ON MY BIKE

Hi-Vis

Last week several people told me that the government were going to compel cyclists to wear helmets and high-vis clothing. On investigation I find that this is fake news, which is just as well. Apparently, such a proposal is being investigated by government, but the evidence from Australia is compelling, where bicycle use has dropped dramatically since the imposition of compulsory helmet-wearing. Since bicycle use has enormous health benefits (as well as being good for traffic congestion and the environment) no rational policymaker wants bicycle use to decline.  There is also a philosophical point here about victim-blaming; if you compel cyclists to wear protective clothing, you are saying that cyclists are the problem, and the authors of their own misfortune. Sorry, not so. But I do realise that it is a lot cheaper and less politically difficult to make rules for cyclists rather than to actually enforce the existing traffic laws where they are routinely flouted by lorry and car drivers, or to enforce safe design principles on the bus and truck building industry, or to design safer road layouts. In fact, I think we all (cyclists included) need major re-education in conducting ourselves in a civilised manner.

Goslings and Cygnets

I probably mentioned before that a pair of swans on the canal have managed to keep seven cygnets alive, which is remarkable. When resting on my bike rides I regularly see a pair of Egyptian geese on the pond in Regent’s Park, and they have five goslings, not terribly old, which is very encouraging. I hope they are old enough to survive the winter cold. Sadly, the pair of Egyptian geese who live here on the canal show no sign of procreation. Charmingly, they were walking back and forth from the water to the grass, one following the other, each time I cycled past today, and they made little chuntering noises as you passed, as though concerned about your behaviour.

An Assault

I was punched while out riding recently. It happened as I was accelerating away from the pedestrian crossing at Clarence Gate, at the bottom of Regent’s Park; there was a group of people on the pavement, and as I passed them I received a blow on my upper arm, not hard enough to knock me over, or even to hurt, but just a total surprise. I didn’t stop, as my momentum had taken me a long way past before I properly registered what had happened, and what would I do? Get off my bike and wheel it along the pavement to ask, “Which of you hit me?” assuming they were still there? No, I just cycled on, wondering why, because this was completely out of the blue; I hadn’t done anything to upset anyone, nor had any cyclist in front of me. I came to the conclusion that it was because of the jersey I was wearing. Regular readers will be aware of my enthusiasm for brightly-coloured jerseys that have some significance; well, on this occasion I was wearing a recently acquired Team Euzkadi jersey, which is a brilliant lime green, bearing the word Euzkadi in black lettering, and with the left sleeve coloured in the design of the Ikurrina, the Basque flag. It had not occurred to me that wearing a Basque team jersey would be regarded as provocative in London, but I can only conclude that this was what was going on. The assault happened in the wake of the Catalan “independence” controversy, and I suspect I met a Spanish nationalist who was so enraged by the Catalans that he regarded my Basque jersey as just another threat to the integrity of his homeland. I should not, perhaps, add that I think the Basque claim to autonomy is much stronger than the Catalans’, but that the Spanish government are absolutely right in their interpretation of the constitution though they have been astonishingly clumsy in the way they have gone about addressing the matter.

Closed Estate Offices

You will remember that I voiced some apprehension about City West Homes’ (Westminster’s equivalent of the Kensington TMO) closure of their estate offices. They told us the few personal callers they actually received could be dealt with more efficiently on the phone to a call centre, and that this would free up housing officers to be present on the estates. Well, I can’t comment on the presence of housing officers out on the estates, but on this estate they were actually available in the office in the past. Meanwhile, tenants who try to phone find that they have to hold for ages (routinely ten minutes) and are then answered by people who have no local knowledge, which makes reporting anything very inefficient and frustrating. Those who turn up in person to the central office, at Westbourne Terrace, are made to feel very unwelcome, while if you try to email you find that you cannot email any named individual, and so pursuing an issue becomes very trying as it will be dealt with by different people on each exchange of emails. The tenants are left with the impression of an organisation seeking to evade responsibility, and to clothe all its actions in anonymity. Trying to keep the tenants at a distance is exactly what Kensington’s TMO used to do. There does seem to be a pattern of behaviour.

Fire Alarms

I don’t mention the Kensington TMO gratuitously, but you would hope that people would learn from the appalling experience of Grenfell Tower. It seems not. Keyham House is a tower block on the Brunel Estate, just over the tracks from us here, (and also in Westbourne Ward) and there the fire alarm is constantly going off. It rang for seven hours recently, and for four hours on another occasion. Residents are stopping up the alarms with paper to dull the sound. Everyone in authority seems completely accepting of this situation. City West have known about it for months. Have they no imagination? Have they not thought what it must feel like to live in a tower block where you know the fire alarm is malfunctioning? How can it be acceptable not to know whether a fire alarm sounding is real or not? This demonstrates a total lack of care, and I suspect that the “arm’s-length” nature of City West just encourages that ethos, because nobody really feels responsible. I am sad to say this, as I know some good people who work for them, but the contempt displayed by City West for their tenants makes me very angry.