bike riding

Heading into work today I ended up riding for a bit with 2 of the guys from Howies, in London for the weekend at the sample sale.  Cycling is one of the most pleasant and environmentally friendly methods of transport around, but the thing that pleases me most about it is the choice you have in how you travel.  You chose your own speed to suit your mood (or time constraint), chose your own routes and distance and also how much you actually ride, be it one day a month or every day, every journey.  I have cycled approximately 80 miles this week and been on public transport for about 9 and about 9 miles in a car.  The bike-based journeys (mainly commuting) have been the ones where I have had the most constructive time to consider my day (ahead or behind me) and have also been the most efficient for my needs.  I believe bike-riding for ones commute to be a truly philosophically Slow way of travelling (and occasionally just plain old slow).
This Slow method of transport is well documented for many reasons but for me it is special for the time it allows me just to be.  My ride today slowed considerably when we started chatting and was all the more pleasant for it.  The photo above is one of the first from a series I took all the way from Hackney to Knightsbridge a few months ago, a commute I did daily for 18months about 5 years ago, and it makes me feel, looking from a bikes-eye-view, excited about the start of a new journey and about how fresh the day looks.