For some reason I continue to be surprised when correspondents call me Brian. I’ll be frank, that’s not my real name…and, no, neither is Frank!

I enjoy writing under a nom-de-clavier as it provides a limited degree of privacy and a greater degree of intellectual escapism. I can experiment, discuss and develop new themes and ideas without caring one jot about professional credibility. I can even call myself Brian. And yes, I was kidding about the credibility…

Careful readers may have noticed that I prefer to write about bicycles and bicyclism rather than “cycling” – a term too often appropriated by the sport cycling industry to the detriment, I believe, of ordinary riders of bicycles. Let’s be clear, I regard humbly riding a bicycle to work on a daily basis as far more heroic than repeatedly circumcycling a velodrome in pursuit of glory or gold and a damned sight more socially and economically valuable too!

I may not always succeed but I try to treat the bicycle as a metaphor or analogue for something. Ocassionally I’ll just write a meditation on tinkering with an old bicycle – a literary brico-cyc-lage – often with obsessive attention to unimportant detail.  If it doesn’t work, it doesn’t matter. Sometimes I get it into my head to dig up random trivia.  And quotes! I love finding references which express an attuitude towards the bicycle or bicyclism.

But I digress. The name – Flaneur Brian – is perhaps best considered a polyseme; a vaguely Joycean homonymic homage to Flann O’Brien, author of The Third Policeman, as well as being an amalgam of the Flâneur and the bemused victim of happenstance (epitomised by Brian, in Monty Python’s Life of) to compose a character that represents, to me at least, an archetypal urban bicyclist in the transportation paragone of the twenty-first century.

Have I lost you yet?

Call me eccentric…but you can call me Brian.

R:B