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.

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. 

 

Exhausted by the infantile antics of the automotive industry

What an awful lot of exhaust pipes you have, Granny Merc. Yes, all the better to engulf you in stinky gases, my dear!

 Look at the photo above.

That thing is a private conveyance, what we used to call a "car". It is something people choose to buy or lease, and often put an awful lot of their disposable income into maintaining.

Look again. The car in the photo is quite a new car. This is late 2021, and thanks to the ingenuity of engineers many cars no longer need an exhaust pipe as they are fully electrically powered, and do not emit stinky gases.

But this vehicle appears to have not one, not even two, but FOUR exhaust pipes. And this in late 2021, after London mayor Sadiq Khan's expansion of the Ultra Low Emission Zone. 

Why, if cars now have to have very low emissions, do they need four orifices from which to emit suchlike?

Especially if they are very expensive cars, such as the vehicle shown above, a highly respected brand.

As it is a coveted make, I assume only one of those pipes parps out toxic fumes, and the other three bathe us all in exotic fragrances of healing aromas, a touch of musk, perhaps, for the grieving macho driver, but also some gorgeous honeysuckle, sweetpea and lemongrass for the rest of us...

No, sorry, I cycle behind such lumpen machinery all the time and know they all stink of the same thing: money, testosterone and burning futures.

I've also noticed that the 4-pipe brigade are usually the most expensive top of range versions of the model, and are almost certainly the noisiest - in fact they seem to tune those pipes to emit a particularly angry racket.

I was tempted to brand this 4-pipe tribe as Clarsonistas, but this would be too limiting. Although many are ruddy-faced late-middle aged men still trying to wear Levis, but not really cutting it....no, you see, I just as easily fall into the trap of stereotyping people. Young, old, male, female, white, black, small, large, all types of people drive these things. It's depresseing to me that clearly highly intelligent people choose such cars in which to navigate the narrow, traffic-choked streets of old London.

These big speeding lumps of metal glass and plastic on wheels are bad enough in any form - but those extra exhaust pipes are just a provocation too far.  

Are the quadruple exhausts supposed to denote something? Are they helpful, or necessary? Do they make the engine more efficient? I only ask. But it's not as though it's a racing car, or even a derivative of one.  It is an SUV, and therefore more closely related to agricultural conveyances. 

Oh, and by the way, do you you see the designation of the vehicle? It says "GLC 43"

Do they mean to refer to our long defunct but much missed metropolitan government? Are they taking the piss? Show a bit of respect, Mercedes-Benz!

I only makes these points, and ask these questions, because I am puzzled with all the contradictions in this society we inhabit. Four exhaust pipes for one family conveyance seems to be a symbol for something at odds with wisdom, not to mention good taste. Even the fiercest, strongest, biggest tigers in the jungle get by on just one arsehole.

How many more arseholes can this poor city tolerate?

Afterthought: The vehicle in the photo does have two major redeeming features. First, it's by no means the fattest SUV in M-B range. Look at it: it hardly spills over the width of the parking bay, and those tyres are positively anorexic! How pathetically undernourished this car seems.
Secondly, and crucially, it is painted red. A colour! I almost forgive it its 4 pipes for this gift to our drab grey street environment. I counted vehicles in the normal traffic jam at Wandsworth Road/Queenstown Road junction yesterday. Among 40 vehicles, the only real colour was provided by two traffic-marooned busses. There were two enormous white cement trucks, 16 off-white or blue-black delivery vans. The rest were cars, mainly SUVs, some white,  many black, but most in varying shades of metallic grey. Why are people so keen to add to the dismal greyness of this murderously colourless December city?

Largely unnecessary: now even the RAC advises against urban SUVs

 

Two cars, one from the mid 1960s, the other from 2021. This is progress. One of them was found to
be capable of containing 27 adult humans, the other is a six-seater with plenty of capacity for a
Waitrose shop.

I swore I'd lay off SUVs for a while but the strangely belated announcement by The Royal Automobile Club chief  that London residents might think again before buying an SUV - was an irresistible cue for a rant.

The RAC's Steve Gooding was commenting on a recent bit of research by the New Weather Institute which found more SUVs were being sold to city-dwellers than to people in country areas where their use might be more justified.

He used the quaint old term "Chelsea tractors" to highlight a finding that SUVs were indeed most popular in the London boroughs of Kensington & Chelsea, Hammersmith & Fulham, and Westminster.

I'm surprised these had not been overtaken by boroughs like Wandsworth, while the truly super-rich were these days more likely to be whisked around London in chauffeur-driven Mercs or Bentleys, or in a sleek Tesla - leaving their huge Range Rovers at one of their country properties.

Nevertheless it's good to hear this bastion of motor car ownership speaking against the bloated behemoths that clog London's narrow streets, even in such meek and mealy-mouthed tones.

Critics pointed out than many SUVs are as or more energy efficient than a lot of saloon cars. It's true that there are huge numbers of mongrel SUVs out there - basically an SUV shape body on the same chassis as a hatchback or saloon car. 

What they fail to address is that the pollution inflicted by the "real" SUVs is not merely atmospheric. Most residential streets in London's zones 2 and 3 are now blighted by the nose-to-tail parking of huge vehicles, mostly black or shades of grey. Many of London's handsome Georgian or Victorian terraces are now scarcely visible behind these walls of static or crawling motorised metal.

Many are wider than the parking bays and their bulging bodies and tyres infringe on road space shared by cars, bikes, delivery vans, refuse trucks, etc...with a resulting increase in road rage. All those "I got here first" scenes; the cursing and swearing, the raised fists and fingers, bulging blood vessels on puce faces.

Oh well, I broke my vow but I feel better now and will shut the duck up.

Read the New Weather Institute report, Mindgames on wheels, here.

Feeling less lonely as Standard columnist blasts SUVs

At last, an opinion piece in the Evening Standard that pins down everything that is vile about the vehicles known as SUVs ("sports utility vehicles", that is big four-wheel drive farmer's trucks tarted up to appeal to rich and insecure urbanites).

When I read Anna van Praagh's short piece in Wednesday's edition (May 23, Comment: My boy's obsession with 4x4s will not do, page 19) I almost did one of those embarrassing "YES!" gestures loved by footballers who've just scored the winning goal.

So, yes! There is someone else out there who finds these bully-boy autos totally repugnant. She hits the phenomenon right on its chrome-plated, sneering grille: "Childcrushers are so vulgar, so selfish, so crass, surely people driving them can sense how much they are disliked?"

Exactly. She distils most of my reasons for loathing these vehicles in a few very well turned sentences. But are they actually so widely disliked? There's a conundrum here.

It's odd, because there has always been a good deal of mockery and distaste for the urban use of vehicles which might be appropriate on a ranch in Arizona, or in a war zone - but are simply an unattractive nuisance in a city like London with so many congested, narrow streets. I can remember people commenting harshly on the drivers of  "Chelsea tractors" way back in the early 1990s, and possibly before that.

Yet none of the jokes, none of the disapproval, has made even the slightest dent in their popularity: in fact they have burgeoned, and conquered the car market, getting bigger, fatter and much, much uglier year after year.

The original 1970s Range Rovers look positively slimline compared with a 2018 Land Rover Discovery - which, at over 2 metres wide, surely should become one of the first to be banned from confined routes like the Rotherhithe tunnel.

Cycling through the back streets of my own unmentionable suburb (the postcode is SW4), the ratio of these vehicles to normal is about half and half. If two of the fatter SUVs are parked on opposite sides of a road, there's barely room for one of their plump brethren to pass - without forcing everyone else to head for the pavement.

There's also an irony. One of the widest, tallest and  longest SUVs encountered today was a Tesla - an electric-powered vehicle. Many of the top-of-range SUVs around today are more fuel efficient than some of the sweet little cars you love so much, you hypocrite author!

OK - maybe that's true. But that does not make up for the sheer physical provocation these massive chunks of metal and and plastic represent; the way they flash their stupid LED fair-lights at you, blast you out of your saddle with their high-powered air-horns, swish past you on their great fat tyres, looking down their noses at you from their elevated, kid-leather-seated comfort.

Grrrr: this isn't SUV envy, you know, it really isn't.

Things about 2018 I am already sick of....

2018, like every year since about 1986, is dumping even bigger, even uglier, even more arrogant-looking SUVs on our narrow streets. What is the enduring appeal of these ghastly, gurning thug-mobiles? And why are they nearly all black, with tinted passenger windows?

I confess: all the things about 2018 that are already getting on my wick are exactly the same ones that were doing it back in 2017, and long before that.

Restricting it to the bad things about London life, they are things that became noticeably worse in 2017 and show every sign of continuing in that direction - because nothing really goes in discrete years, does it? Apart from calendars and academics, perhaps.

There are the obvious exceptions: things we did not expect to have to put up with. Like the new £10 notes, which pull off the impressive feat of being both slippery and sticky at the same time.

These apologies for currency are the perfect embodiment of everything that is wrong with the UK - perhaps the whole western world - in 2018. They're meant to represent progress, to be "greener" and cleaner and more efficient. But everybody hates them (and not just the vegans).

I've already lost at least one new tenner, handing over two stuck together. Whether the shopkeeper knew or not I don't know - but all the checkout staff I've talked to say they hate the new notes, for similar reasons.

This nasty plasticky stuff is no longer real f-f-folding money. Try and crunch one up into a little ball and it gradually unfurls itself. Horrible, horrible things, like the nastiest shrink-wrap packaging on the nastiest foodstuffs.

Trouble is I dislike them so much that I have an urge to spend them quickly just to get them out of sight, i.e I am wasting a lot more money. Doing just what the Treasury wants, spending with the new notes. Is this really a government scheme to kill off cash completely?

That was a long digression! And not a London story, but affecting every poor cash-user in this crackpot country. But, as I am no longer a journalist (never really was, in truth), and do not need to care about the attention span of readers, I'm going to write as much as I like about whatever I like.

Roving which range, exactly? All those big black shiny new SUVs with
their dark tinted windows are making suburban streets look like the overflow
 parking lot for a convention of undertakers

Groan: more bloody SUV stuff

All the other complaints are carried over from previous years, previous decades. Have already moaned endlessly about the curse of ever-more-bloated four wheel drive cars cramming the tight suburban backstreets of south London.

I'm going to keep on moanin', lord yes. Much more, louder moaning for 2018.

These fat bastard vehicles are killing us in so many ways. Go down to Northcote Road ("Nappy Valley") on any weekend and watch the latest Mercedes, Audi, Rover, BMW, Volvo and Porsche versions of these hearse-like conveyances lumbering up and down this little road, jousting for access into the small side-streets and limited parking places. If you're not inside one, watch out for your life. The drivers do not always deign to look down their elegant noses at us mortals on the streets beneath them.

There's another, linked phenomenon which is quite hard to understand: the majority of the newest, biggest, shiniest SUVs in the poshest streets around here are jet black. The bigger and newer the SUV, the blacker  and shinier it seems. One street in particular seems to have become a sort Mafia parking lot.

All the SUVs are black, and they all have darkly-tinted windows for the passenger area. Often you see big blokes in black suits, white shirts and black ties polishing these vehicles. Who are the owners, are they so famous and important that they are at risk of car-jacking and abduction? Are they frightened the hoi-polloi will throw rotten eggs at them? If only....

While on the subject of automobiles, there is another annoying and dangerous trend - the fondness manufacturers have for LED lights, mainbeams and sidelights alike. They are so bright as to temporarily blind anyone unfortunate enough to be in their glare. The stupid fairy-light adornments, eyebrow shapes over the headlamps, zig-zags around the rear light...are just vulgar and annoying. Adding to the extreme ugliness of so many of these confections of plastic, steel, glass and rubber.

Also they can be extremely dangerous - as, coincidentally, the RAC yet again pointed out the day this entry was posted.

Anger!

But the next one is linked: the rise of generalised, unfettered, foul-mouthed rage.  Anger, so much anger; impotent rage, cursing, shouting, fists raised and blood-vessels disteneded rage; and then turns to physical violence. Twice in a week I witness this. The bike hits the pedestrian at the Half Moon junction in Herne Hill. Felled cyclist springs up, stares in disbelief at the bits of expensive plastic that have broken off his machine, then takes a groggy swipe at the dusty pedestrian who has only just got on his feet.

And then, at the Brixton Town Hall crossroads, a cyclist stops and raps on the driver's window of an Addison Lee people-carrier. Window winds down, big snarling face stares out, about to mouth obscenities, but the cyclist gets his pre-emptive strike in first - a stream of saliva, spat fast into the driver's cabin.

Cyclist zooms off, Addison Lee in hot pursuit, makes as if to ram bike, then rams on brakes instead. Common sense, perhaps, prevails; the looming court case, the lost job, local news reports ...maybe these flashed through driver's consciousness. Let's just scare the shit out this fucker.

Anger, rage. On trains, buses, in the queues at Sainsburys, at the post office. Parking worst of all.

Worst-case media horror trend of selfish UK public behaviour so far this year - the rude scrawled notes stuck on ambulances parked briefly outside the houses of these angry vehicle-obsessed people, whose anger - once mainly confined to in the forums of certain newspaper websites - now seems to be spilling out all over the shop.

I feel my own anger mounting, as I write. None of us is immune - this is the prevailing psychic environment; anger; fear; it's contagious.

Beep! Beep!

Expressions of anger are all around us at all times in stressed-out, tensed-up London. Again, the worst and most visible is on the roads. The screech of tyres as an over-hasty driver slams on brakes at a junction. Absurd over-revving of expensive but poorly silenced engines: an intimidation by accelerator pedal and exhaust pipe.

The realisation by murderous psychopaths that cars are very effective weapons, especially if you want to kill several people at one fell swoop, and permanently injure many more. A new motor-psycho sickness.

At the merely annoying end of same spectrum:  the inevitable, ever increasing use of the car horn to express rage - the high-powered air-horns, weaponised, enough to make you jump in the air, to make your heart tremble. This topic was covered here before - see "A pox on your blaring horns" from 2013 – and it is worse now.

Time to revive the notion of the Inverse Blare Bill, as recommended on this site all those years ago. The simple idea was to legislate to make sure the most macho and aggressive vehicles emit the feeblest, silliest, most embarrassing noises when the hooter is activated. Only the smallest and sweetest of cars - say a  2CV or Topolino - would be allowed to make a strident beeping sound.

There are many other topics to get het up about - such as the proliferation of dogs and the their doings. Why have so many dog-owners stopped picking up their darling doggies' turds? How many times must we get home, get all the way up the carpeted staircase to the fourth four flat, and only then notice the vile, tell-tale stink.

Fed up with all this food

Then - another cause of mounting Calvinist-style intolerance in this bitter old bastard - there is this constantly increasing London hyper-obsession with food.

So ironic, so typically bonkers British, that at exactly the same time we are told ours is the fattest population in Europe, we are also bombarded day in, day out with editorials heaping praise on obscenely extravagant food-feasting....

Latent annoyance at the gourmet-gastro-masterchef culture burst to the surface when handed a free copy of a fat, luxurious magazine called Foodism.

Yes, Foodism! Here it was, a great beautifully printed wodge of nosh-porn. It didn;t get my juices flowing, I'm afriad - but it did make my blood begin to boil, gently. Trouble is, I love food. Most of us do - and we certainly depend on it for our existence, unless we are vampires. I love what I think is good food; what you can get in a cheap, ordinary restaurant in almost any local bar or cafe or restaurant in France, Italy or SPain, at normal prices.

Because in those and many other countries, good food is nothing to do with "foodism" or gourmet cooking, it is what everyone expects as a right. Decent ingredients, well cooked, in simple, classic styles.

Alas, even these fine countries are being invaded by the Anglo-American industrialisation of food, a phased invasion of fast food and junk food and then - the ultimate paradox, the final insult - selling them back bastardised versions of their own dishes as something healthy and fashionable to aspire to.

That's why it's so annoying to be told that London is now the world's food capital or similar rubbish. London is just the place where there are enough rich and gullible and ignorant and incompetent and fashion-addicted people to allow all manner of tricksters to open stupid ridiculous new on-theme eateries, and to get people queuing in the rain to spend a week's average wage on some sickening variant of a hamburger and chips.

All of this comes wrapped up with another paradox: how can London be a city both of extreme Veganism and extreme carnivores? How many different "gourmet" burger joints does a suburban high street need? The Five Guys/Byron/Haché thing seems to be outstripping Americanised Italian coffee shops in this blighted area.

A few years ago, the fashion was all for "pulled" meats. Even if I ate pork, I can't imagine asking for a pulled-pork bun or whatever. Don't the images this coupling of words evokes put you off these juicy meaty products, as well?

Obviously not.

But these days the food fashions seem to have got even less delectable. Weird rainbow-colored doughnuts; great gloops of stringy cheese in warmed buns; ill-advised hybrids, such as the awful cronut.

Am stopping here before I blow a gasket. Good night!

SUV menace: Is Ginger Baker to blame?

No secret,  I hate SUVs. As a cyclist in London,  I'm more and more often experiencing that near-death feeling at the business end of some chunk of over-heated metal driven by some over-cool yummy daddy or mummy  - is it a BMW, an Audi, a Merc or one of the originals, the Range Rover series? - as  they push their chrome-plated noses across the mini-roundabouts of South Kensington.

And then I think back to one of the dodgy heroes of my youth, the jazz and rock drummer Ginger Baker.  And I think, fuck you Ginger - you helped kick off this whole SUV thing in 1971 by driving one of the first Range Rovers across the Sahara, on your way to the shrine of shrines for all jazz and rock drummers of the time - Fela Kuti's Shrine in Lagos, Nigeria.

So, swerving out of the way of one of these monsters, I had this thought. If you'd stayed back home, or gone by plane,  Ginger, would London today be quite so clogged up with these inflated and unnecessary automobiles?

The new film,  "Beware Mr Baker", is a wonderfully entertaining documentary about that strange period in London's musical history - late 50s through to 1970. Thanks to the producer/director/writer/narrator Jay Bulger's bravery, it was an unusually good film, revising and reviving ideas about these old rock idols, and yet never detracting from the skill and showmanship that made Baker such a natural star in the first place.

But he deals with other stars in that strange 1960s/70s constellation, as well.  Oddly, Eric Clapton came out of the whole thing smelling only of the finest roses.

But Ginger! Oh dear! Now, everyone seems to agree he was a monster, a violent, selfish bully who also happened to be a drum genius. And a bit of a sad case, in his old age.

Well he surely was a great drummer,  even though some of us found those solos a little overpowering. And at least 20 minutes too long. Unless it was live and we were there, moving.

I love drumming, and I love the way Mr Baker, etc, made us all think back to the origins of the rhythms of jazz, just as Miles Davis and a number of others did, in those days, the very early 1970s, that time of Tony Williams, Miles, Sly, James Brown, and the amazing wake-up call we were just beginning to get from Jamaica.

By 1971, when that veneer of fame was begining to wear a little thin, perhaps, Ginger decided to check out these roots in person. He would go to Nigeria. He would go in a large British vehicle built by that  British establishment bastion, Rover. And the whole thing would be filmed by the BBC TV arts director of the moment, Tony Palmer.

The resulting film - Ginger in Africa - now seems like half a brilliant advertisement for Rover's brand new offering, the  Range Rover, a gentrified version of their military/agricultural workhorse, the Land Rover – and half a fascinating pilgrimage of one our best jazz/rock musician's search for his rhythmic roots in West Africa.

I love this film.  Watch it if you can. Or, if you can't find it, watch the new documentary - parts of  Tony Palmer's original documentary seem to be in there. But pleae, if you live anywhere in the UK, apart from on a large farm, please don't buy a Range Rover or any other SUV. Unless, like Ginger, you are planning to drive it across the Channel, across Europe, across Algeria, across the  Sahara Desert.

And then on to Lagos.

A pox on your blaring horns!

Warning: this vehicle's horn can damage your eardrums.

A pox on the bullying drivers of London (especially, I notice, the drivers of the most horrible postcodes: SW4, SW11, SW3, SW6, SW10  and W8) who cannot resist blasting everyone else with their hideously powerful car-horns at the slightest sign of a hesitation or a missed gear-change.

These fat cats in their bloated-people-carriers seem to have forgotten that is an offence to sound your horn other than in emergencies.

The police seem to have forgotten this too, although their helpful website, AskthePolice.uk,
spells it out:

"A horn should only be used when warning someone of danger, not to indicate your annoyance at a manner of driving.

A horn should not be sounded when stationary on a road at anytime, other than at times of danger due to another vehicle on or near the road.

A horn should not be used on a moving vehicle on a restricted road (basically a road that has street lights and a 30mph limit) between the times of 2330hrs and 0700hrs."

If only these rules were enforced in London's plumpest suburbs, where the residential streets are thickly populated with big fat shiny vanity-wagons, each packing a heart-stopping sound-blast with more wattage than the Rolling Stones had in Hyde Park in 1969 (it seems).

No, I  wouldn't mind if all the car horns were 1960s style poops and honks and beeps.

But, as with engines and headlights, the power of these devices seems to have undergone a dreadful inflation. So often now a bladder-emptying, over-trebly, eardrum-piercing blast emanates from even the smallest, meekest and most modest looking of vehicles.

Of course as a hugely prejudiced anti-fat-cat cyclist (as well as fully piad-up motorist and pedestrian) I am most offended by the noisy, arrogant horns of the posh set in their  hideous Range Rovers and Audis and BMWs and so on. These vast, shiny vehiclkes with their exaggerated comic-book angry face chrome grilles, they are caricature ugly. But how how can they be so noisy? The way they sit in stationary traffic, hitting the noise button, as though that will do any good.

All it does is make the rest of us highly likely to drive like lunatics to get away from them, or better still to switch off our engines, get out of our cars, find the sledgehammer in our car boots, walk calmy over to said Range Rover or Mercedes or BMW - the shiniest, biggest one of the lot - and make a large dent in the most sensitive crease of its obese body-panels.

Oh, sorry.

Back in the 70s I remember people used to pay extra for something called an "air horn". Is that what they use now, or are they some  sort of fiendish digitally enhanced devices? Who knows.  All I know is that there should be some sort of horn tax. And perhaps the chance to avoid that tax by paying heavily to buy a hooter-tone that precisely subverts the machismo of your motor.

In my ideal world, there would be an inverse law, so that  the biggest, fastest, ugliest, most testoserone-packed cars would have to have the most ridiculously meek and mild and silly horn-sounds. One of those huge muscle-bound things -  are they Humvees?  - would, for example, be legally required to play a Pink and Perky number whenever the horn was sounded.

All Rolls Royce and Bentleys would have "Buddy, can you spare a dime" fitted as standard before being allowed out of the factory.

Most 4 x 4, SUV style wagons would have to choose between various British comedy actors' voices of the 1960s and 70s, especially the really camp and nasal ones: "OOOoooh, you are awful! ( but I like you)", "fancy yourself do you? "; "I say!"  etc and so on.


I would have a reverse law for small, pretty cars. Genuine Fiat 500s, for example could have full-blast snatches of Pavarotti (or better still) versions of Nessun Dorma at twice the dciebels of anyone else. Just becaue they are lovely little cars with small...

A beautiful little Citroen 2CV could choose any chanson it eanted, and I wopuld npt object. It could even play Serge Gainsborough if it wanted, or  Edith Piaf, or even Charles De Gaulle himself.

Smart Cars, I am afraid, would need to leanr some humility: I would have them utter only  very basic sounds at their moment of need: "Doh!": "You what?", "Uhhhh?"

And Beetles? Will I be banned forever for suggesting that original VW Beetles might be allowed a little stridnet Wagner - Ride of the Valkyries, etc - but anything post 1999 would have to take a 5 second loop from certain Kraftwerk and Can tracks.

Which just leaves the middle market. What would be the ideal, the approrpriate hooter-tone for  your Ford Focus, your Vauxhall Astra? It would have - in the spirit of this experiment - be something incredibly rare and exotic. The last cry of ecstasy from some endangered species, the call of the - what?