Wife in the North: Bulldogs on bikes?

Wife in the North is a popular blog by UK journalist Judith O'Reilly, who blogs about her "lonely journey into the Northern heartlands" and asks, "Just how grim can it get up north?"

She also thinks "sight of an Englishman on a bike [is] faintly absurd" in this Times guest editorial.

I don't mind the enthusiast in baggy tweed trousers and bicycle clips so much - it is a way for him to get sweaty without bothering the wife. Infinitely worse are the helmeted, Lycra-clad, Masai-buttocked colleagues who bounce self-righteously into the office, daring you to snicker. The Englishman and his bicycle in all their glory - sorry, it's just not sexy.

It's the usual nonsensical ranting about "smug" bike commuters, fitness hobby cyclists, and "sadists" who "make you drive for mile after mile of bendy road watching their muddy bottoms." She also has her implied threat of violence (disguised as concern for safety), including this little sickening prose:

I can only drive by in awe when I see an entire family out cycling together - particularly those parents who cycle with the five-year-old on the back seat of daddy's tandem, the eight and nine-year-olds three miles ahead on their own bikes with tinsel wands, and a panting mummy at the rear pulling baby Alice in a trailer. An entire gene pool there for the taking.

So anyway, whatever.