Bike sex

Seven years ago, a man in Scotland was caught having sex with a bicycle.  I missed it somehow.  It’s not a piece of news you’d forget.  A few days ago, the story popped up again on the BBC website, in the ‘most read’ section.  Thanks to the internet and our fascination with sexual content, the world is going to laugh at him forever.  Flogging a dead bike.

Most of us have experimented sexually.  Positions, people, places.  Some of us do it with animals, or corpses.  One of us, at least, with a bicycle.  But we are usually more careful, or luckier, than our Scottish friend.  Think back.  The last time you locked your bedroom door, then did something wicked, were sturdy women with mops in their hands waiting outside?

He lived in a hostel.  He must have thought he was safe in his own room, with his own bicycle.  He wasn’t outside the local school, or carrying it on the train.  (At peak times, only folded – Kama Sutra.)  It was right between his legs when the cleaners walked in.  They said they knocked.  Two ladies.  That was bad luck.  Men might have blinked.  And how many cleaners do you need for a single room? Two, obviously.  More bad luck, but convenient for the magistrate.  Two against one.  Our friend couldn’t deny it.

The BBC said he was “caught trying to have sex with his bicycle.”  He was charged with “simulating sex,” found guilty and sentenced to three months on probation.  I expect he was moving his hips in a certain way, like a bicycle pump, at the rear of the machine.   Three months’ probation for simulating sex.   What if he’d really done it?  What if he’d screwed the bells off his beloved bicycle?  They would have thrown away the key. 

For some men, a car is like a girlfriend, one you can’t get into the bedroom.  Our friend, Biceps Femoris, loved a bicycle, and he got it into his room.  He deserves a medal, or a yellow jersey.  Recently, young men in tight pants humped their two-wheelers around the English countryside.  People watched and cheered.  Women were among the crowd.  Some of them were probably cleaning ladies.  The police did nothing. 

Le Tour de France.  Apt name for an event on this side of the Channel. 

I said magistrate, but they’re not magistrates up there, are they?  They’re sheriffs.  Like Tombstone or Nottingham.  The Sheriff of Ayr proclaimed: “In almost four decades in the law I thought I had come across every perversion known to mankind, but this is a new one on me. I have never heard of a ‘cycle-sexualist.'" 

Neither have I.  Sexualist.  That’s a word in Scotland.

In the BBC report, there’s a picture of a bicycle chained to a fence.  These days, in England, at least, victims are treated with more compassion.  They are not arrested, let alone chained.  A bicycle can’t defend itself.  Its very structure invites abuse.  It is made to ride.  Town bicycle – you know what that means.  Although we are not told the gender of this machine, a barrister could twist things around to show that she brought it on herself.  As for the Sheriff, a male bike would provoke him even more, and what if it was only a few years old?