As with the critical mass—it’s the hooting, whistling and ringing that signal movement... We move, but this is painfully slow, as the public have formed a narrow lineout through which we must pass to get going into the road. It is not easy riding an armchair slowly. The bike weighs perhaps 100 pounds and is low-slung, I can ride at walking pace, but not a weavy-wobbly tip-toe dragging pace. I have to wait for clear ground in front, then go. People are laughing, cheering and just gawping. Once out onto the open road life gets better, I move out into the front and settle in just behind the front riders and police escort. There I have room to ride because the police have closed the roads to traffic to allow the volume of riders the full road to ride in. We hoot, we yell, we weave. It feels good to stop traffic like this. The sun is out, London is packed with people who can’t afford it, and they’re all so happy to line the railings and laugh and cheer and take photos with their cellphones.

We move fast—up Piccadilly, down Haymarket, through Trafalgar Square, and down Whitehall. In Whitehall I stop in the wide center lane and look back at the throng—it seems about the same size as last year. People are up to the usual antics, taking photos of each other on the Cenotaph—that most sombre and sparse of our first world war memorials. What first seems sacrilegious is actually a vindication of the freedoms they died for. I remount and rejoin the naked snake near the tail end, straggling up to the corner of Parliament Square where more naked people start hopping about for more photos... The police are keen to move people on simply because they can’t hold up the traffic forever, so their calls of “Move on!” are met with replies of “Go slow!”