Saturday 29 August 2015

I WANT TO RIDE MY BICYCLE



I WANT TO RIDE MY BICYCLE

Years ago (back in the early 80s) there used to be a bike racing team sponsored by DAF trucks; the great Roger de Vlaeminck rode for them in the latter stages of his career. I thought it an incongruous sponsorship at the time, because unlike Renault (who owned Gitane bikes) and Peugeot (who had always made bikes) there seemed no connection to the world of cycling, and indeed, some inherent conflict of interest. I was reminded of them the other day as I drove through Notting Hill (where I would normally be cycling) with a DAF truck filling my rear-view mirror. Now, of course, in London we are sharply aware of the mismatch between bikes and trucks.

Acute Irony
One of the ironies of being a cyclist in London is seeing the tipper trucks advertising Cycle Training UK, which is an organisation delivering safety training around cycling. The irony is that the lorries concerned belong to G.F.Gordon Plant Hire, who, working for CrossRail, have been involved in more cycling fatalities than any other operator. This feels like a very egregious case of victim-blaming. I know Gordons have some “tips for drivers” stickers on their lorries, as well as “tips for cyclists”, and are sending their drivers on courses with Cycle Training UK, but it does feel a bit odd to be lectured from the side of a lorry as it threatens you. The message seems to be that if only cyclists behaved better then they would be safe.

Acute Injury
The fact is, though, that while some London cyclists have died recently after making unwise manoeuvres, others have simply been mown down by lorries while cycling perfectly normally. Gordons are, I am sure, one of the better operators, and are perfectly sincere about this, but others in their industry seem less keen to face up to their responsibilities. It is scandalous that drivers with driving convictions are employed to drive HGVs, but it seems to be regarded as unreasonable to point this out. Drivers still omit to signal when turning left (or have non-functioning indicators), and I’m afraid I had an example of that just here the other day, from a Gordons truck! Too often drivers will sit in a queue at lights and only turn on their indicator when the lights change, which is not much help to the cyclist on the inside of a vehicle she thought was going straight on. Yes, perhaps we shouldn’t creep up through lines of stationary traffic, but drivers get very vexed if we occupy a car’s-worth of road space and then don’t instantly move out of their way. And sometimes, to be honest, cyclists are trying to get to the cycle refuge in front of the queue, which is meant to be safe.

Why Exactly?
The point which the haulage industry doesn’t seem to want to address is that the design of European trucks is simply unsafe, for pedestrians as well as cyclists. It would be interesting to learn why exactly our trucks are designed with such poor visibility, because it surely doesn’t have to be that way. How is it, for instance, that American trucks have quite differently-designed cabs from ours?

Sympathy for the (old) devil

Extraordinary sight the other day: a large plain, blue lorry, bearing the name “Ronnie Wood Ltd”. It turned out to be delivering new chiller cabinets to Waitrose in Bayswater (which is being rebuilt). Ronnie Wood, I thought? Chiller cabinets seem a very prosaic trade for a Rolling Stone to get into, a long way from rhythm guitar. Perhaps he’s fallen on hard times? Should we organise a whip-round? Somehow I imagine not.   

Thursday 13 August 2015

Jonathan Livingston...



JONATHAN LIVINGSTON…
You could tell it was midsummer when a series of “killer seagull” stories appeared in the news, because it seems to have happened pretty much every year recently. There is a widespread belief (in British cities) that gulls have recently invaded cities and are becoming much more common here. Every summer there are new reports of people having sandwiches and ice creams snatched from their hands by marauding gulls, and now those are emerging from city centres. Now the contention that gulls are invading our urban areas might be true, though the evidence is not clear, because whatever the RSPB may say, the statistics around bird populations over time are pretty shaky, but I cannot help thinking that there’s something else going on here. If I were to remark that seagulls were swarming into London it might make the connection clear.

The rooftops of Paddington
From Helen’s room on the eighth floor of St.Mary’s Hospital I was intrigued to see what was evidently a gulls’ nest. Two gulls kept returning to the same bit of roof, high up on top of the Cambridge Wing, and after a while I caught sight of their baby; well, I called it a baby, but more properly a juvenile, as its body was nearly as large as its parents, but it lacked a tail (so it looked like those odd birds you see in Egyptian hieroglyphics). Baby would stomp around his little roof and do a frenetic nodding routine when his parents were returning, presumably prompting them to feed him, which they did, regurgitating stuff dutifully. The thought occurred as to what on earth the parents were regurgitating for the baby; when you see them beside the sea, it’s fish, that’s obvious, but in Paddington? The only fish was likely to be the battered variety, with chips.

Scavengers with a social purpose
The thought of regurgitated chicken nuggets was a rather scary one, but of course gulls are scavengers. Herring gulls (which these were) are opportunist feeders, so not true scavengers (like kites or vultures) but liable to eat anything that presents itself. You can well imagine that in the tourist territory of central London there is actually plenty of potential food that presents itself, and see that they may very well be performing a useful social function by consuming rubbish (because if they don’t do it, the chances are that the rats will). So why do we get so agitated about them? Perhaps because we don’t like their manners; they’re noisy and rather pushy, aggressive even, and so they frighten us. But watching the pair of herring gulls and their solitary baby, I found myself sympathizing far more with them. In the abstract I can go along with those who write about invading seagulls, but when I actually saw a herring gull family unit I found my allegiance shifting.

Back in the day
That classic 1970s text “Jonathan Livingston Seagull” was just going out of fashion when I was a student, but you still saw it on people’s shelves, and I fear I heard lots of the soundtrack album, because it was everywhere at one time. The book is a fable, with gulls standing for people, and it’s basically a sort of sub-Sufi self-improvement manual, but with all the faith and discipline removed (so very much of its time). I think our commentators are using gulls in a similar way, but for a very different end, in the contemporary discourse around the “seagull invasion”.

Birds and words
Those interested in birds will be aware that “seagulls” are not actually a species, but a generalising term, a bit like “migrants”. What I watched from that hospital window were not marauding seagulls, but a family group of herring gulls. Just so, when you actually get to meet a “migrant” you will find that they are an individual human being, with an individual story. It’s easy to demonize both birds and people, if you don’t understand their way of life very well, and make them live on rubbish dumps (for what else is “The Jungle” outside Calais?) and keep on regarding them as aggressive aliens. Actually, there have always been herring gulls in British cities, just as we have always had migrants. Yes, absolute numbers may be a problem just now, but do we really have more herring gulls than Germany, or migrants?