The Charging Herd

When I'm not in The Widows Arms with The Blackheath Stick Men I can be found out with my sandwich board railing against the destruction wrought by the infernal combustion engine. Exactly what triggered my antipathy towards the motor car I don't know but I've always disliked the contraption. Maybe it was when I was a kid and we were forced off the side streets where we roller skated and raced our box-carts. For certain by the time I gave up walking country lanes. 'Look out, car coming!' Back when you could still hear the blighters.

On our estate owning a car automatically disqualified your council tenancy but as incomes rose small cars appeared, Anglias and Prefects, Imps and Heralds, and the magic Mini, which you had to love for blowing raspberries up and down The Kings Road. The thrill of the empty road called and car ownership grew and grew and GREW. You had to have a car or you were an arse and an unperson, the bigger the better and ever more ostentatious. And so the roads filled and filled until the cry went up, 'I'm stuck in the traffic!' No, you are the traffic.

In the Middle Ages they built cathedrals, the people loved them and everybody wanted access to one. It was a mass delusion and it impoverished the populace. Motor cars are the same. The model T made some sense in the US where farm distances were vast and a horse took all day, less so when cars became racing machines and the playthings of the rich. But what the rich have today the poor will want tomorrow and the manufacturers were pleased to provide. And so the peopled pavements disappeared, the streets where you were known and looked out for, where neighbours talked over the garden gate and children safely played. Before people got into their armour and slogged it out. Friendly not anomie.

The freedom machine ha ha, which chains us to murderous sheikhs and religious thugs, that homogenises and hollows out the high street, sends sprawl across the countryside and empties our pockets, that infuriates, alienates, poisons and kills. Too many, too fast, not to scale. No, bring back the packed omnibus with its community singing, the time when laughing shoppers conga'ed down the high street, and the citizenry queued cheerfully in the rain for buses that never came. The motor car! I don't want one. I have set my face. Anyway, I never had the money.