Books. Who remembers those? The sub-30s now are scratching their heads; huh, books?! They are something in old movies, aren’t they? Huh, movies?! 

It’s easy to just dismiss books as old technology, and hit play on a five-minute (if you have an exceptionally long attention-span) video. Why read when everything you need is in your pocket? Because that thing in your pocket needs to die. It’s killed our ability to think, to savour, to sponge up knowledge, in favour of cheap nasty meaningless fluff. To read, to absorb the words laid out in front of your eyes without them being lasered by light, is something to behold, to be beholden to. To feel the paper betwixt your fingers is a tactile connection with a not-too-distant past that is rapidly being relegated to the virtual dustbin of time. It’s real, swimming against a current of overwhelming unreality.

Right, that’s the philosophical take, but what to read? Reading For Dummies? Another Harry Potter? Something with lots of photos? If you’re here reading this, there’s a good chance you’re into bikes and some form of riding them. My own bookshelf is dominated by cycling related tomes, from fiction to autobiographies to almanacs with lots of photos. They are all interesting, but sometimes you need more than how a race was won/lost and a heap of captions.

The subject of this review, yes I’m getting to it, has been sitting on the shelf for eight years, unread by me, yet loaned to some friends, one of whom hasn’t ridden a bike since school and is decades beyond graduation. If he had heard of it, and actually enjoyed it, then maybe it’s time I got stuck in. It was handed out to all our guests on a cycling tour in Belgium I had been a part of hosting back in 2015, and during the ten days I’d seen most of the attendees grasping their copy between riding and drinking, heads buried, chuckling away, not really engaging with anyone but the author.

Before I’d even completed Gironimo, I was ordering another of Tim Moore’s cycling-based comedic travel books, and couldn’t wait to finish it so I could start the next one. Every night I was shutting off the computer, eschewing the endless mindless digital drivel and reaching for the hardcover. Every night I was queried with “are you going to bed already?!” The anticipation, the need to know what mechanical misfortune was going to beset Moore’s hundred year old, wooden-rimmed bike, what near-death experience would be wrought by the criminally insane Italian drivers, what the riders of the 1914 Giro d’Italia went through a hundred years previous to the author’s seemingly batshit-craziness-inspired recreation of the route described as the hardest in the history of the race around the boot.

Moore’s lack of preparation, lack of training, lack of mechanical nous, and lack of self-awareness all pales in comparison to his complete lack of not giving a fuck about any of that, which is what makes him likeable, to an extent. But it’s the characters he encounters along the way, and in particular at the end of the journey that add the extra herbs to Moore’s staple daily meal of margherita pizza. It’s so basic and easily digestible, but still leaves you wanting a repeat serving the next day, knowing exactly what you’ll get but garnished with a hint of each region’s unique flavours to ensure you’ll enjoy it until the last mouthful.