In the final installment in our series Women on Wheels, Liz Seabrook spoke to Kat Jungnickel about riding - and racing - a penny farthing. 

This interview was first published in Issue 26. You can buy the issue here or subscribe to Oh Comely here. 

It’s quite something cycling through London behind a penny-farthing. People stare, smile, laugh, point and shout, and fellow cyclists ding their bells in unison. It’s quite the event. Perched on top of this penny-farthing is Kat Jungnickel. I met Kat three springs ago. I’d just moved to London and I had a commission from Bristol-based bike magazine, Boneshaker. Since taking her portrait one early summer morning on Brick Lane, I’ve bumped into Kat (and Penny) decked out in handmade period garb for the Tweed Run, racing in the Nocturne races at Smithfield and at various other cycling hotspots across the city. Naturally I wondered: how do you become a penny-farthing racer? For Kat, it all began at the age of nine with a step-through lemon Apollo, which was slightly too big and had a basket on the front.

“It was a classic first bike. I grew into it and grew out of it. I used to attempt BMX jumps on it, down in the local reserve,” she smiles mischievously as we chat in the sun in London’s Victoria Park. “I’d help the boys build the jumps, but I didn’t have a BMX. They wouldn’t let me ride theirs, so I would just try anyway. I didn’t break anything, but often ended up tangled in the sides of the jump. It was always great fun.”

Kat grew up in Newcastle, Australia, an industrial town some four hours north of Sydney. When I ask her whether there was a cycle culture when she was growing up, she looks perplexed, as if she’s never considered it before. This is interesting, as Kat has studied many cycle cultures in the UK for postdoctoral research. “Australia has a very car-dominated culture. It’s a rite of passage; when you were of age you swapped your bike for car. Cycling was how we got to school, how we played and how we’d get to the local pool.”

Seventeen years ago, Kat arrived in London to “have a look.” In my mind, to be the prolific cyclist that Kat is today, bikes must have always been part of her day-to-day existence. But this is not the case: “Arriving in London, I found the public transport system extraordinary. It actually worked so much better than it did in Australia. I remember one of my flatmates’ friends gave her a bike and it just sat in our hallway. No one touched it. Looking back it’s so funny that I didn’t recognise its potential for my life.”

After a few years in the city, Kat returned to university. Campus was swarming with bicycles and cycling drifted back into Kat’s consciousness. Serendipitously, this awakening coincided with a friend leaving the London to return to his native Chicago to complete a post-doc. “He was giving away books, beans, rice, and his bike. It wasn’t anything extraordinary—a Specialized Hardrock steel bike—but he clearly had a special connection to it. This was his lemon Apollo. We agreed that I’d look after it for him on a sort of extended loan, along with his stinky helmet, old lock and some lights. I had everything I needed.”

They say you never forget how to ride a bike and to some extent that’s true, but you do forget how to balance. You forget how to ride with confidence and you forget how traffic moves. And at this point, Kat hadn’t ridden a bike in quite some time. “I cycled from his house in Clapton back into town, and it was terrifying! I couldn’t take a hand off the handlebars to indicate and I did a few Flintstones stops, but I was absolutely exhilarated. I couldn’t believe the high that I had from that cycle home. I felt I was flying like the wind—I remember going past buses and thinking I was superhuman. I just couldn’t get the smile off my face.”

For five years Kat and this slightly-too-big bike were firm friends, commuting, touring the Outer Hebrides and riding all the way from Hackney to Bilbao. Then, it was polished up and shipped back to the US with a courier that cost far more than the bike’s monetary value.

A few years later, Kat found herself back in Australia working on a PhD researching DIY technologies. One day, she found a flyer attached to her bike inviting her to a ‘tall bike jousting’ event. “I turned up at the Arena of Scrapey, a car park with very uneven asphalt, and it was madness. People had hand-built rubbish bicycles: very tall ones, very long ones, crazy choppers and a few penny-farthings. There was huge music, lots of drinking and I felt like I had found my people. A person with a penny let me ride it. I had my foot on the step and hand on the handlebars, and I remember thinking it was interesting but mainly just a massively ridiculous bicycle. Then I got on it, and realised I needed one.”

When I ask why, she simply asks if I’ve ever ridden one. I shake my head, secretly hoping she’ll offer me a go. “It’s a completely different feeling. There’s something incredibly beautiful about riding it. You find yourself engaging differently with the landscape in which you’re riding. You have to think about speed bumps, potholes, low-hanging trees and how to get off. Every bike is a different experience, but the penny just shifts everything again.”

One day in 2007, Kat picked her penny up from an airport in Adelaide. “Some friends put it together in the car park, which is where I took my first significant tumble, trying to get off to the side like a normal bike. My feet got caught in the spokes and I fell head first into a hedge.” A year later, Kat was back in Tasmania at the Australian penny championships; in her first ever penny race she placed second.

Since acquiring Penny, Kat has continued to race, ridden through the Peak District and fallen into several more hedges. Only once has she achieved what is known as an ‘imperial crowner’, where front wheel stops dead and the rest of the bike pitches over the front. “I had a jumper around my waist and it went into the wheel. I ended up face-planting with my legs caught in the wheel, stuck vertically.”

When I ask what’s next, that glimmer of mischief returns to her face and I’m suddenly looking into the face of a curly-haired nine-year-old, tangled in the frame of a lemon Apollo. She points to a long scar down the length of her shin, “I did that jumping off the jetty into a lake last year on my friend’s BMX, so I decided to get some tuition.” At 42 years old, Kat has just begun BMX lessons.

Read more in this series: Lois Pendlebury Rides a Skateboard; Meg Peplowen Rides a Mobility Scooter; Pam Prescod Drives a Bus; Stefanie Mainey Competes on Roller Skates. 

In the fourth in our series Women on Wheels, Mia Kingsley chatted to Lois Pendlebury about how she started skateboarding fifteen years ago and hasn't looked back since. 

This interview was first published in Issue 26. You can buy the issue here or subscribe to Oh Comely here. 

I meet Lois Pendlebury at Victoria station. After a brief introduction, she glides ahead of me in search of a place to talk. A long-time professional skateboarder, Lois was born in Bradford and turns thirty in September. As she weaves in and out of the human traffic, she breathes an air of agility—so it’s no surprise that she has been skating for the better part of fifteen years. But it isn’t the tricks of the trade that have captured Lois’s heart, it’s the community and adventure that skating has brought her, since her first session spent sharing a beat-up set of wheels.

How did you start skating? I was fifteen and a friend of mine had a skateboard from Argos with an alien on the bottom. We started skating on that one summer holiday before going into Year Eleven and then we snapped it, so we got a new one each after that. The first skate park we went to took us three bus journeys to get there, all our spending money, and we would eat twelve snickers just to get through it. It was a full-on mission. We would get there and skate until we were done for.

It must have been exciting, to venture out of that first skate park and explore the world of skating. It was unreal, that is why I still do it today. It’s the adventure that’s involved, the missions, the journeys.

How do you feel when you don’t have your skateboard with you? I imagine it acts as a piece of freedom. Yes, I have formed a strong attachment to my skateboard; it’s a weapon, it’s your protection, and it’s your mode of transportation. I get frustrated when I have to walk places, especially a route that I would normally skate, so I start running. Although there was a period when I would skate to work, which can be fun. I call it the muggle juggle.

The what? The muggle juggle! Muggles are like the norms, aren’t they? The non-radical.

As in Harry Potter muggles? Yes, I would just skate through them all, walking with their briefcases and their miserable faces.

Is that a well-known comparison within the skate world? No, I’m pretty sure I coined that one. I can claim that: the muggle juggle.

Have you ever had a serious injury? Yes, plenty. (Lois flicks out her whole front right tooth with her tongue.) That one is pretty bad. I can’t eat with it in.

Wow! I don’t even know how to put that into words. You will have to insert some brackets, “Lois’ front tooth just started winking at me!”

But you still do it? It’s like being Bart Simpson in real life. When you’re skating, you are in control of something. These wheels are underneath your feet. You use your feet and your body and your mind.

Read More in this series: Meg Peplowen Rides a Mobility Scooter, Pam Prescod Drives a Bus, Stefanie Mainey Competes on Roller Skates.

My mum was in need of a holiday; I am currently living one long one. She was talking enviously of a friend's bike trip; I wanted something active to do. Oh Comely was publishing the Wheels issue; we decided to cycle the Atlantic Coast of France.

I didn't have a bicycle - I hadn't even been on one for months. I borrowed one from a friend and my cousin lent the two of us a tent. We bought a book and booked a ferry. We said goodbye to Berkhamsted, and we were off. 

We followed the Eurovelo Route 1, otherwise known as La Velodyssee. It took us from Roscoff all the way to the French Frontier. We cycled down Hydrangea-lined canals, beside sunflower fields and wild flower meadows, through 'ville fleuries' along 'voie vertes', all the way to the sea.

From there we followed the coast, past oyster farms and fishermen's ports, past rocky coves, wide sandy beaches and vast dunes until we were in France no more. 

We saw all sorts of bikes, from tandems to recumbents and even a unicycle. I made it my mission to perfect the cyclist's nod of acknowledgment and felt encouraged by the sense of camaraderie along the cycle paths. Although it wasn’t difficult, never having done anything like it before made it feel like a challenge. 

Thankfully, everything being in kilometres made it seem like we travelled distances much quicker than had it been in miles. I grew to love the feeling of being constantly on the move. Not least for the joyous sense of freewheeling down hills but also for a much larger sense of freedom: observing the changing scenery through the passing of the day; witnessing the morning mists rise from the water as the day began to warm; experiencing the heat as the sun rose high in the sky, and then watching it set again as we put up our tent for the night. 

It wasn't always beautiful but it was always very French. Sometimes it wasn't easy to find the way but it was mostly very flat. There might not have been a single boat along the canal but I did see my first ever otter. I got a sock caught in the gear shift but I didn't even get a single puncture.

I would highly recommend it to any first time cycle holidayer. In fact I enjoyed it so much I'm carrying on...

Photos: Olivia Wilson

In the third in our series Women on Wheels, editor Liz spoke to Meg Peplowen about getting around on a mobility scooter.

This interview was first published in Issue 26. You can buy the issue here or subscribe to Oh Comely here. 

Meg Peplowen‘s reputation has preceded her. Her scooter is just back from the repairman after she burnt out its motor brushes in a mere two years. I‘ve heard tales of her riding it down rough tracks and hauling herself over low-hanging branches—no small feat given that MS limits her mobility. At home in picturesque Snowdonia, I call Meg for a chat about how wheels have enhanced her life.

I hear you‘re quite hard on your scooters. The first one that I had, I struck lucky and got a secondhand old tank, absolutely brilliant. It lasted me ten years or so of really pushing it, going off on bumpy tracks and up steep hills. The scooter I‘ve got now is not quite so robust. So I‘ve been a bit more gentle on it, but I just can‘t give up getting out of the village and there are some quite steep roads out. They give you a feeling of height and being away from things.

When you first got it, how did it change your life? With MS, like a lot of chronic illnesses, a major part is balancing how you‘re using your energy. I‘ve always loved being out in nature, and I used to love walking—I‘d walk really far. Having the scooter allowed me to do the boring bits of the walk, through the village and up the hill, and then I‘d park my scooter on the side of the road and head off on my crutches. If I‘d set off walking from my house, by the time I‘d got to anywhere nice, I would be too exhausted to go any further. It was a huge increase in my freedom, and it has really helped me cope with the decreasing ability to walk.

Some people use scooters and some people use wheelchairs, and I was wondering what determines which one you go for. I wouldn‘t feel secure enough on a powered wheelchair going along roads or tracks. The big plus for wheelchairs is their manoeuvrability. I‘ll use my wheelchair to get around the house on days when my legs are really buckling. And I have a very heroic spouse who will push me on it. There‘s a quarry where you can walk all the way along to the end of one of the lowest slag heaps, then there‘s a wonderful view out over the valley. I hadn‘t been up there for years and my partner Nick pushed me up there and along this hill. They had put a new safety fence there that goes up nearly five feet. So I was there in the wheelchair with this big horrible ugly fence between me and the view. We got to the end, and I stood up, but it still wasn‘t enough for me to be able to see over, so I decided to climb over the fence. I was using my wheelchair as a climbing prop, and I‘ve got one very unmoveable leg, so it‘s really quite a challenge to get that over the fence, but I managed it.

And then you had to get back over the fence the other way without the wheelchair! Yes. Without the wheelchair. Nature is a very replenishing thing, though. In a way, I had more ability for climbing back over.

Read more in this series: Pam Prescod Drives a Bus; Stefanie Mainey Competes on Roller Skates.

In the second in our series on Women on Wheels, Sadbh spoke to Pam Prescod, who's driven a public bus for eleven years and takes no funny business from anyone. 

This interview was first published in Issue 26. You can buy the issue here or subscribe to Oh Comely here. 

When I meet Pam Prescod in the Tower Transit depot in Leyton, it’s a glaringly bright day and Pam is running around pretending to hide from management. Ducking and diving between the other drivers the heat doesn’t faze her—all she cares about is her half-faked fear of working another shift that Tuesday. “I’m not here!” she whispers, laughing.

It’s her cheekiness and pragmatism that catches my attention. Pam’s been a driver with Tower Transit for eleven years and drives the 308, the W14 and the RV1 (her favourite). The job has its ups and downs, but Pam has an impressive kind of patience and humour with which she tackles the day to day.

Why did you start driving buses? I like driving. I’ve always been driving from when I was young, so I thought, “What about doing it as a job?” So that’s what I tried to do. I didn’t pass first time, didn’t pass second time, but the examiner saw me and said, “We’re going to pass you,” because I kept missing it by one point! I’ve been at Tower Transit ever since. I’m a spare driver now. I love this job because you’re independent, even though there are lots of people watching you. You’re working freelance and you get to choose the times you work.

Eleven years is a long time. You must enjoy it. It’s good fun. Actually they had a bet when I first started that I’d only last about four months. I proved them all wrong, because they’ve gone and I’m still here! I used to cry, and they called me crybaby. Then I toughened up. It’s not that I don’t care, it’s just that I’ve toughened to the point where I don’t get too emotional.

How do you deal with rude passengers? You have to educate them in your diplomatic way, and try and stay calm. I had a situation on the 308 that I had to deal with diplomatically. This guy was shouting and screaming, and I let him get on with it. The thing was that he came back and said sorry. You start on the driver because that’s your first front. You just let them cool themselves, they finish, they take a seat and then when you’ve finished getting them to their destination, they’ll come back and say, “Sorry, driver, I didn’t mean to have a go.” And I get that.

I think people assume that because there’s the glass there, it’s not a person behind it. We’re human. But they expect a robot.

So how do you show people that you’re not a robot? You have to be patient. Everyone just wants to tap and go, but you’ll get the odd one that wants to mess about, feeling their clothes for their oyster card. I call it, “Head, shoulders, knees and toes,” and I go, “Oh, you’re doing that dance! Yeah, I know that one, let’s do that together.” Then I wait a bit and say, “Listen, these people want to get to work, and you’re doing a song and dance. Let’s not go down that road, bye-bye.” I’m a character, that’s just who I am, and this job did take it out of me in the beginning. I’m the same person, but I don’t take it too deeply anymore. If someone is angry, let them get angry and move it on.

Read more in this series: Stefanie Mainey Competes on Roller Skates. 

The Wheels Issue is now out! In it, we interviewed five incredible women who each use a different set of wheels in their everyday lives. Over the next few weeks, we'll be sharing their portraits and stories. First up is Stefanie Mainey, who competes on rollerskates. 

You can buy Issue 26 here or subscribe to Oh Comely here. 

Stefanie Mainey is a full-time roller derby coach, number thirteen in the London Rollergirls A-team, London Brawling, and the captain of Team England. Roller derby is a violent speed-skating sport with a female-dominated elite, and I would have missed the chance to speak to Stefanie entirely were it not for her resolve to train at every opportunity possible. She had just returned from a coaching job in Vienna and was about to set off for San Francisco, but squeezed in a training session at her community hall between the two, and it was here that we met.

Why did you get into roller derby? I saw it on the TV about nine years ago, looked it up and found the London Rollergirls. I went to a skate shop in London and I bought all my equipment, including some skates that cost about fifty pounds.

That’s cheap, right? Yes! I went along to my first session shortly after and really, really enjoyed it. I’m still doing it eight years later.

I read an interview with you when you’d been doing it about five years and you said, “Oh, maybe two, three years tops because of my knees.” But you’re still here! I have some extremely good-quality knee pads! Five years ago I wasn’t doing any exercise outside of roller derby and that was considered enough then. Now I go to the gym about four or five times a week, I strengthen all the ligaments and muscles around my knees, I do a lot of holistic stuff, stay away from refined foods and I take a lot of vitamins. Basically I do lots of boring things to try and give me the longevity to keep playing the game.

Is it as aggressive as it looks? Yes. You have to think about it like boxing: you don’t go out with flailing limbs to completely kill someone. You have to be controlled and considerate, and you have to protect yourself. But if I am playing a game against a top-tiered team, I am going in to hurt them, I’m going in to make them think twice about blocking me again. I have to be conservative with how I play, but I’m definitely going in to hit people as hard as I can.

I’m trying to reconcile this with what I’ve heard about everyone being so supportive and sisterly. The people that I’m trying to make sure never block me again are also some of my best friends. They’re jammers, I’m a blocker. They’re going to try and throw me off my skates and I’m going to try and get them on the ground, or slow them down. And they’re still my best friends.

Why roller derby in particular? I’ve answered this question before, and the answer seems so lame, but it’s that I’m just really good at it. I’m good at it and I enjoy it.

That’s not a lame answer at all. “Because I can and I want to!” Given the battering you go through, though, what is so addictive about it? I really enjoy that the sport is always evolving and I feel like I’m part of that evolution. I am coaching brand new concepts and material all the time and I spend an awful lot of time thinking about those elements. That’s what I enjoy, having the time and space to think of how I want to do something, rather than having someone else teach me how to do it. It’s by the skater, for the skater. We own the game and we fiercely protect it.

When this project was first born, the idea was to shoot a story about raincoats; I got carried away and became fixated on the idea of shooting fisherwomen. To Google I went with grand plans, and Google delivered me a Defra report that wrangled with the inequality that faces women in commercial fishing. 

Cue Ellie Hughes’ email. Oh, the excitement: a fisherwoman! But Ellie’s not your average fisherwoman (if such a thing exists). She’s an oysterwoman working purely under sail – without a motor – on a boat called Ivy who’s over 100 years old, on the last native wild oyster bed in Cornwall. Her boyfriend Aidan is skipper to their two-man vessel and the pair adopt the same techniques to fish the bed that have been used for the last 500 years. On top of all of this great news is a celestial cherry; we’ll be out on the boat during the solar eclipse.

I'm waiting for for Ellie; it’s a beautiful day. She pulls up in a gloriously disorganised van and we head to Mylor where the boat is moored to wait for Aiden. We talk - or I gush - about how pleased I am to find Ellie. She smiles and concedes that being a fisherwoman isn’t the easiest vocation. She tends to be referred to as Aidan’s maid or wife by the older fishermen, and they occasionally ask if Aidan’s taking her on a nice trip out, rarely acknowledging that she hauls just as many dredges as he does. That said, a particularly surly local has taken a liking to the young pups – he rarely speaks to anyone else – and has advised them for their first seasons on the bed. Much like Fiona’s coppicing, Ellie wonders if it’s because he recognises that without new blood, the oyster industry in Falmouth will eventually disappear or be led astray by other, less sustainable techniques.

Aidan arrives looking exactly as a young fisherman should, wearing a chunky navy cable knit, yellow galoshes and a bushy beard in training. Ivy is moored out into the bay, so we have to get into an old motorboat to get out to her. I wobble a little as I step aboard; I haven’t used my sea legs for a good few summers. Once aboard Ivy, Aidan and Ellie get to setting the sails. We’re out too early – you’re not allowed to fish until 9am – so we sail over to the oyster bed very gently, with Ellie at the rudder. Once we’re in the right place Ellie produces some peppermint tea and two viewing contraptions that her Dad had crafted for her and her sisters for the last eclipse. We excitedly lift them up periodically to see how the moon is progressing. As it moves across the sun the sky darkens; it feels like time is winding backwards.

The basic principle of fishing the oyster bed is simple. Aidan and Ellie sail to the top of the bed and then take the wind out of the sails and drift with the current until they reach the opposite side of the bed. Each have a dredge that consists of a long iron handle and net that is thrown overboard and dragged along the bed as they drift. On a good day, they might pull up the dredges around fifty times per drift. Once the dredge is in, the contents are sifted through and oysters of a legal weight are kept and the rest thrown back into the sea. April is the end of the season, so there are pretty slim pickings to be had. I try hauling a couple – it’s heavy work. In one particularly exciting dredge (for me), Aidan brings in a starfish. I’ve never seen one so big up close; they’re bizarre creatures covered in suckers and spikes and slime.

When we head in after a couple of hours, I feel content and completely reluctant to get on a train back to the hustle and bustle of the city, so I buy a fisherman’s smock in rebellion. When my six hour journey pulls into the capital it's 11:30pm and I’m full of resent; why am I living in a city where people wear such impractical clothes and so much make up? I’m tired; tomorrow will be better.

I am continuing this series as a personal project: if anyone would like to be involved, or knows of anyone that might be suitable, please get in touch at [email protected].

Photos: Liz Seabrook. 

The following piece is an outtake from issue 25. You can buy the issue here or subscribe here. 

In the making of this project, I took an incredible number of trains. In just five days I spent a little under 24 hours – covering somewhere in the region of 1,000 miles – watching the world roll by, listening to podcasts, drinking tea and pretending to sleep.

One particular train journey took me to Bangor station, where the sun was watery and the light diffuse. I’m here to meet Vivienne Rickman-Poole, an artist and wild swimmer. Viv swims nearly every day, with the aim to swim all 250 lakes and pools in Snowdonia. She mostly swims alone, but sometimes with a group of girls or other outdoor swimmers. Trained as a painter, Viv runs pinhole camera and drawing workshops with various charities whilst documenting her swimming as a personal project, using a GoPro for still images.

She's waiting for me at the bottom of the station and we hop into her car to drive to her local lake, Llyn Padarn. During the short drive we chat about women in sport, traffic lights and murder - I've been listening to NPR's Serial podcast for the duration of the three-hour journey from London and my head's full of it. 

When we arrive, we scramble down to the shore. It’s an awesome view: there’s no breeze and the water is still and glassy, the surface broken now and then by a fish. Across the lake are hazy mountains with Snowdon, still capped in white, towering in the background. It’s definitely not a warm day and I shiver guiltily as Viv gets down to her swimsuit, puts on her goggles and gingerly picks her way over the stones to the water. She sits for a moment, splashing water onto her pink skin and then she's off. After not too many strokes, Viv’s arms have become small and insignificant in the splendour of her surroundings.

Whenever Viv talks about wild swimming, she speaks about the indulgence of swimming alone in such vast bodies of water. Even if she’s not in the mood to swim or is injured, she’ll still take herself off even to dip her toes in or to sit for as long as her body will allow. In a world – especially in cities – where space is at such a premium, I marvel at the ability to give yourself the gift of temporary isolation and freedom.

Later, over a pint of tea, we talk about portraits. Viv explains how different the women she swims with are in front of the camera, on land and in the water. In the water, the women exude confidence, with little to no regard for the camera. On land, their inhibitions return; they become awkward and self-conscious. The lakes then, are not only a place to find peace and quiet, but also somewhere to be at peace with yourself, your body and those around you.

Viv drops me back to the station. I miss my train by two minutes and end up waiting on the platform for the next, listening to travellers old and young grumble about the infrequency of rail services to and from the area. My head is full with lakes. 

I am continuing this series as a personal project: if anyone would like to be involved, or knows of anyone that might be suitable, please get in touch at [email protected].

Photos: Liz Seabrook.