Back on the Soapbox

When I was about nine or ten, I wrecked my Mum's bike. At the time there was a craze for attaching bits of cardboard to the front and rear forks so that they got flipped by the spokes going round, making a very satisfying noise; offcuts from Kellogg's Cornflake packets were favourite. The day of the incident, I was wearing sandals - yes, I know, but we all did back then, along with short trousers; fortunately the trainer had not yet been invented. As I rode along it occurred to me that I might get the same sort of noise if I gently poked the front of my sandal into the spokes of the front wheel. Seconds later, I was lying on a gritty road surrounded by the mangled remains of my Mum's pride and joy. I was bloody, bruised and apprehensive; I could here the words already - "Just you wait until your Dad gets home!"

I learned something that day, to do with respecting other's property (my Mum still mentions it fifty years later), and to do with sandals; they're not a substitute for cardboard. I also learned that falling off a bike hurts; the next time I did it, the injuries were so traumatic that I fainted the next day during school assembly, the only time I've ever passed out. Since then I've fallen off several times, once as recently as two years ago when I went into a bramble hedge. Riding a bike is risky, whatever your age, but think of what pleasure it gives. Why should we, or the petty officials who blight our lives, deny ourselves, or our children, the elements of risk that are concomitant with the fulfillment of a life richly lived?

I'm aware that this is a hobby horse of mine and I'm relieved that, in the UK at least, we are finally waking up to the damage we inflict on society by over-regulation, particularly in areas of health and safety. My concern is that it is too late; the bureaucracy is entrenched and, due to the very regulations they enforce, we will not be able to winkle them out of their funk-holes with anything pointed, mildly corrosive or fattening.

I haven't got any bicycle images handy so I'll have to make do with this trip hazard to illustrate today's theme. Obviously if you avoid coming a cropper on the post, the nasty disease-carrying seagulls will get you. You will never win.