Free wheelers: the author (clothed) interviewing participants in the 2006 World Naked Bike Ride. Photograph: Linda Nylind
Poor old Robert Stewart, apprehended in flagrante delicto with his bicycle, has been the subject of some mirth this week. The 51-year-old Ayr man has been put on probation and placed on the sex offenders register, both for three years. His offence? Sex, or at least simulated sex, with a bicycle.
The court sheriff, Colin Miller, told Stewart: “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’.”
Well, he should get out more. Sheriff Miller has clearly never read Henry Miller’s memoir, My Bike and Other Friends, in which the great literary bohemian relates a boyhood crush on a bicycle so intense that his mother bitterly upbraids him that he would take it to bed with him if he could. And he agrees.
A colleague told me recently that when she first got together with her boyfriend, she realised at once – on seeing his shining racing bike hanging on the wall above the mantelpiece in his flat – that there were always going to be “three of us in this relationship”. What would Sheriff Miller call that – “cycle-troilism”?
A friend of mine at university attracted for a time an unwanted (male) admirer who would occasionally leave, as a kind of calling card, a deposit of a bodily fluid on my friend’s bicycle saddle. This seemed an oddly hostile kind of unrequited love at the time, but now I am wondering whether the passion was not for my friend at all, but for his bike.
Anyone who loves cycling is, to some extent, a bike fetishist. I don’t mind outing myself as a “cycle-sexualist” here, because I won’t deny that I will spend many happy hours lavishing TLC on my bikes (yes, promiscuous too!), fiddling with their parts and polishing their tubes. Go figure, Dr Freud.
Described by his own counsel as a “sad little man” (who needs friends when you have a lawyer?), Robert Stewart has, the court heard, a problem with alcohol – for which he surely deserves sympathy and appropriate treatment. He also has the misfortune to be living in a hostel, for the offence was discovered when he was interrupted in his pleasure by two cleaners: Stewart was “was naked from the waist down, and when the women opened the door, he paused only to ask, ‘What is it, hen?’, before continuing to ‘move his hips back and forth as if to simulate sex’.”
The misfortune being to live in a place where being in their own bedroom apparently gives people no entitlement to privacy. The principle any self-respecting court ought surely to have been upholding here was that what passes between a person and their consenting bicycle behind closed doors is nobody’s business but their own. For shame!
Source: Read Full Article