We got Amanda a new bike recently, a surprisingly hard thing to choose. Sites like Which? don’t make bike recommendations because the models change too quickly and there’s so much subjective in the assessment of a bike. And retailers aren’t as helpful as you’d like them to be as every retailer stocks a massively different selection due to exclusivity deals with some of the major manufacturers.

One thing did immediately become apparent; other than the retailer made ‘generics’, bikes are expensive. When I asked my colleague @geowgeow about one brand of affordable retailer-manufactured own-brand bike, his one word review was "crap." They fact that all bikes seem to use fundamentally the same components (Shimano gears, etc) makes it almost impossible to tell them apart on paper; you either have to mystically ‘know’ or you have to be able to tell by looking and feeling it. Which I obviously can’t do.

In the end, we went for a well-customer-reviewed Trek hybrid to match the one my family got me a few years back, and which I knew from experience of Trek was likely to be decent – and it is!

Interestingly Trek  will only deliver via their resellers (and not direct to consumer), so the store has an opportunity to tune, tweak and assemble the bike for you and guarantee a certain quality of experience.  Of course, the fact you then have to take a wheel off to get it in the car doesn’t help you when you get home, so it took an amount of fiddling to stop the wheels rubbing against the mudguards…