Issue #18: Planning For My Birthday, Cycle Trip to Oxford, Diderot Effect, and Books

This article is two days late. That is because I have had a lot more on my plate lately. My birthday is in just over a week and one of the things I have always wanted to do is a long cycle ride from London to maybe Brighton, Bath, Cambridge, or Oxford. I have been to the other three cities but never been to Oxford, so I have settled on Oxford as my destination. In the next four days, I will hop on my bicycle around 7 am and cover the 94km1 distance between my flat and my destination (Oxford University) in about 6 hours. From my calculations and from my recent training trips, I reckon I can do it in about 4 hours 30 minutes, but I am not going to push it. I will take it easy. The goal is to get to the end. It is not about speed. I have discussed the trip with different people, and people always ask how I plan on getting back to London. The answer is that I will take the train back. I will take my bicycle on the train, get into a silent coach, slide into one of the chairs, and just sleep off. There is no way I will do another 94km back. I am not yet fit and strong enough for that.

I got a new road bicycle for this trip. It is super light and moves faster than the old one I had. That purchase has caused an avalanche of other purchases. I have bought a new helmet, gotten new bicycle accessories, bought a portable cooler bag to keep my water, energy drinks and food cool throughout my ride, a helmet camera to record my trip, and a raft of other small items I probably won’t remember until Amazon delivers them. The name of this phenomenon where purchasing an item triggers the purchase of many other items is the Diderot Effect, and I have been fascinated by it since I first encountered it in James Clear’s book - Atomic Habits.

Between recovering from long training cycle rides that leave me exhausted, I managed to finish two wonderful novels. Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead and Tomorrow Died Yesterday by Chimeka Garricks.

Mr Colson is an accomplished writer who has won two Pulitzer Prize for Fiction awards, and Harlem Shuffle made it very clear why he is so well-regarded. Harlem Shuffle was set in the early 1960s in Harlem, New York, and it follows the story of Ray Carney, an ordinary, but ambitious furniture man who is married to Elizabeth with whom he is expecting a second child. His in-laws look down on him, and he dreams of climbing society’s social ladder and moving to a nice neighbourhood. Money is tight though, so he often sells supposedly stolen goods that his cousin Freddie brings to him from time to time. He gets pulled deeper into a life of crime when Freddie got involved in a plan to rob a famous hotel in Harlem. The book touches on race, power, ethics and morality, and the double lives many ordinary people sometimes live. The reader follows Ray through the book as he gets deeply involved in unsavoury activities, and the pitfalls and dangers he has to navigate.

I think it is a wonderful book. The writing is exquisite, the character development is solid, and the plot progression is good. I highly recommend it.

Below are two of the sentences I enjoyed in the book:

The way he saw it, living taught you that you didn’t have to live the way you’d been taught to live. You came from one place but more important was where you decided to go.

Everyone had secret corners and alleys that no else saw - what mattered were your major streets and boulevards, the stuff that showed up on other people’s maps of you.

Unlike Colson Whitehead, Chimeka Garricks hasn’t yet won a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, but the story he told in Tomorrow Died Yesterday is amazing and deeply compelling.

The story follows four old friends whose lives become reconnected after the kidnapping of an oil company’s staff goes horribly wrong. Doughboy, one of the four friends, is responsible for the kidnapping. The oil worker died in his custody. His friend, Amiabi, a calm university lecturer and ferocious government critic, becomes involved in the mess and is unjustly arrested for kidnapping. Kaniye, their lawyer friend turned restaurant owner becomes involved and tries to prove Amiabi innocence in court, and there is Tubo, their treacherous friend who can’t be trusted. The story is set in Port Harcourt and tells the story of people in the Niger Delta region, a region in turmoil often neglected, and reeling from the effects of environmental degradation caused by oil exploration. I enjoyed the book.

94km is about the distance between Abeokuta and Lagos.