‘My crush began on a bicycle’

How do you start a conversation with someone on a moving bicycle? This was something I often pondered last year, while, on my daily walk to work, I developed what can only be described as a crush on a total stranger.

I gradually became very aware of a handsome man cycling in the opposite direction. After a while I would look for him and get that nice/horrible butterfly feeling when I saw him coming up Cheltenham Road. After treading the same path every day at roughly the same time, you can’t help but begin to recognise people – you probably see them more often than members of your family. There’s a woman I see all the time who wears lovely dresses; we started exchanging smiles after passing each other, usually in the Bear Pit, for about the twentieth time. It’s nice. 

Last summer, the man on the bike definitely starts recognising me. Smiles are exchanged. But it’s difficult to detect the tone; does he also imagine stopping his bike long enough for one of us to invite the other to breakfast? (I imagine being very late to work one day and that being the reason). Or does he wonder why some woman is smiling at him? Who knows. My friend says it sounds like a romantic comedy, and I picture a montage of us passing each other in different seasons and weathers – summer dresses and t-shirts are replaced by coats and swirling leaves; there is a plinky-plonky Wes Anderson-ian soundtrack – until eventually, somehow, we’re not strangers anymore. 

So, how best to advance? I’m not known for approaching strangers in the pub, let alone on the pavement. It’s logistically tricky. There are issues of road safety to consider. And almost as present as my vaguely felt concern that we might become another lost connection, is that he will one day stop but turn out not to speak any English, or that he’ll be allergic to cats.

But I never get to find out and this (admittedly unoriginal) film is never made. He disappears. Towards the end of the summer I’m left wondering if he’s moved house, or changed jobs, or been tragically knocked off his bike on the James Barton roundabout. 

Crushes are weird. They come out of nowhere and then they’re gone. Or they last a summer, for a few seconds each day, on a particular stretch of road, and then you’re left wondering about them months later.

The philosopher Alain de Botton has said about crushes that the person “across the train aisle or pavement constitutes a complete answer to our inner needs”. That from among all the people we encounter, however briefly, “we pick out a few examples who seem to us not merely interesting, but more powerfully, the solution to our lives.” Which I think is a bit much. But what makes us attracted to one person and not another? (said everyone ever since the dawn of civilisation.) God knows enough men cycle up Gloucester Road on drop-handlebar bikes every day, but I don’t recognise any of them anymore.

If this was a romantic comedy, he’d be reading this and it would end in a nice, predictable sort of way. Unless he’s allergic to cats.

Image: Solominviktor/ Shutterstock