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.

Mescalin, Morris and the horrors of contemporary car design: charity shop synchronicity scores again

How these four recent charity shop finds led to yet another post on the awfulness of contemporary automobile design

Who can fail to like Jan Morris, the travel writer and novelist?  Jan - James before a sex change in the 1970s - Morris was a charming and witty writer who maintained a prolific literary career up to her death, aged 94, in 2020.

Some of us came to her a bit late and with trepidation. Recently, after enjoying a book about Trieste by resident sage Claudio Magris, I stumbled across Jan's late work on the same city, The Meaning of Nowhere, in a local charity shop. 

This (by the way) was just one of many recent examples of charity shop synchronicity which this blog has been covering - in myriad unpublished posts - ever since it started.

This book is a breeze, a delight. Morris's relaxed style draws you in, and before long you've read the book, enjoyed her literary hospitality. She shares interesting locations and historical anecdote, serves up plenty of salty gossip, and then you're sated and the book's finished. It's a great read, as much about Morris as the city: an "allegory of limbo". 

 As she aged the style became more chatty and less sharp. I found one of her last published titles, Thinking Again, a collection of daily musings covering the year 2018, in another charity shop. 

The first dozen entries are funny and interesting. I particularly liked day 5 - "...when I re-read it the entry turned out to be so footling that I have expunged it with a muttered curse". I like that: most of my writing is far too footling to share, as I keep telling you.

Getting the balance between frothy and serious is hard, and Morris generally gets it right. She's great on the frustrations of old age, and her confessions are endearing. As on Day 12,  when she admits a fondness for BMW cars and that she likes to drive like a boy-racer.

No surprise there: Morris always had a gung-ho side, as in that first great scoop on the climbing of Everest, when an ambitious young journalist on The Times.

It's good to have expectations overturned. But when Jan, still on Day 12, parks alongside a lot of  daytripper vehicles on her local Welsh seafront, she looks around and says: "This, I think, is a good period for external automobile design. Most of these machines look elegant and discreet". 

Well,  I almost choked on my muesli.

Can she really be saying this? What sort of cars do they have in North Wales? New cars that are "elegant and discreet"? Surely not the bloated, gurning chariots of toxic masculinity that are so popular in London's wannabe posh suburbs (SW4 in particular). 

OK, I am obsessed with the current state of car design. Believe manufacturers have been fanning the flames of toxic car culture by making their products look ever more aggressive, pugnacious. 

Look at their pumped-up bodies. Muscle-buggies who spend too long in the car-gym. The crude grilles that leer at pedestrians and cyclists and other drivers, as if to say:"I could crush you, little worm". 

Most have absurdly loud horns, tuned to frequencies seemingly chosen by experts in auditory torture.

All these things have been repeated ad nauseam in this blog. Unfortunately, the trend continues, and the cases of death by dangerous driving, often involving these over-powered monsters, carry on rising. 

Well, I can't blame Jan Morris, but it does seem an odd statement, and it also reminded me of another sychronous connection. I recenty found a beautiful 1960s Penguin edition of Aldous Huxeley's Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell - two essays on the writer's experiences of psychedelic drugs, the first of which is famous beyond the literary circles for suggesting the name of Jim Morrison's band.

Huxley's smart highbrow intelligence and wicked playfulness seduced me when I was about 15, and it was great to find almost exactly the same paperback I read over half a century ago.

Writing about the effects of mescalin on human (his own) perception,  Huxley also crystallised some truths about automobiles in a way no-one else has managed.

He is sent off on a mescalin trip by a researcher in California, who gives him "four tenths of a gramme" of the hallucinogen dissolved in a glass of water. 

For the first 90 minutes he stays indoors, looking at reproductions of paintings by Cézanne, Vermeer and others. He's deeply moved, but then realises he's just as thrilled by the furniture, by the folds in his own trousers .... seeing them now as Van Gogh or Vermeer always saw them.

Then they go out of the building, and Huxley was "suddenly overcome by merriment".

"We walked out onto the street. A large pale blue automobile was standing at the kerb."

Huxley finds himself incapable of resisting a tidal wave of hilarity. I share his amusement every time I read these lines: "What complacency, what an absurd self-satisfaction beamed from those bulging surfaces of glossiest enamel", he wrote. 

"Man had created the thing in his own image – or rather the image of his favourite character in fiction."

Which character that could be, he annoyingly fails to let on.  I would've said someone from Ayn Rand, but maybe she was a bit later? 

It's lucky that Huxley was taking his trip in the late 1950s, when US car design was at its baroque peak of absurdity. If he'd had the same experience today, it might have been a very bad trip: the cars are not so much a source of "merriment" as of dread, or leaden thuggery.

Of course they do have a comic side: if they are being created in the image of anyone, it is of a gym-fit muscle man, pumped up with steroids and testosterone to the point of bursting. They even move with that awkward gait of guy whose thighs are just a bit too big.

I'm a total hypocrite, in so many ways. I do not hate all cars. They can be beautiful, wonderful things. I think Citroens of the early 1960s, Ferraris, Jags and Porsches of the same vintage, can be extremely attractive sculpturally. Even those huge old US autos expressed the cheerful optimism of that nation's golden years. 

They burned up so much gas, and fouled up the atmosphere, but they contributed to a culture that is oh, so beguiling. Could anyone find a Range Rover Evoque beguiling in that way? Give me a break.