Читать книгу Grumpy Old Men: New Year, Same Old Crap - David Quantick - Страница 26

They’re still incredibly self-satisfied, smug, vain and humourless. Anyone who dresses like a condom on wheels has to be. Cyclists used to be wonderful features of British life, pedalling around in small family groups, smiling at the slothful pedestrians, looking forward to stopping at a country inn for a glass of dandelion and burdock and a lettuce salad sandwich. We were so fond of the bicycle that we made the police ride them, even though all the villains were driving large foreign cars or stealing trains.

But then a bad thing happened. The bicycle became a symbol not of eccentricity, but virtue. Owning a bicycle meant that you were an honorary eco-warrior (see PEOPLE WHO CALL THEMSELVES ECO-WARRIORS) and loved the Planet Earth, or ‘Gaia’ as you would call it after a couple of organic dandelion and burdocks. Riding to work at your overpriced wholefood store let you off all other duties, ecology-wise. You may be dressed like a corking tosser, but you were on a bike, and therefore almost Christ-like in your excellence (the phrase ‘Christ on a bike’ may derive from this idea, although it doesn’t).

The worst thing is that bicycles are in fact secretly very bad for the environment. Their tyres are made of barely sustainable rubber, ripped from screaming plants in the Burmese jungle. Their frames are forged in huge furnaces, gears smelted in burning fires and factories in over-exploited developing countries, and the covering for the saddles is made of the hide of little baby mice. Probably.