sporting life (3)

The Fool rides a bicycle. Another ‘orrible, common sport, cycling. And, like swimming, burdened with its own particularly vile sartorial code. Fortunately, unlike swimming – where one isn’t even allowed into the pool unless professionally attired –, no one will actually arrest you for wearing sensible clothes to ride your bike.

One finds, however, after doing it for a while, that there are reasons behind some of the bizarre choices. And that’s how the Fool eventually found himself resplendent in another pair of lycra shorts – only this time a little longer in the leg and, reader, padded in indescribable places (to protect sensitive, un-nameable body parts against chafe, you understand).

Now, this padding, in this location, may confer on the wearer a more flattering and … enthusiastic figure of a man than he has any right to claim for himself. And which may fool (forgive the pun) the casual observer, the untrained eye (or even the jaded one, as we shall see), into thinking they are looking at something which they really aren’t.

If you see what I mean.

“Oooh!”, went the Begum Sahiba – I was about to write Mrs. Fool, but my hand was stayed by a mysterious force (an instinct of self-preservation, probably, or the urgently whispered advice of a guardian angel) – when she first saw the Fool in his ludicrous new togs.

But she immediatelly realised her mistake for what it was – mere artifice, sweet illusion, a trick of the light –, and dismissively went back to more important occupations.

So I have taken to hiding the misleading bulge beneath modest tennis shorts, and reverted to type – just another overweight old codger, laboriously pedalling his way up hill and down dale in a vain attempt to reclaim some of the vigour of long-lost youth.