Unfortunately for the rest of us, it also means that you are gripped by an arrogance unheard of since the last days of the Hellfire Club. Cyclists now break every law known to man, except possibly playing football on a Sunday and not owning a falcon. They ride on pavements. They ride the wrong way down one-way streets. They fail to ring their tinkly dinkly bells when they are hurtling towards you. And they get violent when you challenge them. Which actually isn’t that bad, because bikes nowadays are so easy to ride, with all those gears and so on, that cyclists are not as muscular as they used to be, and a puppy could have most of them.
OLD BLACK CAB DRIVERS
That’s not ‘old drivers of black cabs’. There is nothing wrong with the elderly (although see OLD MEN IN GYMS). Wisdom and experience are good things, and should be harnessed. No, what is meant here is ‘drivers of old black cabs’. For some reason, really old taxis – the smaller ones, with the snub nose, that you see in 1960s films – are quite possibly haunted. Or maybe it’s just because they’re old.
Whatever it is, you should never hail one. Ignore the fact that they’re curiously keen to stop and pick you up. Never mind that shiny new cabs keep not stopping for you. Old black cabs – and their drivers – are a little bit too much on the Stephen King side of life.
You give in and hail one. It wheezes to a halt accompanied by what sounds like (and may even be) a saucepan full of old bolts. After several minutes of struggle in which firstly the driver can’t hear you because he can’t get his window down, and then you can’t get the door open, you are off. The cab lurches forward as though the engine was about to be sick. You are thrown about the cab. The driver, who looks like the late Sir Anthony Blunt, tells you to mind the upholstery.
Your journey begins. The taxi takes no route you have ever seen. Perhaps it is relying on some mental map of the past, when it was happy and roamed the streets with its taxi friends. Perhaps it is the driver who thinks it is 1958. Either way, you are lost, late, and about to drive into the river.
Finally, after much swerving around corners and falling to the floor, you reach, if not your, then someone’s destination. You step out, visibly rattled and quite possibly crippled. You offer the driver the fare. He is enraged because there’s no tip.
After a mental debate, you do tip him, not because he is right, but because you don’t want to wake up in the middle of the night and see a pair of headlights glaring at you malevolently from the foot of the bed.
CYCLISTS 3
And then they have the nerve to shout, ‘Get out of the road!’ at you. Okay – as soon as you get off the pavement, you self-satisfied, road-fearing, only-brave-because-you’ve-got-a-knobby-helmet-on, glorified-hobby-horse-riding tarmac wasters.
OLD MEN IN GYMS
Gyms are full of machinery. Machines for running, machines for climbing, machines for – apparently – just ripping your arms right out of their sockets. These machines generally do their jobs quite well, if you actually use them properly (if you don’t, you could end up wondering why your lungs are now wrapped around your head).
But some people have evolved their own uses for machinery. These people are called ‘old men’ and they use the whole gym in a different way to the rest of the world. They treat the machines more like a prop than a tool. They may look from a distance like they’re ‘working out’, but in actual fact they are ‘sitting on their arses’, talking to their mates. Who are, of course, other old men. Sometimes the old men are having a kip on the machines. Sometimes they are lifting weights, in a cursory, occasional way. But mostly they are having a good old natter. Which is good in a way, as it means you can’t go on the machines and you have to go and sit in the coffee bit until it’s time to go home.
Where this all goes wrong, however, is when the old men decide to have their good old natter in the showers (see CHANGING ROOMS). Oh, lord.
YOUNG MEN IN GYMS
The illusion of superiority to one’s fellow man is hard to keep up at the best of times, so imagine how much worse it is when you’re at the gym. It’s all very well pretending that you are a superb physical specimen when you have got all your clothes on and you’re just walking past a home for the terminally obese (or Pizza Hut, as it’s generally known).
But trying to maintain your fantasy of fitness in a gym is beyond most of us. There you are, gamely lifting something heavy and being almost sure that you felt a muscle in there somewhere. Suddenly a younger man comes in and starts virtually throwing weights into the air and catching them with his earlobes. At this point, you catch sight of yourself in the mirror. A large pile of old compost appears to have disguised itself as you.
PEOPLE WHO COMPLAIN
Complaining is, from time to time, a good and useful thing (see PEOPLE WHO DON’T COMPLAIN).
‘That man is setting fire to our car!’
‘Goodness! We should say something!’
But in all fairness, the preceding fictional example is about standing up for yourself, rather than complaining, which is defined by most dictionaries as: ‘being a whingeing git who will try anything to ruin someone’s day, so long as they can do it just by talking in a droney voice about someone else’s perceived faults.’
Complaining is bad because it combines only negative elements. For a start, it offers no solutions. The old scumbollock who knocks on your front door because your ball has gone over his fence yet again rarely offers to buy you a PlayStation or suggest that you grow some leylandii (see LEYLANDII) so that your ball will bounce back into your own garden. No, he just wants to complain. Preferably while either handing you back a ball that has been deflated with some old-man scissors, or while hinting that somewhere, possibly in his shed or his odoury bedroom, there is a magical pile of balls, all collected over the years, some possibly signed by Bobby Moore, or even kicked over the wall by Bobby Moore as a lad.
Then there’s the moany factor. If a stranger is just a friend you haven’t met yet (and here’s a clue: they aren’t), then a complainer is just a lonely, stinky attention-seeker you haven’t met yet. Complaining is the flip-side of making pals with people. Unable – thanks to their vile personalities, totally negative outlook, and obsession with keeping other people’s footballs – to form normal relationships, complainers are forced to resort to a different tactic. Complaining.
When someone knocks on your door in the morning to complain about the fact that they could just about hear your Brian Eno CD after 10.30 p.m. if they stood on a ladder and jammed their ear up to the ceiling in a toothglass full of sophisticated surveillance equipment, they’re not just there for the joy of making your life unpleasant. They’re lonely and friendless and would do anything for human company.
Unfortunately, they are also very bad people who, when they die, will go to a special hell where demons will constantly kick footballs into their burning garden, play music loudly after ten thirty at night, take their milk from the fridge without replacing it, and never put the lid back on either the toothpaste or the toilet.
PEOPLE WHO DON’T COMPLAIN
This may well be a purely English phenomenon. Just as the English are a nation of whingekeepers (see PEOPLE WHO COMPLAIN), then they are also – by some strange paradox – a nation of apparent stoics in the face of a minor crisis. We can prove objectively that this problem is largely localized to England, incidentally, simply by looking at the rest of the world. In hot European countries, like France, Spain and Italy (there are others, but we need not name them all here), the populace are long used to rising