The Lycra louts are back

‘That will be £7.50 please,’ said the girl in the bakery to the cyclist in black Lycra after he put a sandwich and a drink on the counter. By way of reply, he slapped down a fiver.

He still had his aerodynamic hat on, and the straps and flaps on his booty feet. Click clack. Click clack. He moved with a waddle, like they do when they’re in their special outfit. They look like aliens to me in their pointy hats and clacky shoes and their behaviour is as alien as anything I have ever come across.

He pulled this £5 note out of a little pouch in his pants and slapped it down on the counter. I imagined it was still warm, and smelt of Lynx, for my mind is overactive. And he said to this sweet young girl: ‘Well, I’ve only got five pounds, so you’ll have to have that.’

He took his sandwich and his drink costing £7.50 and, having stolen £2.50 from this small local bakery, staffed only by a girl in her twenties, he click-clacked back on to the high street where his razor sharp bike was waiting for him to climb back on and strap his feet to the pedals so he could torture himself and Surrey all day long by pedalling around at speed with only dubious ability to stop and balance, if he absolutely had to, to let a pedestrian pass without being run over by him, or to obey a traffic light, or other such inconvenience.

This cyclist was a big chap, very tall and grotesquely muscled. He stood by his bike to joylessly ingest the energy of his luncheon, the £5 worth that was paid for, and then the final few bites and slurps of the stolen £2.50’s worth.

Did he reflect to himself that he had committed a crime? Or did this pass him by, as a concept, just like the idea of passing wide and slow around a horse, or the idea that maybe he shouldn’t ruin a footpath by hurtling down it, scattering old people with walking sticks into the bushes?

Who knew? The cyclist was, on the balance of probabilities, prepared to question, should a speed trial make it necessary, the laws of the highways and byways, so why should we be surprised that he stole £2.50-