You want to name my bicycle, you want to name my bike

This is my bicycle. I bought him for £20 in September off the colleague of a friend of mine. He’d obviously been sitting in a shed for a while and not being ridden – he was quite dusty and needed oiling, and his brakes were worn down almost to the metal. So I took him home and gave him a wash down and sprayed WD40 on various bits of him till we both smelt like a garage, and I got him new brake pads so he wouldn’t kill me by mistake, and I got him a bell so he could clear his throat at pedestrians (only put that on today, though, so it’s not in the picture), and I got him some wheel reflectors so he would be cool and whizzy and visible in headlights (only put them on today, too – I’m not the quickest), and generally made him all spruced up, and I’ve been riding him around ever since. He’s brilliant. He has a huge cream leatherette saddle the size of your face, viz:

Mmm, leatherette. The Dairylea Slice of upholstery.

and a proper Sturmey-Archer three-speed gearbox, which people think terribly quaint but which I find much easier to use as, if you give me the 18 speeds you get on lots of bikes these days, I just get baffled with the choice and only use three of them anyway. Also, despite being fiendishly complicated, they’re actually more reliable than your normal, garden-variety derailleur gears that you get on most modern bikes. In fact, they’re so reliable that the one on my bicycle (and, as my friend Esther has pointed out, he is a bicycle, not a bike) was made in 1980. Check it out now:

He's older than most of you!

So there you go. He’s wonderful, reliable, comfortable, red, shiny, classic and but a few months younger than me. I simply love him. If that makes me a 12-year-old girl, so be it.

Except he hasn’t got a name. And that’s where you come in. I know there’s at least a dozen people who read this blog fairly regularly (thanks! you make me write; I’m proper grateful for that), and you’re all quite creatively clever types, so there must be some good ideas out there: what I’d like is for you to get your thinking caps on and think of a name for our shiny red friend pictured above. There are a few ground rules:

• He’s a boy. He just is. I mean look at him. Besides, if I rode around on a girl all day what would that make me?
• It has to be a name you could conceivably call a human. Not what you’d necessarily personally call your own baby, but it can’t be the sort of name that only dogs have, like Rex.
• It has to reflect his character. So like, he’s 30, which in bicycle-years is probably just about old enough for him to be described as “sprightly”, and I think he was a bit posh in his day (he’s certainly well made) but he’s now a bit ramshackle, but still good fun – like lovable, probably-a-bit-corrupt eccentric Mayor of London Boris Johnson but probably less Tory and certainly far less probably-a-bit-corrupt. Only he can’t be called Boris because:
• No alliteration.

Then I’ll pick my five or six favourites (assuming anyone responds) and work out how to do one of those clicky poll things you sometimes see on blogs, and then next week you can vote, and That Will Be His Name.

Fancy it? Play my game go on it’ll be fun. =o)