People definitely talk about their cars as persons and describing your motor as a ‘he’ or ‘she’ is not frowned upon, as far as I know.

Boats too, even more so, but bicycles?

Increasingly I have heard people describing their bikes while borrowing from the biological gender binary to talk about its capabilities.

Just the other day an avid cyclist was telling me ‘she’ did Land’s End to John O’Groats in record time where ‘she’ was the bicycle, not the avid cyclist.

We are seeing rapid increases in bicycle use in Europe, and what can only be described as a bicycle revolution in London and in Oxford.

So it should be only natural that personification of the bicycle should increase as well.

My bikes have always had personalities to me but I thought I was the only nut-job out there to feel like that.

I asked a couple of friends in the pub the other day whether they considered their bikes as masculine or feminine and their answer was ‘most definitely’.

One friend had just lost her bike to thieves but recalled ‘her’ with fond affection, describing how ‘her’ features were perfectly matched to ‘her’ rider and how ‘she’ could always be relied upon unlike many other inanimate objects in her life (namely the washing machine which was not elevated to a ‘he’ or ‘she’, as it remained a lowly thing in her life).

Another friend described his bike as a hermaphrodite, possessing qualities of both sexes.

There is a video doing the rounds of the online community of cyclists at the moment. It depicts a day in the life of a bicycle.

Shot from the perspective of the bicycle, it is stolen, dumped, rescued and then returned to its owner but at no point do you see the faces of the people involved in the story – just their lower bodies.

Rather than lacking emotion the film exudes it. Yyou feel for the bicycle, when it’s being ridden even by a thief it seems to blossom but when it’s thrown down and left on the ground, you feel rather sorry for it, as if it should have feelings.

Psychologically, we think about our bikes as mechanical things, there for a purpose, functional and forever confined to human captivity.

Interesting then that we are beginning to extricate and give life to them?

Personally, I reckon it’s because we are only just beginning to appreciate what they help us achieve.

After all, they add value to our lives, help us do the daily chores, taking us on days out and generally helping us achieve more in less time than we could do on our own.

Heck, I can’t imagine a world without the bicycle; to do so fills me with sadness and that is why I love my bikes, each and every one of them.

Which is why I have decided to stay one step ahead and officially give them names (and one day I’ll tell you what they are...).