At the beginning of the month (August) I started looking for a bar bag for my commuting APB Moulton. What had brought this on was that we had just had a short spell of good weather here in Hove on the south coast of England. I found that wearing light trousers meant that my wallet and keys were a problem banging around in my pockets as I cycled. I needed a solution.

On the handlebars of my commuting APB is a Klickfix mount to take my rather excellent Carradice Super-C bar bag. This, of course, is a super piece of touring baggage but far too large to use just for wallet and key. This I use mostly on my touring Moulton R18, but I have the Klickfix mount on the commuting APB because sometimes it has been very useful to use the Super-C bar bag on it. It is great for carrying camera stuff and I used it to take pics at Pride in Brighton this year for example.

So, now I wanted a much smaller bag for the commuting APB to put onto that Klickfix mount. Smaller and also one that could work as a shoulder bag very easily. Although the Carradice Super-C bag has a shoulder strap it is really awful to use as a shoulder bag because of its boxy shape.

I looked at all the UK online stores for a bag but I could not find a suitable one. There were smaller bags but none that would go on the Klickfix mount.

I went to the Klickfix website and saw that they do bags by Rixen-Kaul. It looks to me like Rixen-Kaul and Klickfix are the same company. Anyway, I looked through those Rixen-Kaul bags and saw that they have one that looked like it would suit very well. The Rixen-Kaul Smile. Whilst Smile is a pretty naff name, the bag looked good for my plans.

More pics in gallery

It didn’t seem to be available from any UK dealers, so I had to buy it from a German online retailer. Fortunately I have a good friend Anne who speaks German very well because she is, in fact, German.

In some of the gallery pics there is no shoulder strap. In fact I have shoulder strap on it all the time and I just tuck it into the bag’s handle like to keep it from dangling around whilst riding.

The bag also comes with a waterproof cover which is like a black shower cap.

I’ve had the bag for a couple of weeks now and I’ve been using it always when I go shopping etc. It’s no fashion accessory, this I know , but it looks “equipmenty” enough such that I get away with it. When worn on the human it looks like it might be a camera bag or something like that.

It takes my wallet and keys no problem. It will also take a few other things, like a compact camera or a pint of milk.

I think it is true that in Germany they make a lot of things for commuting cyclists that are very practical and useful. In the UK we have loads of stuff for leisure cyclists but not as much for commuters.

The first computer I owned was an Amstrad PCW8512.

When I bought it they weren’t called PCs, the phrase personal computer was not used, the Amstrad was sold as a Word Processor. I’ve been reading the Wikipedia article about it and it’s been jogging my memory.

Mine had the “relatively obscure 3-inch ‘compact floppy’ format” discs but they didn’t seem unusual to me at the time because everyone I knew used them.

The worst thing about the PCW was the awful dot matrix printer. At the time I owned it I took very little technical interest in computers and I didn’t even know it was a dot matrix printer, but I knew it was bad. It produced very light type which I didn’t like. Looking back maybe I needed to replace the ribbon.

The software was Locoscript and this was stored on one of the three inch discs.

I typed a huge amount of material on that computer. I had it when I lived in Northern Ireland and was doing radio stories for the BBC. All the scripts for the stories were typed on that computer.

I think the first computer you own is quite defining. You want the things that it can do forever.

Before the Amstrad PCW I used a typewriter. The leap to being able to edit the text as I typed was fabulous. It was and still is a form of magic.