What you can see in the background of this picture is a part of that practice heading towards the Mall as seen from where we settled to eat, which was a several hundred years up and over from the Monument. As you can see, everything has greened up since the last time I took pictures in St. James park.
Now then, I might not have included that poor photo of the procession but it's needed for contrast to the other procession which caught me unawares as, hours later, I trumped down Oxford Circus in search of bits and pieces for my trip to Athens.Why look!
Is...is it?
Why yes it's hundreds and hundreds of naked cyclists!
Call me a pervosexual if you will but, as you can plainly see, I was far from the only person pulling out a digital camera or mobile phone. After the initial "Oh me, oh my!" I found it neither arousing, disgusting nor even fearful!
It wasn't the hunt for perfect bodies that made it hypnotic, it was a two part equation that consisted of 1) the sheer volume of people that kept snaking by for well over ten minutes and 2)the fact that you were getting a pretty egalitarian cross-section of human bodies.
I mean, let's face it, we all know that 98% of the naked bodies we're exposed to in film etc (even dead bodies in murder mysteries, which sometimes makes me raise an eyebrow at the implication that even corpses must be sexy!) are uniformly "perfect".
The cyclists were doing this to raise awareness of motor vehicles contribution to climate change, to suggest to us that if more of us rode bicycles that it would do a great deal to help alleviate the problem. It was an interesting thing to imagine a society where bicycles are the dominant mode of transport and all that would change. But what they unintentionally raised awareness of was that maybe we shouldn't fret about our bodies not being sculpted like Hollywood film stars and take comfort in the fact that the vast majority of us simply are not made that way - and that that is okay!
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