What do I do with My Rapha Bag?
Yawp Cyclery
A very kind person recently gave me a Rapha 'cross jersey--a fine thing in both the world of gifts and the world of cycling apparel. I don't wear many things that are not wool, but so far I am quite impressed with this jersey. Twice I've left the house wearing nothing but the jersey (and pants, etc.), and the temperature has fallen drastically during my ride but I've stayed warm. There's a classy and thin shoulder pad on the right shoulder, for carrying my bike over barricades, I presume. As I'm not leaping many barricades these days, that shoulder is where I keep my parrot. In any case, the jersey isn't the point of this blog.
The jersey came with a little bag, that in itself is also quite fine. I own very few things that are made as well as this bag. Someone even took the time to write a little paragraph about...well, I'm not sure what, exactly, it's about. It may be about an animal that accidentally wandered onto a cyclocross course.
It may also be a rewrite of that Schwarzenegger movie Running Man, which was probably a rewrite of "The Most Dangerous Game" by Richard Connell. Clearly, the protagonist, or "you," are certainly going to be eaten if you get caught by these gun-toting, jodhpur-wearing, hunter-cyclists. This reader was unfamiliar with the word "jodhpurs," and a quick google image search explained that jodhpurs are the answer to the question, "What would I wear if I wanted to look silly?" In any case, close reading isn't the point of this blog.
The point of this blog is to pontificate the function of this little bag. I'm going to presume that, the Brits being such tidy people, the bag is for toting your dirty cross jersey home after the race, because you don't want to get the back seat of your Aston-Martin muddy. However, if you're the kind of person who either doesn't race much or who rides to and from races, that leaves you with a very nice bag that has no function. Obviously, I tried this first:
This wasn't ideal. The bag has no insulation, and carrying beer at the end of a tether tends to shake it up. I then though it might work well as a tool bag, so I put a spare tube into the bag. It immediately turned into a Rapha-style premium inner tube.
This fine, premium inner-tube is fully woolen and stylized with a pink stripe. When I used this spare tube, I felt just like I was on Le Mont Ventoux, losing the Tour de France in the 60's. Unfortunately, the bag isn't ideal as a tool bag, as the straps, as fine as they are, tend to get tied up around almost everything else in my bag.
The only function that occurs to me now is to ship a bunch of these Rapha bags down to the south pole and distribute them to the penguins there to be used as Huddle Sacks.
"I'm dry and out of the wind. Thanks, Rapha!"
Obviously, saving the penguins has been the overall goal of this blog since its inception, so I guess we've met with success. That's not to say we're giving up. We'll be back next week with a first look into penguin mittens. They're so cute! We'll see you then.