Going off on one …

Having decided upon the subject of my post today – and still in the preliminary phase of contemplating its content – I became aware of the recurring issue that confronts every oldie commenting upon the world as it hurtles towards the future.

Regular Rusters will be only too well aware of that of which I write: the risk of being pigeon-holed as an irrelevant dyed-in-the-wool, stuck in the past, conservative (with a small “c”), deluded old codger boring everyone else to death by once again nostalgically harking back to “the good old days that de facto never actually existed” when Battler Britton fought the Nazis single-handed, Fred Trueman and Brian Statham opened the bowling for England, the Beatles had just topped the pop charts for the first time, Two Way Family Favourites dominated the Sunday lunchtime radio listening and Great Britain effortlessly set the world standards for everything that was moral, fair, decent and true upon the Earth.

And, what’s more, in wintertime Mummy used to make us cups of tea and her uniquely wonderful potato cakes dripping with lashings of butter as David Coleman simultaneously began reading out the football results as they came through on the teleprinter on the BBC’s Saturday afternoon Grandstand programme at tea-time.

[I now pause for a moment to let readers return in their minds to that halcyon era when everything made sense and George Dixon magically not only patrolled but also kept our streets safe whilst standing behind his Sergeant’s desk at his local nick at Dock Green.]

Today I espouse the cause – and indeed begin a campaign on behalf of – a greatly-disadvantaged section of society that has long been discriminated against and never more so than today when it seems that he (or she) who shouts loudest and makes the biggest possible nuisance of themselves automatically grabs the headlines and shames the rest of society into giving them exactly what they want.

You know the group I’m talking about.

Pedestrians.

One of the effects of the coronavirus crisis in all its manifestations including the lockdown has been to emphasise just how bad things have become.

I write as some who, as some readers will know, started his latest fitness campaign during the lockdown and has maintained it ever since by going daily – okay, with occasional lapses – for his “hour-long-plus exercise” session every afternoon – wind, rain or shine.

Based upon my informal research/survey both of experience over the last five months I can report the following:

Only about 30% of the UK population walk the pavements in an ideal manner, i.e. in single file whilst acting considerately and constantly taking into consideration extraneous factors such as the traffic conditions on the roads and the number (and wide variety of size, fitness, disability, age and intelligence) of other pedestrians, whether at any particular time they be standing still, moving in the same direction as themselves, or coming towards them.

Of the remaining 70%, approximately another 30% (for whatever reason) appear to be acting as if the coronavirus crisis has never happened and life “as it was before” has just continued as if the date was still December 2019.

I’m primarily referring here to the family groups on foot comprising parents accompanied by children ranging from the age of three to fifteen and/or grannies confined to wheelchairs; tall, lanky teenagers of any number between two and four, of all genders, wearing either shell-suits and baseball caps back-to-front, or else T-shirts and (most often noticed from behind) baggy jeans with belts for reasons unknown worn at half-mast – i.e. just above the knees – thereby deliberately exposing their underpants to the world, together with garishly white expensive trainers; and lastly, a great number of middle-aged men with Dad-bods bedecked in in ridiculously-tight lycra sportwear who really ought to be pulled over by the local police (if we had any) on sight and given immediate £1,000 spot fines.

Of the now remaining 40% others inhabiting our pavements, at least half are cyclists.

These mobsters, as self-obsessed as the likes of Black Lives Matter, transgender activists and any other ‘disadvantaged group’ one might care to mention, are clearly not content with just being lionised by the “Woke” generation for helping to save the planet and also having the best part of £1 billion spent upon making our cities cyclist-friendly (not least by building cycling lanes everywhere, thereby reducing even ‘key worker’ urban road traffic to a crawl).

No – believing themselves to be at the sharp-end forefront of the Millennial movement – they have also taken to terrorising the nation’s pavements.

Ironically, I have found that a good proportion of my current state of fitness has been directly caused by the calorie-burning effect of having regularly to evade these miscreants as they hurtle past me from behind (or alternatively towards me in twos or threes) zig-zagging in and out of any pedestrians unfortunate to be in the vicinity, usually either by having to contort myself in an extreme fashion away from them and/or diving sideways into some side-alley or unsuspecting homeowner’s front garden.

And I haven’t got around yet to mentioning those adults and children propelling themselves along our pavements standing upon leg-powered little scooters, still less those non-public-spirited oafs who have jumped aboard the latest (and most anti-social mass-craze of all time) fad – that for engine-powered adult scooters capable of hurtling along at up to 30mph along both our roads and pavements without apparently needing to be licensed or ‘controlled’ at all.

These mobile catastrophes should have been ‘strangle at birth’ long ago.