April 2024

Manufacture Berthoud Cycles
Texte : Jean-Acier DANÈS

Every day in April, I listen to the clock as it ticks away;

    Every day in April, I listen to the clock as it ticks away; April goes with the beat of a tick, tock, tick, tock, and at a regularity that I question.

  Before it, winter was wet. It's something I've come to grasp when I'm servicing my bikes: worn chains, blown brake pads, pitted tubes, tyres studded with cuts, dry bearings. It's nothing after all, happiness is a balance, a contrast. Happy is the person who links time and space and discovers the world!

   From the very beginning of this Journal we had a conversation at the Manufacture Berthoud in Fleurville, I remember being in the office with Philippe and Denis and hearing this question: ‘What is it that drives you to pedal with Berthoud equipment?’ It's not just the taste of a distinction, a conquest, a requirement, or a social and environmental vow. It's a confidence, a choice, a pleasure. Thinking about it, when I am doing so (gauging my tastes), it means that I am trying to answer the question: ‘Why do we ride?’ or ‘Why have the designers at Berthoud been helping us to think intelligently about our adventures for 77 years?’

bike ride in the forest

Photo credits: © Philippe Marguet

    In April, I said to myself that the reason I was so keen on durable, well-executed products was because of the relationship I had developed with space through cycling. The reason why I've never stopped pedalling, ever since I learned to balance as a child, is because one day I realised that the bicycle enabled us to embrace the world in one piece. A bicycle is not just a racing car, or a companion for adventure, escape, travel or achievement, but a formidable tool for understanding the relationship between time and space. To find your speed, based on the geography of a continent, and the size of a mountain. To see the seasons. To know that in the dead of night, you'll have to eat here or there, to learn to adapt your desires to the realities, your ego to your heartbeat or the pace of your calves.

    Cycling allows you to make memories across landscapes, explore geography and experience your own age, time and availability. Do you remember a time when, as a youngster, you only had a very vague, uncertain sense of a journey, a distance or a territory? When we were young, we used to take the bus, the car, the train, even the plane, and we were fascinated but less realistic about the landscapes we saw. A grove of trees was a world, and a three-hour drive was practically nothing. Then one day, I started riding my bike. To move around on my own, to think about my own routes, to conquer my freedom with geography: I learned so many truths from the road.

landscape seen by a cyclist

Photo credits: © Philippe Marguet

    Cycling allows you to combine the essential with material constraints: it's both a way to recharge your batteries and to become aware of every second, every curve and every mountain pass. All of a sudden, a length between two towns becomes a cycle time (possible, or too ambitious?), a bidon, a banana or a bar becomes the duration of an effort, a night means a number of kilometres, fears or breaks. We can no longer separate the map unfolding before our eyes from a number. We are living tachometers. And what a joy it is to connect in this way with everything around us, which is why I love using good equipment. Beautiful tools, extraordinary handlebar bags, things that are sustainable and made to last: these objects exude the possibility of choosing what you want, of completing an escapade, of dreaming beyond the horizon.

    We have lives that are bursting at the seams. Children growing faster than a sunflower, an Earth cracking open, drones so fast we can't see them any more, water escaping and soiling itself between our thick human fingers, solicitations straining unsuspected nerves, screens with refreshing rate too fast for our brains, even beyond the speed of our retinas, and on every foot where we put our body weight, we have the feeling of instability. Imagine running across a pond, jumping from lily pad to lily pad, and the slightest slowdown means next thing you know you’ll be sinking, taking on water.

    More often than not, we need to find our speed, our rhythm, our cadence, take the time to digest, shape, encounter and raise our heads. This is what April allows us to do: to win a victory with patience, to appreciate a solemn gentleness, to cherish simple but obvious things, to know the grandeur of a plain or the narrowness of a path, the age of a stone or the fragility of a tree. Rediscovering the taste of a rhubarb, the bronze texture of a garden summer brasero, the delicacy of a tablecloth spread out in the sun.

bike ride in the forest

Photo credits: © Philippe Marguet

    Riding around the Manufacture in April is a good way of taking the measure of this time. It's a gruelling but sweet month - full of activity, with projects on every side intensifying, dreams taking shape, launches rolling out and needing to be fuelled like a small fire. April is the month when, one evening, you forget all your repair kit after having thoroughly cleaned your bike the night before. That day, as you'd expect, you get a puncture and must fiddle with it, sheltered from the warm rain under a tree, then brave the last 15 kilometres with a knotted inner tube just before the leaking hole. A scene worthy of a Chaplin film, to the throbbing rhythm of an irregular tyre tataTontataTontataTon!

    "April, how many evenings spent dreaming of new bikes, just in time for summer and its mileage frenzy, comparing modern mechanical groupsets (Campagnolo fans, let's unite!) Between two torrential downpours, opening the waterproof jacket, hearing an icy, light balm, a free frost running across the chest to the clear sound of a bird singing. And plop, and plop, and plop, under a green leaf weighed down by water, a toad hides under a cathedral roof, a pheasant darts through the undergrowth, and on the saddle the man feels a smile springing up from nowhere. The white socks on the pedals get busy. You'd like to live just for the heedlessness of it, not to hear it crack, to like to take your distance. To simply provoke nature and ask her to create everything for us. Just flap your wings, let yourself be carried away, flood your mouth with fruit and immerse your body in the first water basin, fountain or container that come along. Forget about opposites, see only what pleases you, never land on a restless branch, never confront the buzz calendar. Enjoy dreaming, watching the clouds, the wonderful clouds. A bike and a bit of time. Oil, a gravel path, pine trees, a ledge or hill and a bit of momentum. Today, I am twenty-seven years old (the date of going online corresponds). Bernard Pivot has just passed away this week. And yet, as a dancer, poised on the uncertain balance of the world for the moment, all is well. The fizz. Without egotism. A silent participant in a sublime choir"

    That's it for this month. April came to an end at the VéloInParis trade show, with Marjorie presenting the latest products from the Manufacture to customers: some very nice frame and fork bags, ready-to-ride and custom bikes, and new hubs and lighting from the SON catalogue. I drink a coffee, then a tea, to warm up while chatting. Philippe and I talk about short nights, the difficulties of creating in France, brilliant and exciting projects, and the joy of this magazine, which also allows us to take stock of the passage of time and to search, month after month, for the theme, the entry, the words. On my way out through the Japanese-style pagoda of the Parc Floral de Vincennes, I see a green peacock snorting in the rain among the camellias. It's so hard to talk about what brings us together, and yet it's so obvious when you meet people who share the same passions as you.

    See you soon, for the month of May.

Jean-Acier DANÈS, author of the book Bicyclettres (Seuil).

October 2024

October 2024

October is a harvest of sunlight. The world is drenched in cinnamon, the leaves have hues of maple syrup and my heart full of envy illuminates the lines of this landscape notebook like a Jack’O Lantern pumpkin.

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Editorial: the monthly journal of Manufacture Berthoud
Jean-Acier DANÈS
September 2024

September 2024

I have two wishes for September, the first being to evoke the feeling of putting on a pair of long shorts again and riding through the woods towards a cup of cappuccino and a slice of cake.

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Editorial: the monthly journal of Manufacture Berthoud
Jean-Acier DANÈS
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