IT’S A devil of a job to gift-wrap a bike, and getting it down the chimney is well-nigh impossible. But if you want to give the cyclist in your life a Christmas treat, what present might properly reflect his or her passion for two-wheel transport?
I am resolutely against the idea of giving bikes as presents. Or, to be more precise, I think that it is utterly stupid to give a bike without the person on the receiving end having tried it out beforehand. The choice of bike is a personal, intuitive thing. The bike magazines and websites may well have raved about a particular model — it has all the right gear, it is magnificently lightweight; objectively it is a great machine — but