Note to serious people: This is so tongue in cheek , the organ in question is almost in my ear, balanced on a brass neck and being fed a diet of impudence and gall. But feel free to argue the case for the bloody things because that’s what “comments in moderation” is for 😉 Hate mail welcome as ever, you have your own folder.

Right then, hinge and bracket weirdos, answer me this; “what is the point of your bleeding, breeding folders?” Oh I know you are out there – the stats report repeated sneaky redirects from “blind-welders-argus.com” and “small-wheels-small-parts.co.uk“. Ever since I wrote this, your fluttering to the unflattering light of my abuse and catty snipes betrays a need to belong – if only longingly looking in from the outside – with us proper cyclists.

Niches do this to people and being ostracised triggers an overdose of the ‘we’re worthy and we don’t care‘ gland.

I’m not buying it – normal dudes and dudettes think of bikes as only useful transport and lavish no further time or money on improving their utilitarian lot but we’re not like that. It’s an almost painless, if fiscally insane, slide from hobby into mental illness until bikes become far to close to the centre of your world. We know it’s selfish, impossible to explain, regularly painful and absolutely on the margins of diminishing returns.

But folders don’t get in – you can have your special interest groups, your forums, your no proper bikes wanted here sites but you don’t count, you don’t get to play with the big kids.

So if you’re still here, explain please the best place for 180 degrees of separation from a real bike. If it isn’t in a handy skip or discarded under a dusty museum exhibit labelled “amazingly useless stuff that somehow made it into production“, then it can only be to span the bridge between a train franchise alleged ‘commitment to cycling’ and the actual delivery of any service in support of that marketing guff.

With a huge dollop of Grudge and a soupcon of Ing, even the foldingly blind can see transportable cycles having a place on a journey that has no place for storing real ones. But if they are really oh-so-simple to de-construct into an unhappy combination of grime and spikey tubes, then “WHY THE FUCK DON’T YOU DO IT ALL THE TIME?”

My spot in the bike cage is well earned; trips taken in dreadful conditions, snot-o-grams to facilities to fix the showers, occasional humour to entertain the queue of unwashed souls shared the changing room – all that kind of thing. Oh yeah, I know my rights and you’re bang to them. This morning not only were two halves of a child’s bike, full assembled, brazenly parked in my spot, it was joined in some unholy communion by about five others.

All built, all pointless and all in my way. So one cyclist to another, here’s a free piece of advice “fold the bloody things up and take them somewhere else“. Make them a talking point at your desk, advance your green credentials to passers by or wield them as instruments of spikey death in boring meetings. I care not what, just do something.

Or get a real bike and regain some lost dignity. I absolutely believed that I was drinking deeply from the chalice of attention seeking arse, but it appears I was merely holding it for someone else.

Oh and I’m a hypocrite as well because I’m always preaching that cycling should be a broad church respecting all faiths from recumbents to downhill monsters passing through almost every oddity in between. But not folders – think of yourself as ex-communicated.

PS. I can’t go and watch transformers either because it’s giving me nasty flashbacks 😉