I move this weekend, after eight months of doing up the house. It means I’ll be closer to town, so won’t need to use the car for the station each day. My petrol consumption – and with it the cost of running the car – should decrease rapidly, and I reckon I’ll only be filling up once every month to five weeks. At the moment it’s more or less fortnightly.

It’s got me to thinking about how I can use the car even less, though, and switch to the bike for all but the longest or most impractical journeys, which is why a little column in today’s Guardian about attaching trailers to your bike for shopping and the like caught my eye.

The appropriately-named Bikes and Trailers specialises in such things, and I see from looking at their site that they come in all shapes and sizes. It’s like adding a boot to your bike, and although you wouldn’t use it for a trip to Ikea, something like a Mini-Boy or a Bike-Hod would be far more suitable than a ruck-sack for the weekly shop, particularly as I can get to the town centre Tesco entirely on cycle paths.

In fact, the Hod is designed specifically for shopping, as you can unhook it from the bike and wheel it around the supermarket, scanning your items as you go, dropping them into the Hod, paying at the self-service till and then hooking it up to your bike again for the ride home. It all sounds very efficient.

Only trouble is, it looks like an old lady tartan shopping trolley.

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bike trolley, shopping, cycling

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