WEEK 11: Long chain polymeric fibres maketh the Man

I don't do lycra. I don't dress up as Superman, I'm not a ballet dancer and at school I didn't wear a leotard for P.E. Lycra and I have never been introduced, unlike Poncey Cycling Git who was born wearing his, and Sunday Cycling Poof who was a reasonably normal human being until he had a mid-life crisis, remortgaged his house to buy a bike and had his lycra grafted on. The rest fall into a very broad category of Plodder's. Your true Plodder is never seen without his unsightly panniers, his high visibility vest, his polycarbonate dome and wrap around polarised glasses. He's a cautious, courteous individual who is often also a qualified and practicing driver. He is also secretly the most smug bastard on two wheels. He revels in his sense of moral and intellectual superiority over the likes of PCG and SCP and is justly scornful and dismissive of No Hopers (sometimes known as Laughing Fools). He feels that he is a genuine cyclist, the proper kind, the sort with a mortgage, with responsibilities, a proper job and people who rely on him. He has a purpose when he rides out each morning. He doesn't cycle for cycling's sake but because it is a means to an end. When he first began cycling himself, he was overcome with the memories of watching his Dad grind away up the road on his terribly practical bike each morning, and when at last he did the same himself he felt, in some small way, as though he had come of age. He rides in the tyre tracks of millions of other respectable pillars of the community who have gone before.

That smug tosser. I know him well. He stares back at me each morning when I look in the bathroom mirror.

Other breeds of Plodder are more like hybrids of Plodder and other things. There are those that will not even wear a vest nor fix a light to their frame, never mind condescend to muss their hair with a naff looking helmet! They drift along in ignorant bliss, assuming that drivers will always see them well in time in all circumstances and will always have the necessary room and opportunity to manoeuvre around them. They tend to be seasonal riders who got the bike out 'cause the the weather was nice and they never exceed a walking pace, which betrays their heritage as the unnatural offspring of some deviant cyclist and perverted pedestrian. These weirdo's got together once upon a time to perform unthinkable acts of flesh and frame intimacy; their awkward fumblings with wing nuts and blouse buttons where no doubt excited by the sense of all the taboo's and unwritten laws of nature they were breaking. Smug Bastard refers to the results of this carnal sin as In My Way.

At the opposite extreme are the Immortals. They share many characteristics with Sunday Cycling Poof, like always riding amongst the heaviest traffic on the busiest roads, most especially when alternative routes such as quieter roads or the occasional, and rare, safe cycle lane are available. They have some sort of stubborn philosophy to do with having a natural God-given right to ride in the middle of the road and bugger up faster moving traffic and would never dream of once using a cycle lane or even an empty stretch of pavement. They are Road Users and damn you for suggesting that they should ever do otherwise. Their favourite habitat is busy roundabouts or complicated junctions, the bigger and more complicated the better. Their favourite time of day is any time that it's rush hour. Their favourite activity is riding right through the middle of it all, sometimes so far out in the traffic stream and among so many vehicles that you can only ever see their heads. The visual effect is strange, as though their heads are creating a wake made up of the tops of cars jostling and dodging to avoid creaming them all over the tarmac. When not on the move, Immortals can be identified by their combination of Plodder and Poof plumage. They have the requisite panniers and sometimes a high visibility vest and lights too, but they also wear lycra. Typically just the shorts with a loose shirt, but it's there, wrapped around their nether regions and clinging to them like paint.

Speaking of nether regions, the weather has been rather hot lately. This has driven almost all the pedestrians to the extremes of sartorial acceptability. Most look as through they just opened the wardrobe door and fell in, sometimes backwards. Happily, I discovered that some of my trousers are in fact “zip-offs” and, well, zipped them off. Great! Or maybe not. It's very strange and probably worthy of scientific investigation, but for some reason long legged trousers don't seem to do it. I refer, of course, to the effect by which one's shorts wrap themselves around one's crotch like an amorous Boa Constrictor and try to screw one's nuts right off at the roots. Each subsequent rotation of the peddles and movement of the thighs tightens the knot until you're either riding along in a delirium of masochistic bliss or an agony of self-inflicted castration. Why does this happen? Why doesn't it happen with trousers? What difference does it make if your ankles are showing?

All I know is that at these times the mantle of Smug Bastard passes to the lycra lovers, for when I pull up behind one at the lights and am treated, as usual, to a marvellous view of his perfectly proportioned and toned buttocks, perched on a saddle so narrow it could fillet a sardine, they are clad in soft, pliable, flexible, breathable, untwistable lycra.

Perhaps that's why there are so many of them and so few of us?