have been happening to me of late. I've just purchased a CO² inflator and concomitant cartridges, to fit inside my Ortlieb Saddle Bag alongside a spare inner tube, tyre leavers, glueless patch kit and modest multi-tool. I then decided that I should invest in a cycling jacket and found one that pleased the eye. My metamorphosis is finding its form as I slowly take on the attributes of a fully-fledged cycling enthusiast, but my bicycle-esteem is starting to suffer as some sort of result.

It was never supposed to be like this. I thought that by eschewing carbon, cleats and conservative clubs I’d be impermeable to the vanities and conceits of more zealous cycling aficionados. Instead, I've returned to fawning over images of vintage bicycles on Gumtree and eBay, thinking about how far I might be prepared to go.

            Talking of which, that Pinarello Veneto is up for sale again. But guess what: not only has the seller corrected his spelling but he’s fixed the price at £600 (open to offers if anybody wants to submit a bid through eBay – he’s rejected two already). Presuming that the Brookes saddle has a resale value of, say, £150, and assuming my Carlos to be worth a little more than the £295 I paid for it – given the rapturous reception it received from the guy at Crown Cycles – would it be fair to speculate that I could offer £580 for the Pinarello, sell the saddle and the Carlos (and the Jamis, too, if it came to that) and actually end up breaking about even? It’s a tempting prospect, for the Pinarello is still very enticing and probably faster and easier to handle than my Carlos.

Such a proposition doesn't sit quite right with me. For one, the Pinarello has something of the Bianchi or the Colnago about it: lovely bikes all, but high-end Italian marquees loaded with connotation. They are highly desirable machines, and that’s reflected in their value. I don’t think I’d be able to relax if I rode on something like that. The threat of theft or impact damage is not my real concern here: the issue is more how these bikes might reflect upon their owner. What sort of individual rides a Pinarello? Miguel Indurain won his five consecutive Tours de France titles on them, I think, and Bradley Wiggins has just ridden one to his first, so what business have I got owning one?

Why should this matter? It doesn't matter, actually, but I've only recently embraced cycling of the road-racing kind and it would feel almost impertinent of me to ride a bike of such calibre. I’d feel like the guy who put his gear before his physical ability: who spent more money than time in honing his or her craft; the person who launched himself into their new-found hobby for all the wrong reasons.

There’s something else that’s troubling me. If I give up on Carlos then I might be disturbing the narrative. Part of me was sad to see the Raleigh Record Ace go, but I was sure it was the right thing to do. Buying Carlos also felt like the right thing to do, and even the guy who sold it to me expressed this sentiment. Carlos feels right. Carlos is unique without being ostentatious. Carlos has some foibles but does ride rather well. Carlos is consistent with my approach. Carlos is Weltschmerz.

Carlos is also in keeping with the accessories I've amassed: the two cycling jerseys that I bought on the cheap; the fingerless gloves that didn't break the bank; the moderately priced but classy looking bottle cage; the base-level cycling shorts my mother kindly bought for me; or the old Adidas Sambas that make for a perfectly serviceable pair of cycling shoes. And I want to ride a Pinarello? It would feel like sedition!

I'm not going to bid for the Pinarello this time but I shall keep an eye on the market for other bikes, with a view to selling the Jamis. Because whatever becomes of Carlos, I feel a strong, almost uncontrollable urge to purchase another white bicycle replete with 1980s era livery – like a PDM labelled Concorde, perhaps?

[A Concorde 'Gavina' in PDM colours]

AN APPROPRIATE BICYCLE - Pt. 5: CARLOS

£450 was my final offer, and it had neither matched nor exceeded the reserve. The only circumstances under which the Pinarello could now be mine was if I remained the highest bidder and that £450 was close enough to the seller’s valuation that he/she might let it go for less. By now I'm not sure I even cared.

            I left my house at 18:41 and the auction was due to reach fruition at 22:10:11. I assumed this time-scale was dependent on the exact moment the sale was floated and calculated on the basis of that – how else can you explain those extra 11 seconds of opportunity?

            When I logged on to eBay the following morning I was quite relieved to see that I had failed in my bid. But it was funny: my final offer had been the second-to-last tender of the day, before some opportunist came in with a bid of £460 at precisely 22:10:08. How’s that for taking it down to the wire?

As far as I could tell, at 22:10:04, the leading bid – my bid – was visible at £400. Somebody else then attempted to trump my bid with an offer of £422. I’d set my maximum bid at £450, so they were destined to fail, but this now placed me as the highest bidder with an offer of £430, because eBay raises the bid (in increments determined by the current value) on your behalf. Waiting in the wings, the eventual winner then submitted an offer of £460. I can only wonder what would have happened if, with the bidding set at £430 with just 3 seconds to run, the bidder had decided to chance his arm on a maximum offer of, say, £440. At least I think that's how it works...

But they still hadn't made the reserve. Had they taken a chance on my bid being close? Were they confident that the seller would acquiesce to the sellee and take whatever they could get?  Was I missing something concerning the nature of eBay? Was this a green light for the winning bidder to now enter into a personal dialogue with salesperson whereupon they’d thrash it out between them, reaching some sort of fiscal compromise? Consumed by intrigue, I sent the following email to the seller:

'Hey - are you selling your Pinarello for less than the reserve? I see that I was outbid at the last minute. If I'd known what the reserve was I might have bid higher in the first place. I don't really understand why people keep their reserve price secret - it just encouraged me to pull out of the bidding early. Anyway, if you let me know what you are prepared to take then I might still be interested.

Also, why did you buy a new saddle if you intended to sell the bike? I think you priced a lot of people out of the auction by having to cover that cost in your reserve.'

I wasn't expecting a reply to this and nor did I get one – which is a shame. It is a shame if only because it would make for more interesting reading, especially if the seller had somehow taken offence and sent me some sort of invective in return.(I never intend on being provocative or insidious, and it genuinely surprises me how irascible some folk can be when questioned via the medium of email. This rarely happens vis-à-vis, after all; people tend to take you at face value. There’s something about the email that seems to fool people into attributing a more cynical tone to the text. Maybe that says more about them than it does me. Or have I missed some sort of social convention here?) Anyway, the Pinarello was gone, the Raleigh had been long shipped and presumably received (to a disconcerting silence on the receiver’s part) and I was finally at liberty to buy that lovely looking Carlos.

And so I did. On Friday I climbed aboard the train to Waterloo, changed onto the Northern Line, vacated at Highgate and walked back down Archway Road. I felt strangely anxious as I neared the Vintage Bike Cave, so much so that I sought refuge in a delicatessen on the opposing side of the road, for a coffee to settle my nerves. This can be explained in part by a job vacancy at the Vintage Bike Cave that I had expressed a vague interest in. It seemed like it might be a nice place to work, I was unemployed, and working with bikes has to be kind of fun, no? But I was having second thoughts about that, because I’d noted the 70 minutes it had taken me to reach the Vintage Bike Cave, which was tolerable post rush-hour, but would be less so mid.

            I felt a little calmer after drinking mediocre coffee, and when I arrived through that back door the Carlos looked as impressive as I had remembered it. A ride around the block did nothing to dampen my enthusiasm and I knew that if there was any residual hesitation on my part, now would be the time for it to reveal itself to me.

And so the deal was done, the job was discussed (and left mutually open-ended), and I was on my way.

            The man who worked on the lathe – the proprietor of the Vintage Bike Cave – had scoffed at my reluctance to cycle back to Twickenham. It had been estimated that the journey – a journey that involved dicing with death on London’s very terrible roads – would take over an hour and a half, but I had already planned on riding to Gospel Oak to take the train home from there. This I attempted to do, although it was hard to know which way to go about it. At first I pushed my new bike down the Archway Road as far as Upper Holloway, because I thought it might be a good idea to see how long the walk would take, just in case I did indeed end up working at the Vintage Bike Cave. On reaching the intersection beneath Archway Tower I realised that Gospel Oak was too far from Highgate for this theory to make any sense, estimating that it would take at least 20 minutes on foot, thus negating any advantage the Silverlink Metro direct to Richmond might have to offer. I climbed onto the Carlos and started cycling in the vague direction of Gospel Oak.

            It should be pointed out that when I had ridden the Raleigh Record Ace to my courier I was struck by how comfortable it had felt. This was unexpected as I had been riding my Jamis Beatnik in order to preserve the Raleigh for sale, and had got quite used to that smaller machine. This physical amenity, then, took me by surprise, but it reassured me that the Carlos – whose dimensions I had measured to be almost exactly the same as the Raleigh – was probably of an appropriate size (the new found comfort of the Raleigh had also motivated me in continuing to bid for the Pinarello). But now I had the Carlos with me I was convinced that it was smaller than the Raleigh, although still bigger than my Jamis. This bode well for it assuaged any fears that it might be either too big or too small, but the fact that I could simultaneously consider it both left me rather perplexed.

            Meanwhile, my normally reliable sense of direction was letting me down. Meanwhile, the normally unreliable BBC weather forecast was also letting me down – or not. ‘It would remain dry for the rest of the day,’ they had told me this morning, but now it started to rain. I found myself in Kentish Town again, but knew I needed to be further west. I took a turn down a road that furthered itself in a westerly direction, but it led me straight into the bowels of an industrial estate. I retraced my steps and pushed my bike along Kentish Town Road instead, for I knew I’d get very wet if I continued cycling. This allowed me to admire the reflection of my new bicycle in the shop-windows I passed and assess its scale in proportion to my own form.

            I went too far: found a map of the area just outside Camden Gardens and saw the error of my ways, turned down Hawley Road, but on the wrong side, crossed over the road to join Castlehaven Road, which I knew would take me to onto Prince of Wales Road, allowing me to catch my train at Kentish Town West. As I got back on my new bike to ride up Castlehaven Road, I noticed that my rear tyre had a puncture.

[POST-SCRIPT: I did eventually receive a response from the Pinarello Guy, sent some weeks later and only picked up by me a few weeks after that again. He explained that he was in no hurry to sell the bicycle and that he happy to hang onto it if nobody offered what he considered to be a reasonable price. He assured me that the bicycle was not stolen (I'm not sure where that notion came from), that he wanted to sell it to someone who would appreciate it (admirable) and he intended to put it on eBay again – with a reserve in place – but if I was still interested than I was welcome to view the bicycle before bidding.

So far so very reasonable, but then he went on to explain the point of putting a reserve price in place – to keep it, in secret – and that if I didn't like this method of doing business then there were alternatives, both on eBay itself and on other websites (Gumtree, I assume). Maybe that made no sense to me but it did to him – and others too, apparently. It was obvious I’d rubbed him up the wrong way.

He confirmed that he had bought the new saddle prior to his decision to sell the bike and that it was his prerogative to change his mind. I couldn't argue with that but I got the impression that he thought that I was questioning the value he had placed on the bike itself, which was not the case. I just thought that he hadn't done a great job in trying to sell it. This was my reply:

‘Thanks for getting back to me - I only just picked this up as it wasn't sent to my email (or maybe it went to my spam?)

Everything makes a little more sense, now you've said you don't need to sell and are prepared to wait (I never for one moment thought it was stolen, by the way). It's just hard to know whether something is worth bidding on when you have no idea what the seller is holding out for. But you are right: it is a beautiful bike, and you should expect more than £460 - I was never calling into question your valuation. Unfortunately, money is tight for me right now so I ended up buying a Carlos for £295. It's no Pinarello, but it rides well and serves its purpose (and it’s sized right, which I could never be sure of with the Pinarello).

Good luck with the sale - with that saddle it's got to be worth at least £580. List it next time as a Pinarello 'Veneto' (just the one t) and hopefully someone will meet your reserve.’

I hoped he would not submit a response this second time around – what would be the point? He evidently hoped to make more than £500, but he’d only provided the bike’s measurements after I prompted him to do so, and hadn't even spelled Veneto right.]

AN APPROPRIATE BICYCLE - Pt.4: THE PERILS OF EBAY

The next day, after having discussed the contrasting merits of Gumtree and eBay (sic) with a friend of mine the night before, I whimsically decided to take a look at what sort of bicycles there were for sale on the latter. I had begun to feel like I was having some sort of affair behind the Vintage Bike Cave’s back, ogling over all these bikes after supposedly betrothing myself to the Carlos. But I couldn't help myself. Besides, I still fully expected to end up in bed with the Carlos come the end of the week.

I've only ever bid on eBay the once, and that was for something completely unrelated, but it was enough to get the drift. I understand that serious bidders tend to wait for the dying moments of any auction to launch pre-emptive bids, I am aware that some sellers put a reserve in place, that others offer the opportunity to Buy It Now (italics host-site’s own). What I also learned, snooping around eBay on a Sunday evening, is that you are not supposed to contact the seller with an offer until the auction has run its course – assuming that the opportunity to Buy It Now does not apply – but that you can email them to request further information about whatever it is they’re peddling

The first thing that grabbed my roving eye was a red 1980s Duravia, another French marquee that proved almost as elusive as Carlos. The bicycle in question was available for me to buy (it) now for £295, with only about 15 minutes left until sale’s end. Despite the absence of any bids, there was nowhere near enough time left to table my own. No, I needed a good few days to procrastinate, weighing up this and that, before deciding, quite viscerally, whether something convincingly appealed. But the Duravia was a good looking bike, sold by yet another vintage bike dealership bothering to clean up and present their stock for maximum impact (although the new triple-tone black/green/white Vittoria Pro Team tyres they’d fitted were a terrible choice). It was just as well, perhaps, that the sale was about to run its course, because I would have been lumbered with another dilemma to wrestle with for the coming week and I was starting to grow very weary of this whole process. When was I just going to buy myself an appropriate bicycle and start riding the damned thing?

As I was about to knock my eBay surfing on the head, I only went and stumbled upon a vintage Pinarello Veneto! The auction had another three days to run – there was no Buy It Now option on this bike – and the reserve had yet to be met. In truth, it looked like the velocipede might be marginally too big for me. The seller reckoned it was either a 58 cm frame or 60 cm, that he was 183 cm in height and it fitted him fine – and that was all he had to say on the subject. I'm about 180/181 cm, so it was not an altogether improbable fit. But I’d struggled with these sizing issues with the Raleigh and had since come to conclude that whilst my inseam implies I could handle a 58-60 cm sized frame, my ‘reach’ does not. In other words, my legs are in longer proportion to my body – perhaps. Dear old Carlos, on the other hand, had been quoted at 57.5 cm, which looked like a nice compromise. Why was I even considering submitting a bid for the Pinarello?

Because it was one of the most beautiful bikes I’d ever laid my eyes on; because it dated back to 1989, so was not so old that the parts should have suffered too much wear; because it had new wheels and tyres; it had a brand new Brooks Swift titanium saddle… but why had he fitted his bike with a new Brookes Swift titanium saddle just to then sell it on again? A Brookes Swift titanium saddle goes for about £180, so I could only assume his reserve was pitched to cover this extra cost. Why price yourself out of the market like that? Why add value to something that doesn't need adding value to? Maybe he bought the saddle not long before deciding to sell, because the pictures corroborated his claim that it was indeed brand new. I could resell the saddle but there was no guarantee of finding a buyer willing to cover my costs – not even for a pillion of Brookes’ calibre.

I asked the seller for a few more measurements, but they were inconclusive. I increased my bid anyway, because I thought I had a fair idea as to the bike’s real value. Still the reserve remained undisturbed. The next day I upped my bid again, no doubt irritating those who like to leave their bidding to the final moments. Again the reserve remained undisturbed.

I emailed the Vintage Bike Cave to reassure them of my sustained enthusiasm for the Carlos but would probably have to wait until Friday now. (I would have done this regardless of my bidding for the Pinarello because I had decided against picking the Carlos up late on Wednesday and cycling it across London to my bouldering place. It just looked far too dangerous on the map – that journey on a bike to which I was unaccustomed.) I thought very carefully about how much I would be able to pay for the Pinarello, because I wouldn't be near a computer for the final five hours of auction and would need to rely on a pre-prepared maximum bid to secure any purchase. My fingers hovered over the keyboard with much hesitation. I had no idea whether my last bid of £400 was anywhere near the reserve price but doubted that it was - £500 would have to be a safer bet. How far was I prepared to go?