My wife Sarah always names her vehicles and her bike is called Beryl. In relative terms, Beryl is pretty fancy. She’s got a rear rack, a dynamo, a kickstand that’s too short to work. Most importantly for the eventual silliness we get up to, she’s got twist-grip gears and big springs under her saddle. My bike is from the same B’Twin step-through roadster gene pool, but very much the Cinderella of the situation. No gears, an insistently intrusive lump of a saddle seized at an awkward angle and a dynamo light with no dynamo to power it. For the sake of this feature, we’ll call her Belinda, but I may have called her other names a couple of times when wearing board shorts while riding over rough Spanish tracks turned my testicles into castanets.
