BERNADINISM

I used to be a racing cyclist and once a year I like to go to an evening meeting at Herne Hill Velodrome. If I plan it for August, in between watching the cycling, I can collect some blackberries on the wasteland around the back used for mountain biking. I eat about two for every one I put in the container. I don’t look too closely at them, so god knows how many insect grubs I actually consume also. I looked it up on Google to verify the dates only to find out the velodrome was shut for resurfacing this year, much to my disappointment. I scrolled down the page and was surprised to find an RIP for a cyclist. An accompanying picture showed him lunging for the finishing line with two others. To mild shock, I thought I recognised him in his Brixton Cycles team kit. I had not seen him in recent years but I remembered him as a good local sprinter. He interrupted my blackberrying one evening when he asked me to hold him up for the start of a handicap sprint. I balanced his bike while he tightened his double toe straps and pushed him off at the gun.

It did not say what he had died of. Did he get knocked down or die of illness? I did not know so I googled him. He had been hit by a hit and run driver and died before he reached hospital. The article also said a ghost bike had been erected to him. I had never heard of such a thing, so I googled that as well. They are junk bikes painted white and chained to posts near the accident spot. I found it haunting.

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Zex

My Secret Life – my second favourite book (my first is Lord of the Rings). It is the sexual diary of a Victorian gentleman whose hobby was sex. He writes about his sex life from getting into his mother’s housemaids at 16, where at one point he had two sisters on the go, unbeknown to each other, chasing them around the house and shagging one in the outside privy or cornering the other in the kitchen sometimes on the same day.

It gives a candid insight into sexual mores of the time, which is a world away from Charles Dickens. He talks of feeling cunts in the street for sixpence, the habit of women washing out semen directly after sex to stop impregnation and child prostitution (the age of consent was raised to 13 in the middle of the 19th century).

He spent his inherited fortune on high living and high class prostitutes, went back to street ladies again. Got more wealthy later on, went travelling abroad, often boring holes in partition doors to view couples fornicating. The books goes up to his final illness in later life. I bought these for £1 each years ago.

The author of the book remains unknown although many have tried to come up with candidates. The original book, first published in 1888 in 11 volumes amounting to over a million words, was over 4,000 pages. In 1932 a New York publisher was prosecuted for reprinting the first three volumes and in 1969 a British printer was given a sentence of two years for a UK reprint.

Get the first three volumes free as an ebook
Buy the paper version

Model Zex

What I did yesterday afternoon.