Life in London has been hard technology-wise: one cell phone, two ipods and two laptops -of which one was brand new- were stolen from me. But fortunately, I still have one of my most-cherished possession: my bike (and I hope I am not bringing bad luck to myself by mentionning this).

There is no question about that, purchasing a bike was definitely the best idea I have had in a year. Painful 35-40 minutes bus or tube commuting journeys magically turned into brisk 20 mns bike journeys, I discovered parts of the city I wouldn’t have seen otherwise, and my body is certainly thanking me for the exercise. And don’t even get me started on the astronomical amount of money I am saving every day.

I bought my hippy-looking rusty blue bike off Gumtree for 60 pounds. Granted, the process itself was complicated and led M. and I to travel quite far away towards East London to pick it up. On a tuesday evening we hopped in the tube towards East Ham, got lost for a good hour in the beautiful park surrounding the neighbourhood, and finally found the flat. The bike owners were weird to say the least, and spent an hour bragging about their happy financial fortunes (they were quite well off) before even letting me try to ride the damn thing. But two hours later we took the tube back home, bike in hand.

[note] There is where I decide not to write extensively about the emails that followed from the owner, asking me to take him for coffee and calling me ‘honey’ even if I went to his house accompagnied by my boyfriend. Ugh. [/note]

A couple of months later I was talking to one of my co-workers who’s a huge cycling enthusiast (she once cycled from London to Brighton and swears that once one wears lycra to bike, there’s “no way back”) when she made a very poetic remark about bikes: that what she loved most about it was the effortless work between man and machine. How simply they worked together, but how efficient it was.

Spot on, I thought. Bikes are great.

Now - my only profound aversion to cycling these days steams from the dirty looks I get from men who think that a woman wearing a (always medium-to-long, I might add, so there’s not much to see) skirt + bike= free license to wink, stare, stick their tongues out or even scream obscene comments (it did happen). And as much as I would like to refrain from writing stereotypical comments such as “well, what can you do, men can be pigs”, their attitude only allows me to do it without remorse.

Fucking let me go to work in peace, thank you and good night.