Bike Bottomed Girl
My girlfriend wants me to buy her a bike, because she thinks it would be a good idea for us to go riding together. She wants to get fit, she says. She wants us to spend more time together away from home, she says. I think she’s been taken by the romance of having a bicycle with a wicker basket, rolling along beside the canal on the way to drink wine with the picnic she would have packed in the basket. But every bike I show her, she turns down, because the saddle doesn’t look big or gentle enough. How do I convince her that she has to get her bum used to the saddle without getting into a discussion about the size of said bum? And yes, it large. – Bafana, Westville
It’s been a while since I’ve typed ‘Fat-bottomed girls’ and ‘ bicycle’ into Google, Bafana, but I’d like to thank you for giving me the excuse to do so without having to delete the browser history before Mrs Style-to-be gets onto the MacBook. Naturally, the first thing that came up was Queen and their ditty ‘Bicycle Race’. I’d forgotten that the video for the song was banned, because it featured 65 naked female models riding bicycles around Wimbledon Greyhound Stadium. The director used special effects to make sure there was no actual nudity, but the imagination is a powerful thing. And so, on to your question, Bafana. For some of us, saddles need to be broken in. Others will not ride without a chamois. In Vienna in August, a woman had either broken her saddle in to perfection, or she had an undercarriage of steel. The police warned her, reported AP, for “repeated outings in nothing but a pair of white tennis shoes”. Your wife will never like any saddle you buy her. Buy her a cruiser, with one of those saddles with springs on it. Tell her they are suspension struts. She’ll never know the difference. Show her the Queen video. Tell her she will look like one of those models (none of whom had fat bottoms). Now, Bafana, sing with me: “I want to ride my bicycle, I want to ride my bike; I want to ride my bicycle, I want to ride it where I like.”