It’s my right to have sex with my bicycle if I so wish

I HAVE often fantasised about following Mark Frith on holiday and taking photographs of him in his swimwear.

Mark Frith, for those not in the know, is the editor of that specialist journal Heat magazine which, in the noble endeavour of making its female readership that little bit more paranoid about their physical appearance, regularly publishes a “circle of shame” feature, pointing out the minutest, inscrutablest flaws on famous women’s bodies. It is hence, in a warped, Calderised canon of restorative justice, that I one day intend to avail myself of a long lens camera, stalk Mr Frith like a faun to whichever beach he spends his summers and snap reels of unglamorous and unflattering shots of him in his Speedos. I shall accordingly circle any bodily floors with a thick red marker and publish them in my own magazine, provisionally entitled “Chilly”.

A similar idea for forcible administration of a subject’s own medicine was conjured up this week in the light of news emanating from Ayr. I now have a smouldering desire to hike to the home address of the manager of Aberley House Hostel, slink into his bedroom when he’s at his most lonely and vulnerable, ready my trusty Polaroid and capture in glorious technicolour whatever furious act of self-love he is engaged in, and then call the police.

Now, on the face of it you may conclude that I am nothing more than a pervert with a predilection for spying on disrobed men and the legal consequences of breaking and entering. And that may, on some hitherto dormant level of consciousness, be so. But before judging me too hastily, please consider the justness of cause of these quests for vengeance. In particular I beg leave to explore with you the second, borne as it was out of the pathos of the tale of Robert Stewart.

You may well have heard of him. Robert, aged 51, was last week sentenced to three years’ probation and added to the Sex Offenders Register, after two cleaners at the hostel at which he was lodging unlocked his room and walked in to find him attempting sex with his bicycle. (In the reconstruction in my head the camera pans round the corner of the room and onto the busy Mr Stewart as “Bicycle” by Queen creeps into audibility. Actually, Creep itself, by Radiohead, works equally well.)

Citizens of good conscience that they were, the cleaners promptly ran downstairs to tell the manager, my new bête noire, who in turn rang the police and set in motion the chain of events that has resulted in a very sad man having his name emblazoned alongside the likes of Ian Huntley’s for the next three years.

Questions, questions, questions. The jurisprudential debate over the dissolution of the divide between the public and private sphere and the extent to which the law should frame or define sexual morality is sufficiently well trodden without me adding my two penneth. Suffice it to say that, sexually aggravated breach of the peace or not, something is amiss when a man cannot, in the privacy of his own hostel room, simulate an act of love with a consenting (or at least not objecting) object without Scotland Yard coming a-knocking. Frankly, it makes me reconsider my whole life view. All of a sudden that scene in American Pie is not so much a welcome sequel to what passed for sex-ed at my repressed C of E Primary as incitement to a felony.

There is also something of the preposterous about the austerity of our sex offence laws when any misdeed with a sexual element, however victimless, results in an automatic indelible black mark against a person’s name. Mr Stewart should be grateful he didn’t at any point pick up the tire pump mid coitus and strike the frame of the bike in the throes of passion. By the same logic he would presumably be a violent sex offender.

Moreover, the mechanics of the act obviously beg answers. I assume he didn’t choose the spokes, as a chance gust of wind or slip of the brakes and you’re in a pickle. The chain is too rigid, the pedals just asking for trouble. Perhaps that little triangle bit in the frame, but then you’d have to be packing some seriously heavy artillery to muster any kind of friction.

However, pressing as these concerns are, there are, in my humble opinion, a series of far more pertinent questions in need of answering, tangential and incidental though they may appear. Namely in the vein of what in the blue blazes is going on inside the mind of this manager and his freaky deaky hostel?

Firstly, what kind of cleaners exactly were these harridans who interrupted Mr Stewart? Have they lost their jobs? If not, why not? Where in the Big Handbook of Hospitality Etiquette does it state: “If the guest has locked himself in his room for a spot of privacy, it is your duty as chambermaid to fetch the master key to get a butcher’s at exactly what the filthy deviant is up to”? The long, bleak adolescent summer holidays I suffered working as a chambermaid taught me nothing of this shift-brightening golden rule.

The whole to-do further conjures up a haunting subliminal double standard on what constitutes sexually acceptable behaviour for men and women in this hostel. What would have happened had these cleaners walked in on a woman enjoying herself with the aid of some object or other? Would our public-spirited manager have reported her with the same zeal and sense of civic duty? Would it depend on how orthodox her weapon of choice? Odds are it wouldn’t be as immediately obvious as to exactly what implement she was savouring. Is it policy in Aberley House Hostel to ask? “Excuse me madam, don’t mind us, but we were just wondering what exactly that is you’re…A pepperpot? Ah, yes, that’s what we were afraid of. Unfortunately that is not officially endorsed in this season’s Ann Summers catalogue, so we’re going to have to call the police. Sorry...yes, I know, but hostel policy, you see?”

Initially, Stewart denied the offence, claiming it was a “misunderstanding” fuelled by alcohol. The mind boggles as to how he explained away this one. Perhaps his girlfriend was sprawled playfully on all fours on the eiderdown and in his Stella haze he confused the two. Whatever, the manager couldn’t just let this one go. Accept this defence with a nod and a wink. No solidarity among boys. Shipped to the authorities, Robert had no choice but to plead guilty, a tragic victim of the comparative lack of self-stimulation aids available for men in modern Britain. An unappreciated innovator in a niche industry. A fallen pioneer. An aborted market leader. That officious manager could have just slain the next Richard Branson.

His admission of guilt was presumably out of desperation at his situation, but far from being ashamed, Robert Stewart should be proud. He is a true martyr to sexual libertarianism, with the right to be celebrated as such.

Geoffrey Fisher, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, famously declared: “There is a sacred realm of privacy for every man and woman where he makes his choices and decisions - a realm of his own essential rights and liberties into which the law, generally speaking, must not intrude.” This is a mantra which one day I intend to inscribe in the manager’s guestbook at his puritan Aberley House Hostel. Actually, sod that. I’ll go to his house and engrave it on his bike.

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