Introducing The Musette

Stand by for weekly half-formed thoughts on the sport of cycling

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musette: A lightweight cotton shoulder bag containing food and drink given to riders during a bike race.

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When I first started writing on the internet, I wrote about cycling. I found an Australian website called The Roar which essentially published whatever anyone sent them. Granted, they didn’t pay me for what I sent, but for the first time in my life I was sending articles out into the world and strangers were reading them.

Cycling was big in Australia when I wrote about it for The Roar. They had live text of the Tour de France and other big races. I ended up somehow running some of this live text. Again, I did not get paid.

So you’d think that, fast forwarding ten years or so, when I started a Substack it would be about cycling. But at the time I thought it would be too niche, that no one would read it. I know, I know, you’re supposed to write the thing you would want to read. But I do quite like other people reading it too.

So I wrote and still write about travel, a subject I love almost as much as cycling. That’s still pretty niche, really. I should have written about tech. People make money writing about tech. But then I hate reading about tech. And I know shit all about tech.

So, cycling. Each Sunday on The Musette I’ll send out an essay about the sport of cycling. It may be about that week’s racing. It may be about a rider, or a big story, or about really anything at all, as long as it involves two wheels.

What I offer on Tom Fish Is Away won’t change. That will still be travel diaries, and a Speedy Boarding interview every two weeks. Paid subscribers are now going to get a bonus travel diary each month to say thank you. If you want to become a paid subscriber for under £1 a month for your first year, click the button below.

But if you’d just like to continue supporting my writing by just being here, for which I am incredibly grateful, I’d love it if you subscribed to The Musette. Even if you don’t like road cycling, give it a try. The writing will still contain my usual high levels of sarcasm and snark, so if you like that, you’ll like The Musette. Why not come along for the ride? (See what I did there?)