One of the requirements of membership of Socialist Resistance is to spend weekend evenings hanging out with celebrities in glitzy nightspots. So on Friday I went to see the comedian Sean Hughes. The last time I saw him he was very bitter and very funny. On Friday night he built his stage show around the conceit of a 42 year old man wanking (jerking off for our US and Canadian readers) into his sock.

Here is the text of a story  that Jim Jepps has carried. Read it and let me know what you think. Jim got it from the BBC. I’ve obscured the man’s name.

There is the comedy of embarrassment in this but there is something more worrying too.   Is there a difference between Sean Hughes pleasuring himself with a sock and a vulnerable, lonely, homeless man doing the same thing with his bike? Now that he’s on the sex offenders’ register he is disbarred from  a wide range of jobs and he’s probably a laughing stock locally. What was the point of this prosecution? The hostel could have dealt with it discretely as could the police and the case could have been dropped.

It might be tenuous to try to link this with the hapless Lyrical Terrorist Samina Malik but it does feel that another part of the right to be odd and different has been chipped away.

A man caught trying to have sex with his bicycle has been sentenced to three years on probation.

R>> S~~~~, 51, admitted a sexually aggravated breach of the peace by conducting himself in a disorderly manner and simulating sex.

Sheriff Colin Miller also placed Stewart on the Sex Offenders Register for three years.

Mr Stewart was caught in the act with his bicycle by cleaners in his bedroom at the Aberley House Hostel in Ayr.

Gail Davidson, prosecuting, told Ayr Sheriff Court: “They knocked on the door several times and there was no reply.

“They used a master key to unlock the door and they then observed the accused wearing only a white t-shirt, naked from the waist down.

“The accused was holding the bike and moving his hips back and forth as if to simulate sex.”

Both cleaners, who were “extremely shocked”, told the hostel manager who called police.

Sheriff Colin Miller told Stewart: “In almost four decades in the law I thought I had come across every perversion known to mankind, but this is a new one on me. I have never heard of a ‘cycle-sexualist’.”

Stewart had denied the offence, claiming it was caused by a misunderstanding after he had too much to drink.

The bachelor had been living in the hostel since October 2006 after moving from his council house in Girvan.

He now lives in Ayr.