Publishing Company Blog | The secret life of a cycle courier

Written By Unknown on Friday, May 1, 2015 | 7:11 AM

London behind the scenes, the sweet smell of petrol and a blissful exhaustion – teabags delivered to Buckingham Palace and alleycat races … extracts from Cyclogeography, Jon Day’s account of the years he spent hitting the tarmac

When I became a bicycle courier I found that I loved cycling for a living. I loved the exhilaration of pedalling quickly through the city, flowing between stationary cars and weaving through the lines of moving traffic. I loved the mindlessness of the job, the absolute focus on the body in movement, the absence of office politics and cubicle-induced anxiety. I loved the blissful, annihilating exhaustion at the end of a day’s work, the dead sleep haunted only by memories of the bicycle. Hypnagogic jerks, those juddery twitches that occur on the edges of sleep, were smoothed out into circular pedal-strokes of the legs. Most of all, I loved learning what London taxi drivers call the Knowledge: the litany of street names and business addresses that constitutes a particular map of the city, parallel to that contained within the A–Z street atlas but written on the brain, read by leg and eye.

As a courier you learn to inhabit the places in between the pickups and the drops. You learn the secret smells of the city: summer’s burnt metallic tang; the sweetness of petrol; the earthy comfort of freshly laid tarmac. Some parts of London have their own smells, like olfactory postcodes. The shisha bars on Edgware Road fill the area with a sweet smoky haze; the mineral tang of Billingsgate fish market wafts over the Isle of Dogs.

Like going away to sea, or joining the circus, couriering can appeal, as it did for me, as a mild act of rebellion

By the end of the day you wear the city. Grit-bearded and fume-lunged, your fingers are covered in dark tarmacky shadows