A new demographic marker - when Lime bikes descend like swarms of locusts

 Lime bikes are getting people's backs up in all parts of town, mainly for being thoughtlessly dumped on narrow pavements, blocking entrances, 

Here we're generally pro-bike, so it seems a shame to come down on these rental contraptions. But, apart from being a blot on the landscape (a grim achievement, given the beauty of a simple bicycle) and sometimes being ridden by dangerously careless or clueless individuals, these bikes are also a particular menace for other cyclists all over town town.

For example, the racks for normal cycles outside most tube and rail stations in the most yuppified parts of London. (Sticking with the word yuppy for its perfect associations with young "professional" incomers to London, with plenty of money but little interest in the communities they barge into. The current use of Gen Z or X or Millennials seems ageist, too vague and too generalised).

You couldn't get more neo-yuppy than Clapham South, and that's where, at certain times, you'll see huge clusters of rental bikes around the station entrance. Trouble is those bikes are very heavy and very difficult to lug around, especially as they're locked/immobilised until you rent one. So you have to hunt for accessible bike parking.

Ironic to see full racks of Santander bikes about 30 yards down the road. 

I've never seen such a profusion of green, black and white plastic in other parts of town, but all around here they appear suddenly at some puzzling location, maybe near a new shop or café, where they're dumped and I suppose forgotten until the Lime collector does its rounds, if there is such a thing?

I've never tried one of these, mainly because they require use of a smartphone (I think).  I've tried Boris bikes and their equivalents in other European cities, and was generally impressed with their robustness and simplicity. But these were not electric-assisted and thus lighter (but still heavy by my standards).

As for Lime and their rivals, well it seems their time could be up. They are so dangerous for so many reasons. Brent Council is likely to be first to ban them unless they promise to provide designated parking places. But that would be very expensive to provide and also reduce their attractiveness to lazier commuters.

Only recently realised that the people taking phone snaps of these bikes are probably not bike-spotters but are taking them as evidence of where they dropped the thing. Oh, how very 2024, yee-euch.

*Why, why, why, why are we sleeping?

So why quote this line from the 1968 Soft Machine track?

The lyric was typical of its time, a lysergic bad dream, intoned in Kevin Ayers' dark chocolate voice. But that insistent chorus, which builds in urgency through the song, has been ringing in my ears all the time recently. 

Why is no-one apparently awake to the havoc that these orgies of fossil fuel-burning is causing?

The final straw for me was reading a piece in the ailing London Evening Standard (that reliable source of blood-pressure-popping entitled people's waffle) by the sister of former PM Boris, that is Rachel Johnson. 

It's a typically breezy 600 words or so on how much she's hating our non-existent summer and oh, if only she could blame someone for it.

You could dismiss it as just another inconsequential filler if it wasn't (a) on the main comment page of this august publication and (b) so annoyingly missing the glaringly obvious answers. She asks this question, time after time: "I can't think who to blame for this summer. Who to sue".

Is she being deliberately disingenuous? I mean, sue the manufactuers of gas-guzzling SUVs for a start. The ones I see ferrying Wimbledon tennis stars and VIPs around traffic clogged SW London, by the way.

Well, we really ask you, Rachel. Because you really do know.  We're all to blame. Have you not heard of the climate crisis, of the tilting of the Atlantic jetsream, of our being condemned wet, windy summers (and springs, etc) while most of the planet burns or drowns? We need to sue - ie tax - ourselves, and spend all the money on alternative energy sources.

As if to underscore our collective gormlessness, news had just been released showing higher than expected IC car sales last year and a return to almost pre-covid levels of  tourist air traffic.

How can we thus be surprised when we shiver through the spirng and summer months, and are buffeted by endless Atlantic storms. 

Maybe you only notice when cycling through a city like London, negotiating apppaling congestion, inching the narrow bike between very wide and shiny SUVs. Despite many electric vehicles, the air is heavy with the stench of cars, the extremely hot exhalations of their AC, mixed up with burning chip fat from costcutter delivery vans.

All of this, even into the ULEZ and congestion-charge zones. And, it's even worse in the traffic jams of outer London.

It's just a small example of how the West remains in denial of the mess it has created on this planet. The West, all the former imperialist European states, the UK above all, North America, Australasia. We no longer seem to want to know about the onoging climate disaster, largely caused by our greedy consumption of all the wealth we could dig out of our earth, and the earth of the colonised regions.

We'd rather sleep now. Who wouldn't? 

Maybe I should be more charitable toward Rachel Johnson? I mean, there's a place for frothy, amusing writing in the most austere publications. She probably tossed that piece off in a few minutes, and you never know what the subs will pick out for a headline. But no, she's no starving hackette, no unpaid intern or desperate freelancer. And this piece really wasn't at all funny.

The Evening Standard is said to be in its last few weeks as a daily newspaper. One of the main causes of its decline is said to be the provision of wi-fi on London's underground network, so that commuters can get all the news & entertainment they require via their cursed i-Phones. It's true you now see unclaimed stacks of the freesheets at every tube station.

Like almost every other printed form of news, the Standard  has long been the plaything of billionaire owners. Perhaps this is not all bad. At least there'll be less need for unsustainable forestry methods to produce so much newsprint. 

* Why Are We Sleeping first appeared on Soft Machine's first LP ("The Soft MAchine") released in 1968. The writing credits are to Kevin Ayers, Mike Ratledge and Robert Wyatt

Here's a YouTube link: Soft Machine _ Why Are We Sleeping?

And here are the lyrics:

It begins with a blessing, it ends with a curse
Making life easy by making it worse
"My mask is my master", the trumpeter weeps
But his voice is so weak, as he speaks from his sleep

Saying: "Why, why, why...
Why are we sleeping?"

People are watching, people who stare
Waiting for something that's already there
"Tomorrow I'll find it", the trumpeter screams
And remembers he's hungry, and drowns in his dreams

Saying: "Why, why, why...
Why are we sleeping?"
"Why, why, why...
Why are we sleeping?"

My head is a nightclub with glasses and wine
The customers dancing or just making time
While Daevid is cursing, the customers scream
Now everyone's shouting, "Get out of my dream!"
Saying: "Why, why, why...
Why are we sleeping?"

It begins with a blessing, it ends with a curse
Making life easy by making it worse
"My mask is my master", the trumpeter weeps
But his voice is so weak, as he speaks from his sleep

Saying: "Why, why, why...
Why are we sleeping?"

Editor's Non-Apology:

Given that this blog was originally supposed to be about music on vinyl, cassette, etc, I thought the use of this 56-year-old song was allowable. In fact, maybe this lyric is not so unrelated to the story. Thus, "making life easy by making it worse"....hm, isn't that exactly what we've been doing for too long? If I find any other old or new song titles that seem to fit blog posts, I'll use them!

Dear Paris, please would you lend us your mayor for a few years?

Having banned traffic from the north bank of the Seine, and reduced the scourge of SUVs in the
centre,  Anne Hidalgo, mayor of Paris, enjoys a ride in the city she has made safer for cyclists and pedestrians

Less than two weeks to the London mayoral election and the gap between incumbent Sadiq Khan and Tory candidate Susan Hall is shrinking. Given Hall's murky record, it's shocking to think she might grasp control of one of the world's most ethnically diverse cities. 

A booklet - "My vote doesn't count" - arrived by post the other day. It's the GLA's official primer on the election, complete with self-penned blurbs by those Mayoral candidates willing to stump up the £10,000 fee. 

That money buys them two pages and the right to say whatever they like, so long as it's legal. 

Eleven of the 13 candidates decided to avail themselves of this free speech opportunity. Sadly there's no statement from Count Binface (was hoping they might offer a solution to London's renegade wheelie bins). 

All but one of the 11 live up to lowest expectations. Overall, it's a dismal read, occasionally stomach-churning (see: Reform UK and Britain First's entries). The good guys (ie Sadiq) play bland and safe, seeming to lack all conviction,  while the baddies - well they're hardly full of Yeats' "passionate intesity", but they don't mince their words either. 

The only candidate who has anything new to say is Femy Amin, of the Animal Welfare Party. She wants to make London "the global leader in opposing speciesism". Good luck to her! Can't help thinking it might be a good idea for her to join forces with the Green Party.

Of all London's many problems, the most polarising one is private car use, with the Tories and several others hoping to gain votes by promising to ban the ULEZ in outer London boroughs as well as the LTNs.

Although he's hardly shouting about it, Sadiq is the only one determined to stick with  ULEZ. Even the Greens and Lib Dems are non-commital on this issue. 

Much as his commitment to cleaner air is to be admired, I do feel Mayor Khan needs a break. The poor guy, the only politician in the country to do anything concrete about the 21st century's most critical problem, is the target of the vilest abuse. Even the leadership of his own party, who should be mightily proud of his achievements, always hold back on giving him their full support. The achievements are remarkable considering the outright hostility of car-loving Rishi Sunak's government.

Sadiq deserves a real holiday, and London needs new ideas and more urgent action to tackle our deteriorating urban environment, increasingly blighted by private cars of ludicrously expanding proportions,  plus all those Ubers, delivery vans, construction trucks, and supercars that should be confined to racetracks..

Where to turn? Well, in a dream world, just a two hour  Eurostar ride to Paris, a city which has just announced that more of its residnets now go to work by bicycle than by car. The statisitc is largely to the credit of its mayor, Anne Hidalgo, and her mission to make her beautiful city an even more delightful place for human beings to live, work and play in.

Mayor Hidalgo is that rare thing – a politician with ideas, who makes them happen, and takes enough of her electorate with her. Now in her second term, having already achieved the miracle of pedestrianising the riverside motorway through central Paris, she has just administered a sharp prod to the fat flanks of SUVs.

A close win in a referendum earlier this year  means owners of the biggest,  heaviest private cars, ie SUVs,  have to pay three times as much to park in central Paris.

Just imagine the uproar of the British media if Sadiq Khan had even breathed of a plan to do this - let alone succeeded in implementing it!

Imagine the convoys of morbidly obese leather-padded vehicles lumbering in protest to the strategic points of the South and North Circulars, their deathly-white always on LED headlights glaring like the eyes of a nightmare psycho-killer.

That sounds too vile a prospect to envision - except that we see it every day anyway, as these four-wheel fatties dominate the congested, narrow, potholed streets of this messed-up city. Encountering one of these vehicles charging straight at you on a residential street is as grim as seeing a cruise liner blotting out your views of Venice. Howl's Moving Castle had nothing on a top-of-range Range Rover in full flight, its death-ray lights sucking the life out of anyone caught in their beam.

Now in her second six-year term, Mme Hidalgo came early to the realisation that automobiles are among the greatest enemies of human wellbeing in urban settings. It maybe too late to make any difference to the downward spiral of climate change. She might not save the planet but at least she'll make the final decades of life in her city safer and more enjoyable for those not addicted to huge luxury vehicles.

Of course Mme Hidalgo has powerful opponents. As with our embattled London mayor, most of the active opposition comes from the suburbs well outside the city.

And that's where she has a great advantage over Mr Khan. She doesn't need to give a fig for these suburbs. Her electorate resides entirely inside the relatively small Paris commune area, the 20 arrondisements. She does not have to win over the commuting classes and small business white van folk outside this golden circle, living in the various self-governing departments of the Ile de France region.

She also has more power than the London Mayor. Like Khan, she's a Socialist, but her party does not undermine her in the way that the current Labour regime has been so iffy about Sadiq.

And while she has a famously spiky relationship with France's President Macron, the national government doesn't interfere in her business as much as Sunak's lot do with Sadiq Khan. 

None if which is to belittle Mme Hidalgo's achievements: the Parisian electorate is famously argumentative and sceptical.  However they are also famous for having good taste, intelligence and a propensity for making decisions based on reason.

There was no shortage of information to support Mme Hidalgo's policy to penalise SUVs, and those detailed statistics were available to all. The website of Le Monde provides rapid access to a panoply of statistical research on the impact of SUVs on the urban environment.

To me one of the most compelling findings was the vast amount of limited public space taken up by autombiles at any given moment - whether static in parking lots or parked on streets, or moving through the traffic-clogged boulevards. 

There are also detailed statistics on the inexorably rising weight and size of private cars in the city in the past two decades. Heavier vehicles (with the biggest SUVs now topping two tonnes) not only create more pollution - from tyres and brakes as well as the engine - but also damage roads and cause worse injuries in accidents. Their bulk reduces sightlines of other motorists, cyclists and pedestrians.

Oh, and by the way, as I've been saying on this blog ad nauseam, SUVs are a vile blot on any urban streetscape. They're so big and brash: the lumpy, macho and often aggressive styling acts on us all, even subliminally. 

So, yes, please let us have a dash of the Hidalgo spirit. Surely we could borrow football practice, where premier league clubs will loan one of their senior players to lesser teams for a few matches? 

Failing that at least give her the Mayoral equivalent of a state visit: a tour, on bicycles obviously, of London's many notorious traffic whirlpools. I'd nominate the Battersea Park roundabout for a start: an object lesson in how not to use cycle lanes, and in how to confuse and annoy motorists, cyclists and pedestrians equally.

Rest in peace, Damo - your sound carries on, you crazy sound carrier

I love this quote of Damo's on the back cover of 
the memoir published in 2023 - but I'd also like to
slightly disagree. Damo belonged everywhere, and
everywhere he went belonged to him!

Don't worry. I'm not reviving this moribund blog. But I'm not giving it a coup de grace either.

I just have to add at least one more post, just to remind myself, about that mysterious electric disruptive delightful soul Damo Suzuki who I just heard died yesterday aged 74.

When I think of Damo I think first of all the sound he caused to be created and to hum and sing around the planet. His own version of the never-ending tour, the Sound Carrier network - hopping across oceans and continents non-stop more or less since he left Can, what fifty years ago? 

He met up with music-makers and sound carriers - not always the same people - in big cities, small towns, remote villages, the network kept on swelling and vibrating and humming, and it all somehow seemed to be infused with Damo's cosmic sense of music - whatever music is - and I find it hard to separate that from the smile on his face as he made or listened or contributed to these sounds.

Last time I saw him was at Rough Trade East in London, what three or four years ago: and I curse myself for missing him on many other occasions at easy to reach locations. On that evening, where he was talking about his days on the publication of his sort-of autobiography - titled, in a wry tribute to Mark E Smith - "I Am Damo Suzuki".

MES had of course written a song of the same name, a typically oblique bit of musical fanmail to be found on The Fall lp This Nation's Saving Grace.

Smith had died  the year before, and in a wonderfully strange tribute Damo, visiting Manchester a few months after his demise, met up with the last members of The Fall for a cheeky photo-opportunity: "I Am Mark E Smith". Only because it was Damo and the final iteration of the Salford phenomenon, could they get away with it, knowing MES would have loved it.

This delightful story is one of hundreds told in this marvellous book, which includes loads of autobiographical fragments woven into a series of in-depth interviews wwith some of the hundreds of musician and others he performed with, influenced, loved and in some cases fell out with. His joint author, Paul Woods, does a brilliant job both in the interviews and stitching thr whole thing together to make a very readable book, whether straight through or through infinite dippings-into. 

As well as assembling all those irresistible lists, discographies, and some truly priceless photos. There are also some examples of Damo's weird and cheerful artworks.

Paying tribute to a tribute: Damo Suzuki slips into the gap
 left by the Fall's founder Mark E Smith, who died in Feb 2018,
three months before this photo was taken. Damo is surrounded
by the members of the final iteration of the ever-changing band. 
Photo @ Michelle Heighway, from her documentary about
Damo's Network,  ENERGY following Damo Suzuki's
 Network over 7 years.

If you don't have this book, get a copy asap. It's available at £16.99 from publishers Omnibus Press.

That evening at Rough Trade, when Damo answered questions about his life and work, and also spoke a bit about his illnesses (which had been extremely serious, as described in gruelling detail in the book) turned out to be one of his last appearances in the Uk. 

He had recovered from the cancer which had returned decades after a first bout, but sadly it turned out this remission was only temporary. 

That night you could see he was clearly feeling the reduction in energy that such suffering have on the toughest of souls. But it did not stop him crossing the planet, carrying with him some sort of burning magical musical energy which infected, inspired so many others young, old, every type.

Thanks Damo, we love you still!

Getting the hump over speed bumps, and other stories

Here we go again. Your 40-year-old pushbike and the 71-year-old lump of fat, bone and gristle pedalling it like mad (aka me) almost take off as we hit one of those stupid mini-speed-bumps on Silverthorne Road, at what for us is quite a decent speed.

If you think the idea of having two bumps, one in each lane, is to spare cyclists from the often quite dangerous jarring they get from these escarpments in nearly every residential street in inner London, think again.

No, it's more to allow ambulances and cop cars a smooth passage if they're having to proceed at high speed. Trouble is every other driver also knows they can give their fabulously fast and manoeuverable vehicles a quick flick around these obstacles, meaning anyone on two wheels has to be very watchful as said cars swerve into their paths.

But should we abolish speed humps? Of course not. They're absolutely essential to protect the lives and limbs of those foolish enough to be traversing these rights of way on foot or in pram or pushchair, wheelchair, scooter, bicycle or tricycle.

What rankles is that the bumps are ONLY necessary because drivers are too arrogant,  too infantile and too selfish to stick to the legal speed limits. 

Also, it's apparent some cars are now able to zoom over a whole series of the humps without wallowing at all. Maybe makers have tinkered with suspension to enable this? It's certainly not true for long low sports cars and boy racers: there's so often a delightful scrunching sound as they nose-dive into the tarmac, scraping their soft and expensive bellies on the hard stuff.

Many of these bumps are steep enough to launch the unwary cyclist into unexpected aerial acrobatics. They are just a pain in the arse for other road users, but they are positively dangerous for us. 

They also result in many drivers choosing the few roads kept free of speed bumps for the sake of emergency service vehicles. Trouble is I live on such a road and notice that barely a single private car adheres to the 20mph limits. A majority seem to exceed that by a factor of two; some three; and some even four.

So, what about using all this digital surveillance stuff to do some good road safety work?

Here's the boring rest of menu stuff:

1. Corsodyl tooothpaste.  Used to buy this as was only one that seemed to be unsweetened. Now they sell the "Original" with a "new improved taste". Well, if it has a new flavour it cannot any longer be the original. And the "improvement" turns out to be a noticeably sweeter and therefore to me quite disgusting new paste. Why do they force-feed sweetness, whether from sugars or synthetics, onto the British consumer? Obvious: profit for sugar companies, sweetener manufacturers, and the extortionate dentists who will later be dealing with the literal fall-out.

2. BBC radio trails: Still love the BBC for all its failings, but the noisy trails between almost every programme drive some of us mad. So often they seem to involve shouty sportspeople. Surely they know not all listeners to Radio 4 or 3  or even local stations are fans of such stuff? It's also odd that promotional stuff on BBC TV is so much more careful and sometimes even delightful, though even here we see the gradual invasion of Hollywood-style sound editors. And most of the promotional trails and jngles on local radio - even Radio London - are downright embarrassing. You can feel some of the more grown-up presenters wincing as they have to punctuate their sometimes very good programmes with these inane interruptions.

3. Beep beep! Drivers' ever-increasing willingness to blast everyone else (but especially cyclists) with their ridiculously powerful air-horns or hooters. This has been covered in painful length in earlier posts on this site, passim.

4. Idiot wind - the petrol-driven leaf-blower: A curse and a menace that is still rising as more of the recently-created gated private residential developments are completed. The racket of a Monday morning is unbearable. Often as not it's a bloke chasing two or three leaves around a small patch of expensive paving slabs, the turning and parking area of a new block of luxury apartments (which should by law have remained as grass and trees, but never does in this strange inner-London borough.) Electric versions are available: why not make the two-stroke stinkers illegal?

5. Flying ants in sporty pants: The visual pollution of the first sunny days of spring, when the male yuppies strip down to shorts, flip-flops etc and cover the local parks like pale maggots on rotting meat. Actually, since Covid they seem to have been wearing those shorts all year round, along with white trainers, white socks and and padded  gilets over sporty shirts - de rigeur gear for non-office days it seems. They go with the brutal squaddie-style half-scalp-razorings which might look good on a Brazilian footballer but not so hot on a pale pink City boy.

6. It used to be small is beautiful. That's all gone. Now, big is always better in Obese Britain. Another example - it's getting hard to find normal-sized baskets, notably in budget supermarkets Lidl and Aldi. They seem to be replacing them with dumper-sized baskets on wheels, with a little handle so shoppers can trundle them around the crowded aisles like all those ghastly wheelie-bin suitcases at Gatwick. These bigger baskets are worse than the massive trolleys, which are at least properly manoeuverable. They block aisles, trip other shoppers up, and generally make the shopping experience even more miserable than it needs to be.

Amen.

Reserving the right to be angry about most things (alternative headline: Clapham SUV deflations - it wasn't me but I wish it had been)

Yeah sorry it's just a basic Range Rover again, there's many bigger, uglier more repulsive and offensive SUVs out there I know (I mean the latest generation of AUDIs and Volvos and Porsches and Mercs and Beemers are just so provocatively hideous in their absurd, elephantine bulk - but I can't face looking at them long enough to take or edit a photo)

Have just lost the 89th of my 90 cat's lives as a geriatric cyclist in London. Alive but shaken, I'm in no mood to cheer top govt ass Grant Shapps on his latest anti-bicycle musings. Nor will I shed a tear for the people who insist on driving bus-sized cars (SUVs) around the cramped streets of London, when some activists let their fat tyres down.

Last week it was a saloon car taking chance to turn right off Lavender Hill, seeing no oncoming vehicles, not seeing oncoming old git on 1978 biciclette. 

It was one of those moments when you know you're going to die if you don't pedal just that bit extra hard to get your self out of the way of this  jet-propelled BMW's surging arc across the carriageway. Driver notices me too late, but I hit the pedals just hard enough to be merely buffetted by the slipstream  of this metallic behemoth. Like crossing the wake of a billionaire superyacht in the Solent.

(Mental note to self: well done, you've learned the lesson from the time this happened, on the same road, in 2006. That time you squeezed the brakes with all your strength and still hit the car which wasn't aware of you until your nose splattered onto the windscreen, right in front of the surprised chap driving it. Ambulance and cops and so on, 3 months to recover.)

So, this time I get off lightly. As usual I raise fingers behind back and keep going as fast as possible, fully expecting said motorist to have taken offence and decided to off me in a street fight.

This was third time in recent weeks that a cat's whisker has separated rider from being not just a bag of bones but a bag of broken bones and crushed innards.

And yet the bliss of cycling home on these warm days, after maybe six to 10 hours standing or sitting around for money, seems more than worth all the risks.

In truth risks to life and limb come as often from other cyclists and even more often from stealth-bomber electric scooterists.

So many old and new reasons to be angry; nothing clears the snot-stuffed soul more quickly than an adrenaline rush followed by a wallowing in a hot tub of justified anger. 

Yes it's absurd. It's got to the point where other people's anger (say about loud music on the SW4 Common) makes me angry.

But I reserve the right to be angry about most things as long as I express this anger safely and with good humour. Laugh after you curse them, smile a string of expletives. How many times has someone yelled, in best south London fashion, "faarkin' karnt!!" out of the window of their vehicle. It's usually either a battered white delivery van, or a high-end SUV. Back in the 70s it was often a Jag Mk 10.

So, didn't even try to suppress huge grin when the story of London's deflated SUVs made the evening news. Turned out it was a branch of Extinction Rebellion doing this at first, who are now more often calling themselves the Tyre Extinguishers. 

It started in London and Edinburgh and other cities with pockets of arrogant wealth, and has now spread across the UK. In Edinburgh a local cycling forum says the problem of oversized private vehicles hogging street space is just as bad as in London (see: http://citycyclingedinburgh.info/bbpress/topic.php?id=20914 )

When it started, this deflationary movement targetted Clapham once or twice - but it has not reduced the popularity of SUVs. Some streets, such as Orlando Road, have absurd numbers of the newest and biggest and shiniest SUVs.

Seems the activists, in true ER style, are adding wit and ingenuity to their direct action. The tyres are being slowly deflated by inserting a lentil or similar small legume under the valve cap, then screwing it back down to gradually release the air.

There's also an explanatory leaflet stuck under the wipers of all targetted vehicles. All of which   you can be sure will merely increase the rage of the SUV owners as they attempt to head off next mroning.

I'm aware that this tactic is a blunt weapon. There may be people with reasons for owning such a thing in a congested urban setting. They may have no choice. But the opposing reasons can't be dismissed. These vehicles are just too big for London's 18-19th century roads. They ooze over parking bays all over zones 2 and 3. They steal space and light as well as fill your face with fumes of various brake linings and fat-tyre compounds.

At least tax them more heavily, for god's sake - even after 40 degrees day, no politician seems to be capable of acting swiftly and decisively to kill the causes. 

 

Oh come on, please, isn't it time to take those jubilee flags down?

There's a street in Clapham - let's call it The Chase, as that's what it's called - which looks like it has fallen into the hands of extreme royalists. 

At every opportunity -  jubilee, royal wedding, or whatever - these loyal residents organise a street party. Judging from the leaflets circulated for the 2022 event, it was primarily for better-off residents only. Apparently it was a ticketed event, £20 per pop.

For non-royalist residents, this has all become an embarrassment - especially as the organisers like to put plaques on their walls to commemorate the events. One is reminiscent of the revered London Blue Plaque - which somehow devalues those genuine and well-deserved plaques up at the north end of this same street. 

In the past, however, the evidence of these orgies of adoration for the old firm of Windsor would quickly disappear.

This year they went all out for the four-day jubilee, and then some. As usual, huge Union Jacks were strung up across the full width of the road at roof-height - as though this were The Mall, and not just another overpriced south London rat-run. 

Actually the better comparison is Oxford Street, and an even better one, King's Road. All three streets are awash with money and short on taste; their sponsored displays are equally tacky.

Well, OK, for four days you could keep your head down and think republican thoughts as you walked past: or better still take a different route.

But, as if that absurdly prolonged "holiday" were not enough, the massive flags are still there, two  weeks after end of the celebrations. Some of the biggest houses still display tattered bunting and more flags - always union jacks, no other nations getting a look-in.

Worse still, much of bunting was sponsored by an estate agent. The cheapskates! Is not this the height of

Can you believe it? In one of the richest streets in
the rich postcode SW4, they stooped to using
sponsored bunting for the Jubilee party...

vulgarity? But at least it means only one in three of the triangles is a  Union Jack, the rest being PR for the company.

But honestly, how tacky can you get? As one former royal from the 1980s might have quipped, it was all terribly "naff". 

Did I miss something? I thought this street was in the London Borough of Lambeth, and not in some ancient royal borough, all of its own. 

The jubilee week did at least provide an experiment in socio-political prejudices, or demographic stereotypicality. 

Walking around the area, it was interesting to see where the most flags and bunting were. The Chase was the brashest show noticed on a trek from Lavender Hill to Ferndale Road. There were several smaller street parties, though oddly nothing at all in Macaulay road, which is if anything even wealthier than The Chase, in places. Seems the super-duper-rich are more discreet, or more probably celebrating their own wealth somewhere a long way away.

Turret Grove came closest to matching the scale of this street, though its use of multicoloured bunting, pride rainbows and flags of about ten nationalities, seemed far friendlier and more imaginative.  The UK flag seems less grim alongside Spanish, Italian, Jamaican, Scottish, Welsh, German, French, and other national colours. But when it's nothing but the red, white and blue, those of us who associate the flag with the bad old days of the National Front, the BNP, football thuggery, and toxic unionism in Northern Ireland, or toxic Britishness in the colonies, can only shudder. Echoes of Empire are to the fore. 

What for a while was good about Britishness was its post-war reluctance to make too much of a show. Maybe that was also a symbol of war fatigue, or perhaps imperial smugness - you know, we're top dogs so we don't need to wave our flags around. Of course that's all long since gone, and the far right are now more likely to cluster around the St George's flag, it seems. 

Well, the flags remain flapping as I write. Really, do we have to have these constant reminders of the sadly very disunited kingdom we now inhabit, in these sad, shambolic post-Brexit years of widening wealth gap and deepening misery?

* Update July 9 2022: Happy to report the flags came down about a week ago, so they had their full month of loyalist display. Quite surprised to see how many flags are still flying around London - notably in the above mentioned King's Road, Chelsea, where they seem almost a permanent fixture. Maybe they think they hark back to the early stage of 1960s "swinging London", when the flag had a year or two as a mod style icon.