When I was a kid, the little farming village where I lived had a few remaining cobbled streets, and one section of the main drag in the single-stoplight community was paved with bricks. We kids rode our bikes everywhere, under baking sun, in pouring rain, and even when snow piled up faster than road plows could remove it. And we had a blast. Sure, it was great fun to find a parking lot with fresh asphalt so we could ride very fast in circles, but we didn’t let a bit of cobbled road stop us from getting where we wanted to go. Later, in my early adulthood, the village had paved all of its streets, but by then I was casting my sights much further afield. I rode my narrow-tired Schwinn 10-speed on dirt, mud, and cobbled roads all around the hilly county. The picture below of a road leading to a relative’s house—an almost daily ride for me, whatever the weather—looks tame, but each summer the town rolled loads of grapefruit-sized cobbles into the clay, making for tricky riding on the best of days:

 

 
So with that background in mind, it was with considerable amusement that I read a BBC article about how the Royal Mail is refusing to deliver the mail along a “‘dangerous’ cobbled street” in the Devon town of Bideford. Instead of delivering mail to each resident’s home, the delivery man (or woman) drops all the packages and letters off at the bottom of the lane which, incidentally, is 280 years old. The woman whose house is the drop-off point, 53-year-old Sally Bellamy, then carts the post to all her neighbors’ letterboxes up the cobbled lane, whatever the weather. Miss Bellamy is understandably miffed by this. Here’s what she has to say:

“They say ‘it’s too dangerous to walk on, it’s slippery, absolutely lethal’, but I don’t have a problem and nobody else seems to have a problem—I think it is stupid.

Oh, and did I mention that Miss Bellamy suffers from arthritis of the spine? Yep, she does, yet she manages to deliver the mail to her neighbors up the street.

Anyway, this article brought to mind a wonderful advert by the UK bread company, Hovis. It’s said to be the most popular advertisement in the UK, and you can see why. Check it out:

 
Now that’s a commercial I enjoy watching. It entertains, it is artistically pleasing, and it doesn’t insult your intelligence. And this advert—called “Boy on Bike”—has considerable cycling content. No surprise that the advert is so well done. It was directed by Ridley Scott (think Thelma & Louise, Hannibal, and Alien, to name but three). No tricks in the making of the advert, either. It was filmed on a real cobbled road, on a real hill, by a real boy riding a real bike.

Of course, any cyclist who has an interest in the classic races will know about Paris-Roubaix, one of the oldest of bicycling competitions, a one-day race held in early April every year, one which takes the riders over many bad cobbled roads. The race was chronicled in the film A Sunday in Hell, about the 1976 Paris-Roubaix. You might recognize one of the competitors, a fellow called Eddy Merckx, who made a name for himself in cycling history. Here’s a vintage clip from the film’s introduction, showing just how rough riding on cobbles can be:

 
Cobblestone streets and roads are dangerous? They can be, sure. You can fall go boom. You can even break something. But people have been negotiating cobblestone streets for a very long time, whether on foot or on bikes. If the person who delivers—correction, who used to deliver—the post to a certain cobbled street in Bideford, can’t cope anymore, then perhaps the Royal Mail could find a 13-year-old boy on a bike to do so. Or they could pay Miss Sally Bellamy to do it. They could even give her one of the discarded Pashley mail bikes that will be redundant when the Royal Mail phases out the cycling in favor of petrol-powered vans for postman/postwoman.

 
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