Two wheels good, four wheels bad

‘Love me, love my bike’ was the peremptory injunction on a T shirt of a passing pedestrian at this year’s Womad music festival. As slogans go, it was perhaps slightly lacking in subtlety but it rang a bell with me since I have recently been musing on the eternal debate between two and four wheels.

My mental meanderings started when I decided to sell my old motorbike a few weeks ago. It was a bit of a wrench to end our 25 year relationship for we had covered many thousands of miles together, none happier than when, on an alpine tour with my wife-to-be, we switched off the engine at the top of the St Gotthard Pass that links Switzerland and Italy and freewheeled down mile after mile of stunningly scenic, hairpin bends; the only noise the sound of the wind in our hair and a faint buzz from the disk brakes as we slowed down for each elegant curve. It was two-wheeled heaven.

Though not exactly heavenly, Cambridge is a city where two wheels are very much the norm because there is simply not enough room in its crowded streets for cars. Everyone seems to have decided that the bicycle is a sensible way to get around, everyone except the planners at the Cambridgeshire postal service that is who, according to the local postman, are proposing to replace his much-loved two-wheeled workhorse with a petrol-powered van that would take a much larger load of letters and parcels to cover a greater area…and save some money in the process.

We could have spent many happy minutes dissecting the absurdities of this proposal but the average pace at which postal delivery has to proceed nowadays has been raised from a pedestrian 2.4 mph to a skittish 4 mph, so our postie could not allow himself to dally further and left us with the wry parting shot that his union was intending to protest against the plans: they were calling for a walk out!

The image of postal workers staging a walk out to save their bicycles led me to search out my old copy of The Third Policeman, a surreal comic novel by the Irish writer Brian O’Nolan who, for good reasons of his own, chose to write under a number of pseudonyms including Flann O’Brian and Myles na gCopaleen.

One of the many wonderful ideas in this bizarre tale concerns the Atomic Theory of Sergeant Pluck, one of three policemen of the novel’s title who appears to spend most of his time searching for stolen lamps, pumps and bicycles. Look away now if you’re planning to read the book in the near future because I am about to reveal that it is, astonishingly, Sergeant Pluck himself who is responsible for the crime wave!

His reasons, however, are entirely honourable and follow from his careful observation of small changes in the behaviour both of man and machine over a long period of time. Have you never noticed how, during the course of a cold winter’s evening, a bicycle parked in your hallway will be found to have stealthily moved towards the warmth of the living room fire? No? How about your local postman then? Does he stand still while he is revealing the latest inanities of the Cambridgeshire postal service or does he unobtrusively lean against your fence or quietly prop himself up against the curb?

And why do man and bike behave in this way? Because, as O’Nolan explains with wonderful Irish logic, in the course of their long lives together, the man and his bicycle have exchanged so many molecules – the essence of the bike moving into the man through the saddle and of the man into the bike through the same route - so that each eventually has begun to take on the characteristics of the other.

‘You would be surprised at the number of people in these parts who are nearly half people and half bicycles’ concludes the resourceful Sergeant Pluck, for whom the obvious way to minimize this insidious process and save his colleagues from terminal bicycle-isation is to force his Force to use different bicycles or, at least, to reduce the time they spend on their own machines by hiding them under bushes or even locking them up in the station cells!

Personally I suspect that I have a long way to go before I need to take such precautionary steps because I spend more time in my car than in the saddle. However I did manage a spin the other day round my local seaside resort, Weston super Mare. Actually it wasn’t a spin; it was more of a bumble. That’s what I like so much about bike speed: it’s perfectly in tune with the pace of street life and it’s instantly variable. You can zoom through the boring bits and, as soon as you sense something interesting, you can slow down to investigate, to take part. Then, when you’ve smelt the flowers, you just hop on a pedal and you’re rolling along on to the next thing that grabs your interest.

We’re shortly due to head off for a mini tour of that most cycle-friendly of countries: the Netherlands. We’ll be part of a small group so I don’t expect to be able to indulge my weakness for loitering. Will it be motorway madness or rural rambles? Watch out for my T shirt at the next Womad festival: ‘Love me, but keep a close eye on the bike’.

Ooh!

I’ll be with you in a minute. I know; you’re almost as keen as I am to discover where on earth I found the temerity to interrupt your busy life with musings that my children would almost certainly describe as ‘random’. (Mind you, ‘random’ is a frequent - and frequently entirely appropriate - response to many of the things that they see us sensible adults doing in this bizarre world. Unlike ‘whatever’. But let’s not go down that route now because, as we’re both acutely aware, you’re still patiently hanging on.)

So where was I before I so rudely interrupted myself? I was busy. Getting on with what passes for work. Keeping a few of those balls in the air. I was actually trying to think of somewhere near Euston Station where I could meet a couple of authors who were arriving by train from opposite sides of the country. The Euston Road is probably not one of London’s most welcoming corners; like many of the world’s great termini, the first thought that it inspires in those arriving there is how to get away from it to somewhere quiet and normal, where they can have a drink and plan their day, hold their meeting, whatever.

There are several such venues quite close by and I should, of course, have immediately found the number of the British Library, the British Museum or anywhere within the fabulous St Pancras building. But instead of trusting my instincts I turned to the web and googled ‘meeting place Euston Road convenient’ or some such, let’s admit it, random phrase. And I got just what I deserved.

I will not compound my stupidity by again turning to the web for insight into the business of keeping people waiting on the telephone. The profession will undoubtedly have a smooth sounding name that includes the concepts of customers and happiness, while tactfully excluding concepts such as delay, frustration or cost saving. I say this, more in hope than expectation, because I’d like to believe that those who ply the on-hold message trade are all decent, sensible people who want to make the world a better place. Not the opposite.

So when the nice people at Novotel asked the nice people at Sensual Aural Satisfaction to come up with something different for their telephone enquirees to listen to while they were on hold as a result of the completely unpredictable surge in calls that seems to occur whenever I use the phone, why did SAS come up with a phrase like:

‘Breathe – you’ve reached Novotel’?

What is this fabulous piece of nothingness actually telling us, other than inadvertently suggesting that we should not hold our breath because there’s a serious bit of delay ahead? Is it reassuring us that, in the excitement of the moment, we haven’t phoned The Hilton by mistake? Or is it trying to offering an aural pat that we can relax because we have arrived in a comforting phone zone where all our communication needs would be met? Except being answered.

Certainly the fixed smile of the disembodied airhead instructing me to breathe appears to have been designed to convey reassurance and tranquility, in a corporate sort of way. Except I am not corporate and I’m not tranquil, especially when, after a few seconds of background music, she exudes another gem from SAS:

‘Designed for natural living’.

My garden is designed for natural living – it’s a wilderness. The Euston Road has quite a different feel to it, unless Novotel has discovered a small gap in the time-space continuum through which stressed 21st century customers can quietly slip: ‘The Arcadia Suite sir? Yes, just through there. We apologise for the lack of wifi in the 17th century.’

Maybe that’s what the messages are about: little poetic gobbets carefully crafted to whisk us away on mini thought trips lasting valuable seconds while the hotel staff desperately rush around to call in reserves for this completely unexpected surge in calls.

‘Quick, Diego, put on message no. 3 – that always keeps them busy for ages, trying to work out whether they’ve come to a yoga session instead of trying to book a meeting room.’

'Enjoy these few seconds of peace to relax'

Wow! Why didn’t I think of that before? I’m not wasting my time trying to speak to a real human being when I could have walked to London and physically found a quiet corner in a pub before some poor overworked operator can answer my call, I am actually making time in my day for a micro meditate. Thanks Novotel – I needed to be reminded of that.

I am half way through my slow count of 7 on breathing in when I am hit by their piece of resistance, the ne plus ultra of what I have just discovered are called ‘Opportunities On Hold’. If the Ooh! company did nothing else with their time, this alone would have justified the many zeros of their telephone number fee. Indeed, as meaningless maxims go, it’s right up there with my all-time party favourite: ‘Flat fish swim in shallow waters’.

‘Ok Mary, we need more time! Hit the button for message no. 4.’

‘Here everything is done to make each instant a preserved moment.’

Take your time. It’s worth a moment’s consideration. That’s what it’s for. Your call may be next in the queue. Novotel’s delightful customer service operative may come through to you just in time to hear your jaw drop or, more likely, to hear you yell and scream in frustration at the patronizing brainless assault on your integrity carried out by this bland, insincere pap that tries to reduce us all to passive, mindless cretins.

Of course, in fairness to SAS Inc or whatever they are called, they could quite reasonably respond, as I do to my teenage children when they rip apart some innocent social convention, ‘Well, see if you can do better then.’ My rather limited experience with the great out there is that, of course, you probably could do much better. To repeat a rather tired maxim, while professionals built the Titanic, it was amateurs who built the Ark.

Is it fair to ask for suggestions when I hardly know you? Of course not. But then it wasn’t fair to expect you read what has turned into an extremely long diversion from the real matter in hand. Thank you for doing so. Now, hang on a minute while I work out where we were. While you wait and until next time, please remember to breathe – you’ve reached the end.