It wasn’t just Tebbit who used strategic Ridley Scott sentimentality to summon, with bicycle imagery, projections of an England that never was. John Major, a gap-year, work experience prime minister, sleepwalking through the job, as a profile-raising photo opportunity between serious employment in the banking and conference-addressing industries, blundered into a reprise of Orwell’s cycling spinster. He conjured up, without benefit of a brass section, life on a Midsomer Murders village green: it was a social prophylactic to curb the excesses of the time, sexual and fiscal, and to herald a return to family values. Neither of these conservative philosophers, Major or Tebbit, appreciated the inflammatory effect that bicycles have on the libido, the wild and romantic impulses unleashed by the potentialities of the open road, or the conceit promoted by the Surrealists: velocipede as sex aid.