Helen Brown Column | Canterbury News | Local News in Canterbury

The new boyfriend mightn't be so great after all.

"He wants me to go on this naked bike ride," she mentioned as we were trying to cross a dangerously busy street together.

"At first I said I wasn't going to do it but when I said I might he seemed really pleased."

"What?!"

"Hurry up. You'll get run over."

"Where is this naked bike ride? Out in the country somewhere?"

"No, around the central city."

I'm as broadminded as the next Mum, but it's hard keeping up with our 22-year-old. This time last year she'd shaved her head and was threatening to move to Sri Lanka to become a Buddhist nun. Now suddenly she's Lady Godiva of the pushbike world.

"Won't you get arrested?" I asked, clinging to her elbow and trying to scrunch my feet up to fit on the white line. "How naked will you be?"

"No clothes at all."

"Won't you be wearing a safety helmet?"

"Of course I will!" she said, pulling me back to avoid the murderous swoop of a wing mirror attached to a four wheel drive. "I'm not stupid."

So she wasn't going to be technically naked. Not when she was wearing a helmet.

"And shoes? What about shoes?"

"I really don't know," she replied in a tone that implied the conversation was over.

"What's it for, this naked bike ride," I probed, no longer certain she could be relied on to protect me from oncoming traffic. "Is it something to do with cyclists' rights?"

"Haven't you heard of the World Naked Bike Ride? It'll be happening everywhere from Lima in Peru to Golden Bay near Nelson. It's all to do with saving the planet and protesting against road rage and violence in general."

Catching the last part of her speech was difficult as she'd charged ahead in front of two vans and a truck and was now standing on the curb outside the caf? on the other side of the road. Fast reactions, young people. It's the computer games.

She's headstrong. Honestly, I don't know where she gets it from. The only way to get her to do something I don't want her to do is to tell her I think it's marvellous and please go ahead with it. For naked cycling my lips refused to shape the words.

"Don't you think riding bikes with no clothes on puts women at a disadvantage?" I asked, ordering coffee for the two of us. "Women have twice as much to expose, more when you think about it. A male cyclist gets to hide his private parts half the time while he's pedaling, but women can't do much about their breasts."

"I don't know what you're worrying about," she said. "I've done it before in the Naked Olympics."

"The Naked Olympics?! What event were you in. Pole vaulting? Hurdles?"

"I can't remember," she said. "It was a student thing."

"You mean you took part in something called the Naked Olympics and were so drunk you can't remember what event you were in?"

She didn't seem to be enjoying my company any more. No doubt the thought of going flatting again was starting to have appeal.

"The human body," she said, "is a beautiful thing. There's nothing sexual about going naked in public."

"That's what ugly old men in nudist colonies say while all the time their eyes are velcroed to the breasts of nubile young women."

"What makes you so sure?"

"Every cadet journalist gets sent to a nudist colony during the silly season. It's one of those perennial stories, and one of the hardest to make interesting, mostly because of the lecherous old men."

"The human body is..."

"If that's the case we'll come along and join you. I've always wanted to ride naked through town."

She looked momentarily horrified.

I'd cooked my goose, chained my bike well and truly to a lamppost.

Nothing was going to stop her now. All I could do was remind her to wipe her bike seat, give her a tube of sun screen and say I'd see her on the evening news.

When I mentioned the naked bike ride to our friend Barry he said he'd heard all about it on the radio. Fifty police officers had volunteered to clear the streets.

A few hours later I phoned our daughter to ask how it had gone. Apparently only four other cyclists turned up. She and her boyfriend chickened out and went home.