I love you and I want to have your babies.

As some of you will know, I have been, as Munky put it, “a martyr to [my] saddles”. I have spent years hunting for the right one. Shorter distances are not an issue. Longer distances most certainly are. The problem is that I suffer dreadfully from crushing and friction burns on delicate female squishy bits. If it were just raw patches on my arse I could cope.

Now, whenever a question regarding ladies on bikes comes up, most people think first of Myra’s Bike Pages. Indeed, Myra does have a page on bicycle saddles.

I tell you: I could write a book on saddles. She’s got nothing on me. I have a collection of saddles at home – and those don’t include the ones I’ve given away over the years to girlie cycling friends struggling to find a suitable seat.

In the last couple of years or so I have been using Terry saddles on all my bikes (except for the Pinarello, which has a Selle Italia SLK). On Fingal, my tourer, I’ve been using a Ti Race saddle, which has been about the best I’ve found so far, and has seen me through a couple of Dun Runs. On Max, the MTB, I’ve been using a Terry Elia, which they don’t make any more but which is pretty similar to the Damselfy, although with a slightly narrower cutout. I’ve moved that to Shackleton (the Pompino) for reasons I shall explain in a moment.

I’ve just seen the Zero X. Hmm. Might have to think about that one.

The problem is that I have lumps in the crease at the top of each inside thigh, in the skin over the anterior arch of the pelvis. As far as I can tell this is because the cutout in the Race saddle is too wide, and so, even though the saddle is carefully beaked to put the weight on my sit bones, there is still weight going on the anterior arch just because the entirety of my girlie bits sit in the cutout. The saddle is also slightly too wide just in front of the sit bones, so the inside of my thighs rub and I get friction and inflamed hair follicles as a result.

Still with me? I know. It’s not pleasant. But these are common problems for girls on bikes, you know. It’s a particular issue on the fixed, because spinning at 170rpm exacerbates any friction problems. This is why I swapped my Elia onto Shackleton, because it’s narrower than the Ti Race. Unfortunately it also has quite a narrow slot – too narrow, so now I get painful squishy bits at high spin rates, which is terribly distracting.

In desperation I borrowed Munky’s Brooks Swift, at the suggestion of Fixed Phil (AKA The Torque Master). I stuck it on the Pompino and had a go on the turbo I borrowed from Bags (must get that back to her). It was nearly perfect, although without the cutaway it was painful on the aforementioned squishy bits (for those of you desperate for clarification, I particularly mean the clitoral area).

Fixed Phil came to my rescue again, and pointed me towards Dr Underhill and her range of retro-fitted Brooks saddles. I have been corresponding with her colleague for about four months now, and they have been very helpful.

But I need at least two saddles, and at $199 a pop plus shipping and import duty, I can’t buy two of the retrofitted Swifts. I’m still saving up for one. I need to find an alternative that I can ride until I’ve saved up enough for another.

So this morning saw me trying to measure the distance between my sit bones. First of all I tried the “sitting on a piece of paper” method, but couldn’t tell which bits of the indentations were caused by my buttocks and which by the bones. So that left me with the “get a ruler and poke your arse with your thumbs” method, giving me a rough estimate of 140mm (but I got that consistently over three attempts, so it must be pretty close).

This explains why the SLR Gel Flow saddle that I bought before Christmas, at 134mm, was (by my estimate at the time) 5mm too narrow.

It didn’t half cause some raised eyebrows in the office, though. Try explaining to non-cycling work colleagues why you are pressing a shatterproof ruler up against your arse while sticking it out – which you need to do to get a good feel of the pointy bits – and feeling around with your thumbs. They nod and smile but you can just tell they think you’re completely nuts and possibly sexually perverted.

Which I am. But not like that.

I was reading the comments on the BBC site about Dark and Lonely Water (see below) and came across this entry:

I remember when I was a child seeing a public information poster in the street. It proclaimed in large scary letters – ‘DIRTY WINSCREENS CAN BLIND!’ Several days later my mother complained that I was squinting and walking into things. I told her I didn’t want to go blind by looking at the cars. Having it explained was probably the most embarrassing moment of my life.

I had a similar experience with one of the duck jokes:

How do you get down from an elephant?

You don’t. You get down from a duck

It took me about 15 years to get that joke, during which time I assumed it was one of those Da-Da-esque surrealist jokes like: “What’s the difference between a duck? One of its legs is both the same.”

Even now hearing that joke is a bit like looking at that optical illusion that can be seen as either a pair of faces in profile or a vase. I have this near-quantum superposition of interpretations, one of which involves a duck landing on the back of an elephant to give the passenger a lift to the ground; the other, of course, being the plucking of the duck to provide feathers for a duvet.

My brain, despite now understanding the joke, prefers the former option. That’s so sad.

I was banned from bringing doughnuts into work, recently, because Scrope’s a diabetic and has no willpower. He’s supposed to be on a diet but can’t stop himself and his wife complained to my boss.

Scrope’s off sick today. He’s poorly unwell. Poor Scrope. Hope he gets better soon.

But we got doughnuts! Sticky jam ones! Yay!

They’ve got slime mould controlling a robot.

Physarum polycephalum is a large single-celled organism that responds to food sources, such as bacteria and fungi, by moving towards and engulfing it. It also moves away from light and favours humid, moist places to inhabit. The mould uses a network of tiny tubes filled with cytoplasm to both sense its environment and decide how to respond to it. Zauner’s team decided to harness this simple control mechanism to direct a small six-legged (hexapod) walking bot.

They grew slime in a six-pointed star shape on top of a circuit and connected it remotely, via a computer, to the hexapod bot. Any light shone on sensors mounted on top of the robot were used to control light shone onto one of the six points of the circuit-mounted mould – each corresponding to a leg of the bot.

As the slime tried to get away from the light its movement was sensed by the circuit and used to control one of the robot’s six legs. The robot then scrabbled away from bright lights as a mechanical embodiment of the mould.

Slime moulds are weird all by themselves. Roger Penrose is a fan. Now they’ve attached one to a robot? I can see a bid for world domination any time now.

The BBC is running a series on old public information films. Today’s is about David Prowse, more famous for being the original Darth Vader, as the Green Cross Code man.

I remember these films. They were an integral part of my childhood, as they were for many of the Spaced generation. The one that gave me nightmares was Dark and Lonely Water, narrated by Donald Pleasance. I can still hear his voice even now and I haven’t even watched the film yet (you can see it on the website).

Whatever happened to those films? Now we have late night warnings about house fires; the odd THINK! advert about 30mph limits and motorbikes overtaking just as you’re about to turn right; and unending parades of sickly people telling us that they wish they’d quit smoking because now they’re going to die.

The old ones were great. Charlie, from the ‘Charlie Says’ campaigns (sampled and put to great use by the Prodigy) was almost as scary as clowns. To me they were like the fairy stories of their day – the original fairy stories weren’t prim and pretty and nice. The original ones were nasty and horrid. The original Cinderella doesn’t end with the finding of the glass slipper, you know, and Little Red Riding Hood wasn’t quite as straightforward as all that, either.

It’s funny how today we seem to be caught between mollycoddling our kids from the dangers and risks of real life, while being only too happy to expose them to the hyper-violence of TV and video games. Bring back the scary public information film and playground equipment you can fall off, that’s what I say.

In my travels I came across this thing called a Johari window.

I’m not usually one for taking personality tests because, more often than not, I struggle to find the right option to answer the question in a way I think is appropriate. I also struggle to identify traits in myself that I think are recognised by other people – so many people tell me I’m nice, or sympathetic or… whatever. I don’t recognise these things. When I was attending job interviews recently and the interviewers were asking me about my strengths and weaknesses, I found myself having to tell them what I figured they wanted to hear. What I consider to be my strengths and weaknesses are not things one necessarily wishes to admit to in a job interview out here in the Really Real World.

Munky keeps telling me I do the same things as everyone else but for completely different reasons. Trust me. I don’t remember just how you like your tea and make it as close to your ideal as possible because I actually care about your preferences.

Anyway. I’ve got my own Johari window now. And you can help me discover more about how I appear to others, so that if I have to attend interviews in future, I’m better equipped to pretend to be closer to the middle of the bell curve than I actually am.

So far it looks like we’ve got the Pikes, the Chuffy/Bags continuum, Stu, Wing Co. Spesh, Madame Vice Chairman, the current Ravenfamily Devon contingent and possibly Freddy the Hat coming on Saturday. As Freddy and hubbie will not be bringing bikes, what with living in Bradninch and being more into swimming than cycling, and Mr Pike has a poorly leg, bikes are no longer compulsory but are nevertheless advisable.

There might be some party games involving bikes, after all.

Wish my new blue tyres would hurry up. I mean, I’m off the bike myself at the moment with a sproinged knee (the right one, rather bizarrely – after last year’s Dun Run it has been the left giving me problems until now, and never before on the fixie), so strictly speaking I’m not using the bike and the prolapsing gash isn’t an issue right now. But that’s hardly the point, is it?

Wasn’t me who bent Munky‘s chainwhip!

It was Munky who bent Munky’s chainwhip!