I guess a life in journalism has left me with a desire to tell stories. I love the way a story comes together as you find and connect the random events that make a path to an outcome.

Not all the ordinary things that surround us have interesting stories, of course.

Here is my little story about the bicycle.

All summer there were clouds like a thick grey paste, screening the sun.

George Byron, holidaying in a villa near Lake Geneva, had a vision of a darkened earth. “No love was left… the icy earth swung blind and blackening in the moonless air.”

He set a task for his house guests, Mary Wollstonecraft and Percy Shelley. Who could come up with the best ghost story?

Mary thought up a monster called Frankenstein.

In 1816, the “year with no summer”, harvests failed in Europe and North America. Oats soared from 12¢ to 92¢ a bushel. People could not feed their horses and killed them. In Wales and Ireland many people starved.

In Germany, Karl Drais came up with the laufmaschine or running machine. It had two wheels in line and a bench to sit on. You paddled with your feet.

Karl Drais had created a mechanical horse.

To prove his invention he rode from Mannheim to the Schwetzinger Relaishaus in an hour, a journey which took three hours on foot.

On the 10th of April, 1816, Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles, governor of Java, noted that Mount Tambora on the island of Sumbawa had turned into a flowing mass of “liquid fire”.

No-one knew it then but the greatest eruption in 10,000 years had released a pall of volcanic ash over the planet.

The year when Europe went dark was the year the bicycle was born. (I recognise that this part of the story is a bit speculative!)

Forty years later, in Paris, Pierre Lallement and others at Michaux et Cie created the velocipede, putting pedals and cranks on the front wheel. The high wheeler was born.

At 15 James Starley, a farmer’s son, left a note on the kitchen table: “Dear Ma sorry can’t stand it any more going to London will write soon Jim”.

As a child he loved to invent things, like a rat trap made from an umbrella frame.

Businessman Josiah Turner saw his talent. In 1870 they patented the Ariel bicycle. Coventry, England, became the world centre of cycle manufacturing for many years.

In 1885 his nephew John Kemp Starley came up with the “safety” bicycle, two same-size wheels in line, with pedals turning a chain ring and driving the rear wheel. He called it the Rover. Its popularity soon grew and led to the bike boom of the 1890’s.

That is the diamond frame I am riding now, down a canopied lane whose banks are the intertwined roots of beech trees.

Some of these men became rich. Others died poor and unrecognised. So it goes with makers and inventors, awkward men and women, who think crazy things and often suffer from attention deficit disorders.

And of course no story is original. Thanks to all those from whom I harvested these facts, particularly XX who linked the invention of the laufmaschine to the eruption in Java.