I Love my Wife (4)

The Juicy Bits get a hammering 

  

WARNING: This post contains items of a vaguely sexual nature, and may offend those of a highly sensitive and anti-heterosexual character.

Any men who have not yet figured out that the WOMEN have the upper hand or how life really works should not read any further.

If my daughter is reading this, DON'T.
Log off and go and make his tea; you really don't want to know what happens between your Mother and Me in the Hours of Darkness.

[continued from yesterday]  [last one on this topic]  [Promise]

I was aware that the ledger still didn't seem in balance.  I had to do something really nice for my beloved.  I considered various strategies which have been successful in the past.
Giving her breakfast in bed
Going out for a meal
Going out to see a film
Going for a romantic walk in the woods, illuminated by the golden light of the setting sun and holding hands like young lovers.
Cleaning out the goldfish pond
Sex

Wasn't in the mood for any of them really.

Then I knew.

When I was a little boy, living in Glasgow,  we used to go for a holiday or a short break to a lovely little place called Millport.  Well actually the town is called Millport, the place is an island called Little Cumbrae.  We used to get a train to Largs and a ferry to Millport. 
Now Millport didn't have a lot to offer in those days (and I don't think it's improved much in the intervening 50 years) it had a Pier, at least 2 pubs, a fish and chip shop and a couple of rather stony beaches.  So to keep us amused,
My Dad always suggested the same thing. 

We'd cycle around Millport (he meant the island, but nobody called it Little Cumbrae. It was Millport to all but the most pedantic.  Even teachers)  This was a popular pastime.  Few of the locals had cars and cycling was the main method of transport.  The whole island was about 1 mile by 2, and the whole road around the island was only about 5 miles long. 

We hadn't of course brought our bikes with us, but there was a very large bike hire shop in Guildford Street and that's where we hired our bikes, trikes and on one memorable weekend, a tandem. 

Something went wrong with the steering on the tandem.  I have a mental film that keeps replaying at moments of stress. It shows this huge machine, made I think from abandoned scaffolding and left-over pieces of a Tiger tank, veering off the road towards the beach and sea. 
My Mum (at the front) screaming at my Dad (at the back) to stop pedaling and start braking. 
My Dad (at the back) screaming at my Mum (at the front) to stop steering them to a watery death.  It was really very amusing.  The splash was gorgeous.  The icy silence that descended on our little family for the next few days was strange, but somehow restful.

It was a very popular establishment, with (to my 5 year-old-eyes) thousands of bikes of all sizes and types hanging down from the ceiling in bits of wire.
Cycling around the island was very popular because it fulfilled most of the criteria for a Scottish pastime.

• It was educational (you discovered parts of your body ached much more than others)
• It was relatively healthy (Plenty of fresh air and midges [a particularly nasty type of biting gnat])
• Nobody really had fun (met with the dour Calvinistic Principles.  Fun was discouraged, and forbidden on the Sabbath)
• It was cheap.

Main Criteria for Scottish Pastimes

This all flashed through my mind when I was deciding how to rebalance the Ledger of Life.
I had bought my beloved a bright red Chinese built Tricycle for her birthday(see Courage, which tells the tale of our first cycle ride together) and she was always nagging reminding me to go out for another ride again.  The weather was lovely; Sunny with a pleasant breeze.
I offered this idea to my beloved who smiles and accepted with alacrity.  We I loaded the bikes into the trusty Isuzu Bighorn (Look guys, if you're going to buy a FWD, get a Bighorn. Do you have any idea of how satisfying it is for a guy to walk into a bar and say "Mine's a Bighorn?")

We drove to the Hutt River Golf Park  to park and offload the bikes.  My beloved looked out at the 5 or 6 people in the area. "It's too busy" she said.  "We can go to Trentham Park instead"
6 people too busy?
I knew she was a little nervous about riding in public (I had a standing invitation from the Trentham Cricket Club to return.  They said seeing my beloved propelling (cycling was a far too mundane term to use) her trike along the pathways was the best entertainment since the New Zealand Cricket Team (The Black Caps) beat the Australians by 9 wickets in 1990), but 6 people?
Ah well, thinking about the Ledger and the Balance I drove to Trentham Park, where we I off-loaded and re-assembled her tricycle.  It was too large and clumsy to fit in the back, even in the cavernous interior of my Bighorn.

Off we went, perambulating along the nicely paved roadways in the park, and once my beloved had regained her confidence (badly shaken since the incident of the overtaking pedestrian) we set of on the 5 km route to Upper Hutt.

Since we had decided to go on the bike ride on the spur of the moment, I hadn't bothered to get changed, so I was still in my trusty Army shorts, floppy bush-hat, sandals, and my favourite grey (The Warehouse $3.50) T-shirt, slightly grubby and bearing the Honourable stains from an encounter with an oily bike chain and the remnants of yesterday's Bolognese sauce.

I soon discovered that my shorts, utilitarian and normally comfortable as they were, were not designed for bikes.  They gaped at the wrong places.  Their inherent bagginess acted like some sort of animated funneling system.  As my knees rose to their apogee, the inner side of the shorts shot out to form a funnel.

Faithful, but a trifle baggy

At the start I was quite pleased, thinking that they had their own built-in loin-cooling device, as the pleasant zephyrs were directed to my nether regions.
Then the first (of many) insects were so directed, to the detriment of my bicycle riding and steering concentration (almost ran over a Corgi) and to the condition of my Juicy Bits.
Then I discovered one of the real reasons that dedicated cyclists wear Lycra (or as my beloved delicately refers to them, Condom) shorts.

Condom Shorts

One of the things my gaping shorts funneled was the gaze of a red faced girl walking her dog.  Funnily enough she wasn't red faced until she came within sighting distance.

After the 10 km bike ride, I also discovered another major disadvantage of the trusty Army shorts.  They were too commodious, too baggy.  Things could move that I didn't really want to move.  Add the rather hard and uncomfortable saddle, and the result was squashed bits that strongly objected to being compressed.  It hurt.

I noticed as I put the bikes into the back of the Bighorn that my beloved was moving in an odd way.

Sore, but not as bad as this poor bastard's hand

"You OK Dear?" I asked.
"No".  "I'm sore"
"What's sore Dear", I enquired, "Your back gone again?"
"No!" she exclaimed, "The other bits"
Ahhh.  All was now clear.  She had been suffering from the same similar discomfort as me.  Her little Juicy Bits had indeed been hammered, which was odd, as I had ensured that her trike had a large, and I thought, comfortable saddle.  Seemingly its shape rubbed things that should only be rubbed by a licensed therapist (Me) but after 1½ hours of continual rubbing they were rather less juicy and rather more sensitive than a militant dungaree and Doc Marten wearing lady with tattoos and multiple piercings at a Baby Oil aficionado convention.

Just as well.  I don't think my own abraded equipment was going to be doing much for the next couple of days.

Such is life.


By the way.  I didn't mention what my beloved was wearing.  Some incredibly tasteless person had given her a pair of leggings.  Have you any idea what a pair of leggings does to my beloved's lovely but admittedly ageing physique?

There should be a law passed banning the sale and use of such apparel to any person over 40.  And over the average weight for their age.  Some things are best left to the deranged fantasies of the perverted, and not exhibited in public.

Lastly, because I may have to undertake another bicycle ride in the near future, and I really DON'T want to wear Lycra, but I also DON'T want to have more abraded and abused Juicy Bits, I did some research.  And came across this customised cooling and padded cushion.
It's true you know.  You can get anything on the Internet.

Cool, but not necessarily stylish