I chose my last bike because it was cheap as well as comfortable. This time around I have a bigger budget and am looking for something of better quality that will last and won't require masses of maintenance. I am not a person who tinkers with bikes, I prefer to pay other people to tinker with them on my behalf.
The first difficulty turned out to be finding a second-hand bike that fitted my specification. Almost all second-hand bikes are boy-shaped mountain bikes with knobbly tyres and without mudguards.
I don't want one like that.
I'd heard a rumour that a charity shop a bus-ride away had a Dutch-style bike for sale at £75, but it didn't seem likely it would be a good quality reconditioned bike, so I didn't bother catching the bus to go and look at it.
Instead I Googled makes and models I thought might interest me and realised very quickly that anything I regard as worth having is unlikely to be readily available locally second-hand.
I could get a train to Flitwick and pick up a brand new Ridgeback Avenida 7 for the most I am prepared to pay for a decent bike, but before doing anything quite as rash as that I Googled “bike shops near me”, just in case I had missed anything. Sure enough I had, there's one I haven't tried, just a few minutes walk from my flat, so I went to see what they had. They seemed to have only boy-shaped mountain bikes with knobbly tyres and without mudguards, so I told them I was looking for a girl-shaped step-through non-electric commuter bike and they sent me up a metal staircase outside.
And there I found this. It's a brand new Liv Flourish 1 for the same price as the Ridgeback in Flitwick, both bikes appear to have exactly the same specification, the only differences being the choice of paint colour and some slight variation in the structural shape. The local shop include services after six weeks and again every year forever in the purchase price, so that seems to have saved me several train journeys to Flitwick.
Hopefully I will never need another bicycle.
It may have been rash. Perhaps if I had the energy to trawl through pages of internet ads and then go and look at bikes for sale that weren't too far away I might have found something cheaper, but it wouldn't have come with a guarantee or free services and I would have spent the entire weekend traipsing all over the place on buses, perhaps ending up empty-handed and having to get a bus to work again on Tuesday.