Abstract :
Last summer, like many men of a certain age, I watched the Tour de France sweep along the roads of my home county of Yorkshire and immediately went out and bought a road bike. For a mountain biker with 30 years of experience, this was close to heresy, but even so, within a few weeks I???d become slightly obsessed with my new machine ??? so much so that four months later I bought a second road bike on a principle well-established amongst cyclists: the optimum number of bikes to own is n+1 where n= the number of bikes already owned.