The need to finally depart the ex-birdsite is becoming more pressing every time I look at it. I need to hurry up and say what I have to say by way of a eulogy for the good times.

I’ve been hesitating to tackle this bit because it feels like a big topic which I’m not sure I can address properly by dashing off a quick post. But as it’s one of the biggest positive things I’ve experienced over the Twitter years, I need to acknowledge it. And that is the chance I had to read stuff from, and interact with, lots of women, many of them rather brilliant, and all of them, er, women.

I don’t want to over-egg my feminist credentials, but I’ll say two things. The first is entirely selfish and it is that I’ve never felt like a success at being a dude. In the phases of my life where I tried in some way to belong to the dudely dudes, all I ever achieved was being a nasty little prick while failing to impress any of the other dudes. So I have a longstanding need to find a less dudely or even entirely non-dudely consciousness of myself. To be honest, the happiest situations I’ve experienced in work and other contexts have been in mixed teams or spaces of women & men. The other thing is gradually realising that women really are discriminated against in many ways that are systematically ingrained into how society works, and that this is wrong and squanders a lot of potential for good.

Cycling has been a thing that I learned to do in heavily male contexts. Both cycling as in actually riding a bike around the countryside (as a teenager) and cycling as in being a campaigner for cycling as an everday mode of mobility.

Riding a bike was something I learned from a couple of older men who organized a small informal touring club. One of whom is an absolutely saintly character. I have nothing but admiration for him. But our whole discourse among the group was dudely. Cycling virtues were spoken about, abeit often ironically, in terms of the hard men of the road; though we weren’t doing anything related to racing, heroes were the likes of Coppi or Kelly. (As a little guy who liked climbing hills, I had a fondness for the rider then known as Robert Millar, which has turned out interestingly). By the time I was a student, I started to head for the hills by myself to be in a different space. Studenting regularly got me overstressed and there were times when I’d ride off feeling quite weak and panicky, and discovered that by not worrying about how impressive my rides would be by dudely standards, I would gradually find a rhythm again between the landscape and the weather and stops for grub and how the effort of riding felt, and come back after a few days having regained some equilibrium.

These days we might call it self-medicating anxiety, but that was the mid-1980s in Ireland. I didn’t really have a language for it. And when my body got a little bit older and started to have issues, I didn’t have much of a language for that either, except the dudely idiom of no pain, no gain, etc.

Fast forward to the period from 2016ish when I revived riding around the hills. This coincided with Twitter. And Twitter gave me completely different mental coordinates for what I was doing. Firstly I could live-tweet a picture of some random bit of grass and sky and the next time I stopped, it would have a couple of likes. This still seems to me like often just the amount of company I want. A big difference from being alone. But secondly the people involved were no longer just dudes. There were a lot of women. And there was an easy mixing of people who did really impressive big things, such as a year mileage record, or massive audax histories, or even ultra endurance races, and ppl like myself who were just getting going again, or for the first time. And a very explicitly articulated ethos, largely led by women, that there is no wrong way to ride a bike. Everyone who is doing it is accepted. That riding a bike is for all kinds of people, fast, slow, queer, old, young, beginners, fat, thin, scratchers, winners, people who do it sportily in lycra and people who don’t, etc. etc. is a thing that has come to me largely thanks to women promoting it like this on social media. It’s friendly and encouraging and I’ve benefited a lot from it.

When it comes to cycling campaigning, this has historically also been a heavily dudely environment. Street design and engineering and officialdom is still (at least where I am) almost 100% male. And campaigning organizations used to be not a lot better. A lot of the dialogue between the two has historically been dudes trying to out-trump each other with superior expertise and cleverness. Within the campaigning orgs, dudes compete with each other over which is the most important dogma and who represents it most staunchly. Committee meetings stretch into infinity because we’re all giving speeches that are more comment than question and trying to have the last word. It’s all a bit incongruous for a movement whose ostensible goals are making streets less aggressive, more inclusive, objectively and subjectively safer, more welcoming places for people who are not committed experts at riding bikes. Add to this that the patterns of mobility we all pay lip service to – the Stadt der kurzen Wege, the 15-minute city, trip chaining, etc. – already exist, and in many places the people who are already living those patterns in the most exemplary way are women, but do we involve them? Nah. This whole situation is just ridiculous. So it’s been good to see women taking more of a role in everyday-cycling activism. We need a lot more of that.

Of course these are just two specific areas and there’s a lot more to life than just riding a bike, and I followed, and interacted with, many other women about an eclectic range of other topics. Just one celebrity name-drop here because it shows a kind of thing I think only Twitter could have done. One rainy morning in Paris as was bumbling around the Cimetière Montparnasse, looking for Samuel Beckett’s grave, a little woman in a dramatic black cape showed up doing the same – and I knew who she was. It was Sinéad Burke, of Vogue-cover fame. Now I’m the last fecker in the world to pay any attention to the world of women’s fashion, and body positivity was definitely a concept I first heard of on Twitter, but I had noticed her there. Another good one was when I was able to truthfully mention to an Irish friend that I had chatted to Izzy Kamikaze on Twitter. That earned me a couple of brownie points :-). But I wouldn’t have known who Izzy was, either, if I hadn’t been on Twitter.

Anyway. Thanks for the fun, the education and for putting up with me. Even if it’s gone forever, my world is different, and better, for having been in that space with you all. Merci!