Bygone times

The trouble with nostalgia is, well, that it's nostalgia.  There's no point harking back to a time that's gone forever, changed, behind us, it's place taken by something new.  Brexit, for example, we can't go back to how we were before Europe when apparently the sun always shone and everyone was happy.

It may be that cycling has had its day.  The days when we could allow children at ten to pass a cycling proficiency and immediately be given permission by parents to ride their bikes on the public roads to school, scouts, guides, doing stuff with friends, exploring their area have gone.  That was so 1978. Or at least, for me, that was the year when I passed the cycling proficiency and was out there on the public roads, using my bicycle to get to places.  It's gone. Forget it. That's no longer the dream and we shouldn't wistfully seek to go back to the 1970s in the same way as we wouldn't be looking to go back to pre decimalisation. It's gone.

We should settle for the modern compartmentalised life. Exercise must happen in the gym, where it's clean and safe. Travel should be in the car, even the train is out moded, inefficient, a victim of it's own lack of success, unusable because the frequencies and destinations make it defunct.

Everyone should order all their shopping on the internet and have it delivered. We should not have any kind of casual conversation as a result of shopping or anything dangerous like that. We might meet nutters. We need to be kept safe, preferably hermetically sealed in houses. On no account should anyone have fun which has not been pre prescribed, signed off as accepted by at least 80% of society as normal. Everyone should probably work from home.

If we're on the roads and we're not in cars, we need to get with the programme. The car is the safe way, it's the right way, it's the capitalist way and it keeps us in jobs and keeps the economy afloat.

Pavements are for people walking, but we need some better rules here, things about making sure if the car needs the pavement more, the people walking just disappear. There should be rules about minimum walking speeds, maximum walking speeds to make sure that nobody runs and nobody gets in anybody's way. Sigh.

The 1970s are over. Deal with it.