ON YER BIKE: Raging against the machine (From Oxford Mail)

ON YER BIKE: Raging against the machine

8:00am Tuesday 16th February 2010

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LONG live Victor Meldrew. I really am falling to bits. I’ve had a cough and cold since Christmas, and a week ago I lost my voice for two days.

Friends persuaded me to visit the doctor to check for pneumonia. My wife has started to wear ear plugs – I kid you not – as the cough has turned into a hacking bark that makes her flinch.

To top it all, I was chewing a Malteser on Sunday when my tongue detected a hard lump. I spat it into my hand and saw a grey-brown piece of tooth the size of a dried pea.

Someone’s tooth in my Malteser?! Then my wife suggested that it might be mine. Huh? As if anyone would loose a tooth while eating a Malteser. Then I felt the large gap in my teeth. I was crumbling apart.

It was time to have a right old look at myself. A physical wreck, underperforming at work due to a chest of solid mucus but apparently still energetic enough to rail at all and everything around me. Have I reached that certain age at which everything is worse than it ever was “when I were a youth”?

I foam and seethe. I work from home and I really don’t get out enough. Every trivial imperfection in my street riles me.

Students’ Mini Coopers, unwanted wardrobes littering the pavements, and taxi drivers checking their 0-60s aside, have you noticed all those red elastic bands in the streets?

They’re dropped by Royal Mail postmen as they do their rounds. They appear on my doorstep every few weeks. If one is dropped at my house every month (conservatively), and given that there are 24.7 million UK households, one can extrapolate that Royal Mail litters the streets with 296,400,000 red elastic bands every year. More than a quarter of a billion elastic bands every year!

So there I was yesterday, driving to the dentist to get my tooth fixed and worrying about the elastic band mountain.

Yes, driving dear reader, for, with a galloping chest infection I wasn’t going to risk collapse on the 12-mile return trip from Cowley Road to my nearest NHS dentist, conveniently located on the other side of Kidlington.

Usually I cycle, and it’s surprising how the 20-minute car journey takes only 35 minutes by bike. But not today. Not with tuberculosis.

As I eased on to the ring road at Marston, I was shocked to see a million cars waiting to exit. They were queuing all the way from Summertown. It was 9.15 on a Monday morning – and half-term to boot.

Thousands of people, mainly alone in their cars and on occasion sharing, edging patiently into the city.

Where on earth were so many going? Where had they all come from? How long every day do so many cars creep into Oxford along every A-road? My mind boggled.

The vision of these thousands of boxed automatons edging slowly along reaffirmed my determination to help poor drivers end their desperate addiction to the motor car.

I’m sure that some, perhaps ill like me, or elderly, needed to drive. But surely thousands of them could have used the Water Eaton Park & Cycle, or Park & Ride? Or made the same journey by bike along Marston Ferry Road?

People’s determination to drive despite clear obstacles and decent alternatives is flabbergasting.

Long live Victor Meldrew!

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