The Life of Boris De Piffle Johnson: A Cyclist’s Guide
Alexander Boris De Piffle Johnson began his journalistic career at The Times. He was soon fired for writing Piffle.
It’s the Car, Stupid!
I’ve been meaning to write something along these lines for a while. News stories come up all the time which reveal the damage done to our collective wellbeing by the misconceived and disproportionate status given to the car:
The demonisation of a (surprisingly, Tory) councillor who wanted to do something about congestion
The suggestion - wrong and depressing in equal measure - that the difficulties of high street traders can be solved with more free parking
The continual problems of cycling facilities in London, caused by, at root, the conviction that motor traffic must come first at all costs. There are too many examples of this for me to link to individual examples.
The car is not treated pragmatically as another means of transport, one which should be obsolete in most urban and suburban areas, but as an icon of progress, prosperity, opportunity, even when in practical terms it actively hinders the values it’s supposed to help.
To deal with this threat it’s not enough to point out where, pragmatically, the road lobby is wrong (although we do have to do that). We also have to neutralise the imagery and iconography of the car, to counter the huge weight of positive propaganda created by the advertising and political weight of the motor industry.
The Dunwich Dynamo
OK, so I’ve only published these photos six months after the event. But the Dunwich Dynamo is quickly becoming the timeless event of the London cycling scene. It’s bigger than dates and deadlines. It’s a kind of presiding deity of getting together to share the fun of a ride.
There’s a nice write-up in the Guardian; even more detail on the Rapha blog; and some interesting commentary from a wider range of participants from The Bike Show.
Riding into the dawn is always special, but when you’re heading east, straight into the sun, towards the coast, with thousands of others sharing the pilgrimage … AND you’ve just had several bacon rolls, at 4am, from one of the many kindly caterers, it can’t be beat.
It’s a must-try event for anyone even a little bit interest in group experiences, long-distance cycling, and the landscape of East Anglia.
See you on 30 June 2012.
Here is a broadcast of BBC Radio 4’s Point of View programme by the philosopher John Gray, who argues that
the scientific and rationalist attack on religion is misguided. Extreme atheists do not realise that for most people across the globe, religion is not generally about personal belief. Instead, “Practice - ritual, meditation, a way of life - is what counts.” Central to religion is the power of myth, which still speaks to the contemporary mind. “The idea that science can enable us to live without myths is one of these silly modern stories.” In fact, he argues, science has created its own myth, “chief among them the myth of salvation through science….The idea that humans will rise from the dead may be incredible” he says, “but no more so than the notion that humanity can use science to remake the world”
(It’s not directly to do with cycling, but there is a bit of a cycling angle, if you bear with me.)
Several very ordinary, everyday examples of this religious instinct - the desire for ritual, for reverence, for contact with meaningful individuals - came to me while cycling round London recently. I used to live near Abbey Road, in north west London, and I was always amazed by the number of tourists who would ask me if they were near the Beatles’ famous studio and pelican crossing. (Usually they weren’t: it’s a long road. The fact they were looking for it from Baker Street to Swiss Cottage is testament to the crossing’s popularity, and London’s indifferent tourist infrastructure). There are lots of tourist-worthy things nearby - Lord’s cricket ground, Regent’s Park, London Zoo, Madame Tussaud’s - but no one ever asked me how to get to those.
There’s not much to see when you get there: just what you can see in the photo, plus the sound effects of cabbies impatient with tourists standing in the middle of the road. There’s even a webcam of the crossing, so you can see how little there is to see.
The point here is, of course, that many people still want a visible, tangible reminder of events or individuals which have given meaning to their lives. Sachin Tendulkar, the great Indian cricketer, recently published an autobiography with small quantities of his blood and saliva in the paper it’s printed on. It sold out. For centuries, religious believers have worshipped relics of saints: body parts, sometimes quite gruesome-looking, which possess special power. Atheists may dismiss this belief, but the popularity of the crossing and Tendulkar’s blood-infused book show that desire for this kind of contact and reverence remains strong.
Richard Dawkins and his tambourine-abusing evangelical opponents make the same mistake - the literalist heresy, it’s sometimes called - by reducing a complex moral, historical and cultural tradition to a set of much more limited assertions about the state of the physical world today. Even some paint in the road, and a wall of banal graffiti can be worth a long journey; or pilgrimage, even.
And what about the bike? It’s the best way to get to the Abbey Road crossing, obviously. Just cycle up and down Abbey Road until you are stopped by lots of tourists taking photos. And if, as John Gray argues, it’s not what you believe but how you live that matters, then what more could life offer than to be a cyclist?
If you like cycling at night, I strongly recommend the Friday Night Ride to the Coast, which runs from Hyde Park Corner (London) to an English coastal town once or twice a month, and is making increasingly frequent forays into other regions of the country. The peace of empty roads - many of them screaming with cars during the day - the views of the dawn, the company, the greasy breakfast when you arrive: great experience.
Harry Lime, The Drivers’ Spokesman
William Fotheringham says it politely, though you have to love Welles’ style. The part of his speech I’m referring to is when Lime asks Holly Martins if he’d miss any of the dots (=people on the ground) if they stopped moving.
The dots are like cyclists on a busy road. Any cyclist will tell you that it can be alarming when people pass too close, cut you up, etc. But I always find - as William Fotheringham explains - that if you make eye contact with drivers, they treat you with more respect. You are treated like a fellow human, and not like a socio-economic failure (in fact, cyclists tend to be moderately well off, though motorists don’t know it) whose decision to cycle disqualifies them from normal human respect. The fact that drivers tend to pass more closely to cyclists with helmets also suggests that looking and behaving like a recognisable person enhances your safety on the road.
Don’t be a dot. Make eye contact with the drivers around you. Then they will know you are a human being, and at least try not to run you over. Shame drivers have such a seductive figure as Harry Lime to represent them, though.
Scorn the Infidels of Portland!
This post is a reply to the various critical posts which have appeared in the few weeks since my original Guardian Bike Blog about the London Cycle Campaign’s Go Dutch Campaign appeared a few weeks ago. I am responding in particular to the Manchester Cycling Blog post about my piece. Though not without its misunderstanding, this was one of the more reasonable responses I have found, which deserves a reasoned reply.
I’ve only recently found this film explaining the planning behind the bike boom in Portland, Oregon, and am very impressed by it. It shows how much you can achieve for cyclists with relatively simple changes to infrastructure, traffic law, and some effective signposting. This approach is exactly what I have been recommending for the back streets of London, but would work just as well in suburban Britain.
To those campaigners who think that this kind of adaptation of existing infrastructure is a sell-out, I would say that this is the best way to build up cycling towards the 10% of journeys level. Then, when you have 10% of commuters behind you, you will be in a much stronger position to campaign for segregated infrastructure: IF it’s necessary (which it may well not be - see previous posts). Going from nothing to the Netherlands in a few years in London just isn’t going to happen.
Tinker, Tailor, Pinko Cyclist?
[Spoiler alert - I don’t think the film’s been released in US, yet: plot details given away]
Fans of 1970s British consumer products (seriously cool, if you’re new to this school of design) will be thrown into an orgasmic tingle by the wealth of period furniture and cleaning products on display in the new film of Tinker, Tailor.
Early on in the film Bill Haydon, played by Colin Firth, breezes into the MI6 office, pushing his fine-looking British roadster bike, and tinkling his bell in an open, manly greeting. Darn, I thought, they’re giving it away: he’s obviously the hero. And when Guillam starts swanking about in his Citroen, floating on the gassy Gallic suspension like a maharajah in a sedan chair, I thought, game’s up, you two-faced commie bastard.
Lanes, Paths, and Blind Alleys
And I used to think cyclists were such friendly folk. What’s not to like about people who enjoy travelling at a human pace, engaging with the landscape and community they cycle through, yet leaving no trace of their journey in the environment visited? In stark contrast to the boxed-in aggression of motorists, being on a bike encourages conversation, opens the mind and puts a smile on your face.
When I wrote a piece for the Guardian’s Bike Blog last week contextualising and exploring the implications of LCC’s ‘Go Dutch’ campaign, I was surprised by the vehemence of the response in the blogosphere and on Twitter. It’s good to see cycling debated so vigorously. Almost anything which raises the profile of the argument for better cycling facilities will help move it on. The need for better facilities is obvious, but the best means of achieving it is much more complex.
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