Daisy Daisy – Bicycles, Bifurcation and the Yorkshire Gene Pool is gathering momentum. This art commission for The Dales Countryside Museum is a celebration of the bicycle in Yorkshire. An exhibition of recycled and recovered bicycle seats accompanied by my short film will start in Hawes in June as Grand Depart fever hits Yorkshire.

Wonderful archive photos are being dusted off and new ones brought in.

Postcards are now out asking for your cyclista love stories…and fantastic tales are emerging. One lady confesses a guilty secret that she was a tandem racer in her youth… another simply wrote I call my bike my Freedom Machine.

Learning to ride at 53, suffragette Frances E. Willard called her bicycle Gladys because it’s ‘bright spirit’ and ‘exhilarating motion’ gladdened her heart.

Meanwhile I have had christened my own red tandem Daisy May… buying our original heroine Daisy Bell some time to take a variety of cycling partners for a spin before giving her final answer and I am looking for volunteer tandemistas to star in my film.