Amsterdam has a lot of trouble with bicycle theft. There’s a thriving black market, centred on a couple of bridges where the junkies cycle past at regular intervals asking people on foot whether they want to buy a bike. So there’s a couple of reasons you might want to paint your bike some unusual colour: to make it easily recognisable, and thus presumably less attractive to thieves, or to make it less recognisable to its original owner, if a ten euro bike was too good to resist. But paint (good quality weatherproof paint) is surprisingly expensive, and a bike is a fiddly sort of shape to deal with properly. Fear not, gentle reader, I have the answer.

The city is currently undergoing general refurbishment, and lots of the bridges have signs requesting that you don’t leave your bikes chained to the railing because of repainting. This morning on my way to school I saw this work in progress, and a couple of bicycle owners had decided to disregard the warnings.

Without giving any sign of the satisfaction it was giving him, indeed with a calm almost bovine in its placidity, the painter was colouring bridge, chain and bicycle all together in the same muddy gray-green shade.