Naked Bike Ride


Naked Bike Ride 2015

I nearly didn’t bother taking pictures at this year’s Naked Bike Ride. The first and second times I did the ride, it was a bit of a surprise to have photos taken from inside the pack, rather than by giggling folks on their mobiles. So I was getting something a bit special.

Yesterday, it seemed that every other rider had a camera, some of them had more than one, and there were GoPros in evidence. So I set off thinking that it would be okay, I’d let everyone else take photos.

But, I’d brought my camera, and then we stopped on Oxford Road and this was the view ahead-

Manchester World Naked Bike Ride 2015

And this was the view behind-

Manchester World Naked Bike Ride 2015

I knew I had to get a few.

Most of the shots came out dark or blurred because of the overcast, but there were a few more I liked.

These guys had issues. But they’re the sort of people who have issues with everything, and whatever the guy with the megaphone was saying was drowned out by the sarcastic cheering of a hundred or so naked folk.

Manchester World Naked Bike Ride 2015

On the left hand side of this shot, you’ll see the coolest rider of all of us, a three year old kid on a balance bike, who managed to keep up with us for nearly half the ride. He’s a star.

Manchester World Naked Bike Ride 2015

Obligatory Beetham Tower with naked riders in front of it picture.

Manchester World Naked Bike Ride 2015


Bikes are brilliant, drivers are shite

Yesterday afternoon I set off to ride into town. On Burton Road I sat in the filter lane, waiting to turn right onto Yew Tree Lane. There was a car coming the other way and I reckoned the gap wasn’t wide enough to make it across in time. The driver pulling out of Yew Tree, on the other hand, thought they had loads of time to turn right. Without bothering to look at what was in front of them.

The car hit the pannier rack on the back of the bike, damaging the rack and mudguard enough that they needed replacing. I managed to keep from falling over, though something did whack my inner right thigh hard enough to give me a big oblong bruise. As it becomes more distinct I may be able to work out what I bashed against.

I slapped the side of the car and rather loudly berated the driver then pulled my bike out from in front of it so we could clear the junction and they could apologise and arrange to pay for any damage. Except they didn’t stop. Though it appeared they were going to pull in at first, they decided not to and just turned down the next junction and drove off. Luckily the driver behind them had taken their licence plate, so I’ve reported them to the Police. Hopefully they’ll get a fine and points for dangerous driving and/or leaving the scene of an accident, but I’m not optimistic.

Having written about my incident I would like to point out that it’s only the second time in 21 years of cycling around Manchester (and one or two other cities) that I’ve been hit by a car. I did once ride into the back of a car because I let myself get distracted by the driver who should have been behind me but was actually beside me and trying to be on top of me, but that’s something else. I’ve fallen off a few times as well, often for comedy reasons. (Ride over an empty drinks can and the ends curve in and lock around your front wheel. This can then rotates with the wheel until it hooks under your mudguard, locking the wheel and throwing you over the handlebars.) But, really, my riding career has been safe and enjoyable overall.

I’ve spent thousands of hours, and covered thousands of miles, on my bikes. I’ve saved thousands of pounds in bus fare and visited parts of the city that I wouldn’t have got to otherwise. I’ve commuted and ridden for pleasure, transported stuff and gone shopping. And, until last year when I went soft and became rain averse, bikes have provided exercise which has kept me slimmer than anyone who eats and drinks as well as I do deserves to be.

Bikes are brilliant. If only we could get those idiot drivers off our roads.


The Government has declared war on pedestrians, cyclists and the environment!

Not really- or at least, not formally- but they have, in the shape of Decentralisation Minister Greg Clark, echoed motorists self-pitying rhetoric as justification for yet more regressive policies. Two parking related policies- one encouraging more sensible use of space in new builds the other attempting to encourage more people onto public transport- have been “relaxed”. So we’ll get more suburban sprawl and more urban jams and the people who’ll suffer because of this aren’t the drivers or the politicians hoping to win their votes.

There is no war on motorists. There have been policies which have attempted to reduce congestion, and many of us would like drivers to take more responsibility for the damage they, collectively and individually, cause, but that’s not a war. If it were a war it would be fair to say that the motorists are winning. They kill thousands of people every year and injure scores more- and quite often get away with it, receiving minor or no punishment. They have newspapers and politicians on their side and a prejudice amongst the public which somehow paints the far less dangerous cyclist as the great evil of the highways.

If the Government really wants to make life easier for “decent, ordinary motorists” then some tough love would be a better prescription than the constant coddling they do at the moment. More actively punish dangerous drivers- such as the idiots who talk on their mobile whilst driving. Enforce parking restrictions more rigorously, particularly around schools at the start and end of the day. Close some roads and reduce the speed limit on others. Make short, inefficient, road clogging car journeys a thing of the past. (I don’t know how to go about that last one, but millions of journeys every year are walking distance and millions more are cycling distance. The pointlessness of these journeys- and the health and wealth benefits of doing them by foot or pedal- needs to be made clearer to drivers.)

We’re not at war with drivers, no matter how much they behave like the enemy. But we should be at war with the sort of selfishness and blindness which gives rise to dumb phrases such as “the war on motorists”.


Get off my road!

There’s something about news items featuring cycles, particularly stories with a bearing on safety, which brings out the idiots. John Paul Allen was hit and killed by a car on Liverpool Road in Eccles. Which is a tragedy in itself, so why must the morons pile on in the reports comment thread just to compound it? There’s a load of the usual rubbish- Red light jumping, riding on the pavement, etc.- cited even though nothing in the report suggests Allen was doing any of these things. Yet when someone says that perhaps the driver was to blame (statistically more likely by 3 to 1 and almost certainly the truth as revealed in other comments) one of the reactionaries gets defensive and starts frothing and complaining about being victimised.

A complaint rattled out repeatedly by some of the haters is that cyclists don’t pay Road Tax, so they don’t deserve to be on the road. Nobody pays Road Tax, it doesn’t exist. Roads are funded out of Council Tax and general taxation. Even I, currently earning so little I don’t pay any income tax, fund road building through Council Tax and duty on essential items such as beer. Demonstrating their continued incomprehension, one of the commenters suggests that even though Road Tax isn’t real he’s allowed to cite it because he thinks it’s real. Sometimes I’d like to be able to reach through my monitor and slap people.

Another thing which annoys me about reporting of fatalities on the road is the coyness about what happened- the cyclist was “in collision with a Honda Civic”. Who hit whom? “In collision with” makes it sound like the bike rode into the car, when it’s almost certainly the other way around. I understand that there may be a wish to spare the grieving family further pain (in which case why allow the nasty, anti-cycling, “he was asking for it” tone in the comments?) and the paper may not be allowed to give out details which could prejudice a future conviction. But I’d like to see blame in these accidents correctly apportioned. Occasionally it will have been the fault of the cyclist, but many, many times more it will have been the driver who made a mistake which killed another person whilst they could walk away.

As the Government’s transport policy stands to make us all, but primarily cyclists and pedestrians, less safe on the roads, we need to more loudly point out that drivers are not the victims they claim to be and they should get a sense of proportion.


Drivers don’t think

Okay, the full title of the post I’m linking to is Drivers don’t think cyclists should be on the road, says DfT report, but observation shows my version is valid as well. I’ve not yet read the full report linked to in the post, but many of the points are laid out by Bikehub anyway. Drivers need to learn to share the road. Even if they don’t get out of their car and experience the freedom of riding, they could experience a health benefit if they’d just learn to stop being stressed about not making it to the next red lights a whole, ineffectual, ten seconds earlier.


The Naked Guide to Spinneyhead

At the moment, about a third of all the visitors to Spinneyhead land on the Naked Bike Ride category page. Which is cool. WNBR is great fun and I’d encourage everyone to get involved. But I thought you might like to find out about some of the other stuff here at Spinneyhead.

Since you’re obviously naughty types you’ll all be interested in the posts which fall into the Sex category. All the Sex Toy posts should interest you. Go far enough back and you’ll find out about our project to build the perfect sex toy, which never came to fruition, but did generate the Perfect Sex Toy line at Cafe Press. For toys that did make it into production Love Honey is Spinneyhead’s preferred supplier of sex toys.

As well as the Naked Bike Ride I’ve also covered many other naked or nude things, though obviously there’s bound to be a bit of crossover.

Several of my books are available as print on demand or downloads through Lulu.com. Read more about the products available through Lulu.

Owners of the Amazon Kindle can buy ebook versions of my books from Amazon.com. (There is Kindle software available for PCs, iPods, iPhones and iPads if you don’t own a Kindle.) Read more about the products available for the Kindle.

If you have an ebook reader which isn’t served by the Kindle, but which can handle pdfs, some of my books are available as downloads from Drive-Thru Comics.

And if you like any of these links then you can subscribe to the Spinneyhead RSS feed to keep getting updates.


I hate how drivers keep killing pensioners

If you read opinion pieces in papers, and even moreso the comments section on any piece about road safety and bicycles, you could be forgiven for thinking that the greatest evil on the roads these days is cyclists who run red lights. Even though I’m not the RLJ (red light jumper) type, and get exasperated by the people who cross pedestrian crossings when they should be stopping instead, I want their critics to shut up or develop some perspective.

Cyclists do not ignore the amber light and then hit a pensioner whilst going 45mph. They’re unlikely to hospitalise two teenagers by driving into them. On a very, very rare and unfortunate occasion a cyclist will hit a pedestrian and kill them. But for every time this happens well over a thousand people are killed by motor vehicles.

So until people give a proportionate amount of opprobrium to drivers who ignore, or speed up for, the amber light, use their phone whilst driving, turn without signalling, speed and commit any number of other potentially fatal sins they can’t expect me to respect their opinion when they whine about cyclists.


The School Run patrol

Bedford Borough Council is doing something drastic to make its roads safer- it’s taking on the school run. The council has invested in a car mounted camera system which can be used to patrol outside schools and record instances of bad driving, so selfish parents are going to start getting fines for dangerous driving.

Unsurprisingly, spokesmen for Big Brother Watch, Association of British Drivers and TaxPayers’ Alliance fail to get the point, basically whining that mums who break the law should be allowed to get away with it. School runners who park on double yellows are a danger, they put other parents’ children, and other road users, at risk, cause congestion and are promoting unhealthy and antisocial behaviour to their kids.

My only issue with the council is the impression they give that this will be an ongoing, multi year operation. They should aim to stop this sort of behaviour completely, so that the car can then be used to penalise those bastards who park in cycle lanes.


This statistic explains so much

52% of 1000 drivers surveyed by a used car retailer didn’t know the correct sequence of traffic lights. This would explain, but not excuse, the excessive number of idiots who speed up on amber. Could the new Transport Secretary spend a little money educating dangerous drivers? I’m sure the country would save much more than it cost in the long run.


The new Transport Secretary is a danger to my safety

If Phillip Hammond is as clueless as he sounds then he’s going to make my life more dangerous. While some cyclists put themselves at risk through their behaviour there are a far larger number of drivers endangering other people with their actions. And they don’t even have to be the sort of idiot who thinks the road belongs to them. A member of Team Spinneyhead now has a broken collarbone after an otherwise mild mannered and pleasant driver opened their car door on him.

Drivers need to be more aware of what goes on around them, and how all the things which make them safer distance them from, and endanger, the rest of us. They need to go slower on most urban roads and be removed completely from some. And they need to see more cyclists on the roads, which isn’t going to happen if the policy on cycling is “build more off road paths and they’ll go away”.


Do double yellow lines mean anything? 2

Do double yellow lines mean anything?

This is a Mercedes parked on double yellow lines and well up onto the pavement. Nothing so strange about that. But it’s parked right in front of the entrance to the Bootle Street Police station in the centre of Manchester. I’ve blanked out the number plate, because anyone who can get away with this obviously has a bit of clout, but if the Police would like to actually do their job…….

I know that parking on double yellows down a little used side street isn’t much of a crime, but doing it right outside the Police station shows a bit much arrogance and contempt for the law for my liking.


27 percent more idiots on the roads

Mobile phone use by drivers has risen by 27 percent. When you look beyond the headline that’s between 1.4% and 2.6% of road users (white van man lives up to the stereotype by being at the high end). It may not sound like a lot, until you’re crossing the road or cycling along it when one of these fools comes along.


Manchester World Naked Bike Ride 2009

Last Friday’s naked bike ride was fun, even though the Police stopped us and claimed that no-one had told them that Naked meant we’d have no clothes on. More pictures in the Manchester World Naked Bike Ride set