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.

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?

On not leaving London 2: Africa on the Square, photography at Somerset House and some rich coincidences

Bukky Leo and Black Egypt transport a rapt Trafalgar Square crowd - out of cold, rainy London and straight into the heat of
Fela Kuti's Shrine, in the Kalakuta Republic, Lagos, Nigeria. For half and hour. And then the rain came down.

So by the following week, still not having left London, despite the increasingly grim view of the vile Nine Elms - Battersea development from the back of the flat, it would have been plain churlish not to go to Trafalgar Square for the Africa festival.

There are many such events on this square, always free, of course, and always endorsed by the Mayor of London. They include Chinese New Year, the Russian spring lenten festival, Maslenitsa, Diwali and so on. They are generally heavily sponsored by big corporate interests and the Tourism ministries of relevant countries, and often as a result a bit bland and worthy. Plus the square itself always struck me as one of the bleakest and least encouraging of communal meeting places of any major city I've ever visited.

But remember we now have a new Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan. This event is part of the annual educational exercise, Black History Month. It does have a big sponsor - Air France, but the media sponsor is The Voice newspaper. And if anyone can transform an awkward,  grey, ex-triumphalist colonial space into something good, it must surely be Africans.

And by god they did, from the bright colours of the different stalls and pop-up stands selling food, fashion, artefacts, books etc - to the non-stop upbeat patter from the two main presenters on stage. And one super-brilliant DJ. Read on...

So, having arranged to go to the Picasso exhibition at the NPG, we encounter the Square already bustling with people, and with some high-energy South African music echoing off the facades of the old colonial offices all around.

We stay in the square, and watch

We tear ourselves away from this, head to the NPG, even though the sun is shining. Inside there's a big queue for Picasso, so we head for another exhibition, across Covent Garden to Somerset House to see photos by the late Malick Sidibé of nightlife and beach-life in his native Mali. All the photos are black and white and taken on a Kodak Brownie 127 camera with flash gun, and they are superb, evening blown up to a metre square or more. It's a small show and unmissable for the absolute elegance and beauty of the people he cpaptures, their innocence and eloquence of movement, in the matter of body language and facial expression.

This small, unforgettable exhibition has an audio dimension as well, thanks to a background soundtrack of African music contemporary to the photos - that is to say, mainly 1960s, 70s and a bit of 80s.

It's gorgeous music, mixed up with ambient sounds from parties and streetlife of Bamako. This mixtape was produced by the DJ Rita Ray.

By 4pm I am back in the square and there is amazing music coming over the PA. The DJ is Rita Ray. The crowd is dancing, and it keeps on dancing through the three final bands of the day. And dancing even more when Rita Ray ends the whole thing with some astonishing mix-ups or mash-ups of god knows what dub and Afrobeat and tribal chanting and desert blues and who knows what else, but so expertly blended that the sound seems to make the ground slide beneath your feet.

Then the Algerian musician Seddick Zebiri comes on with his band Seeds of

Creation, mixing what sounds like classical Berber oud playing with some serious jazz-funk and a bit of far-out acid-rock riffing and drumming. He's another crowd pleaser! This guy is a crazy singer and mover and his band flies,  always shifting its musical ground, and after a short but fiery set they get a huge round of applause.

The amazing Algerian master musician Seddick Zebiri with his band, Seeds
of Creation, bring a unique brand of North African funk to the Square.

Then comes the final act - a band known as Black Egypt, led by the Nigerian afrobeat Saxophonist Bukky Leo. Yes, the same  Bukky who used to play Sunday evening sets at the Beufoy Arms inLAvender Hill, back in the early 90s I think, a true disciple of the Black Presidnet. ANd sure enough Bukky dedicates this set to Fela, who, he says, "was borh in this month and died in this month". SO Black History month is also Fela Kuti month. Sounds good to me. WOn't argue with that.

Certainly won't argue with this band's top-class renditions of a string of Fela classics, Zombie, Water Get No Enemy, Coffin for Head of State....the voice and the sax are so good, the band is great, even though much smaller than the full Egypt 80 or whatever band Fela had at the time. You could almost imagne the iron hand of Fela himself leading the tight, deadly accurate and beautifully-rehearsed ensemble playing. Trafalgar Square has surely never before resounded to such a fabulous onslaught of music straight out of the Kalakuta  Republic. Love!