He touched my car

[dellzeqq]

I have never felt superior to anyone whilst cycling, I might feel content, happy, relaxed and often in pain, but never superior.

while I'm struck by your humility, I'm bound to tell you that you're missing out.

In fairness you do need carbon fibre forks for the full effect

(the addition to your post is a non-sequitur, by the way)

 

[lukesdad]

Remind us all again Adrian why you bothered to engage with me in the first place, it was your choice and why you continue to do so. After all you seem to regard me not worthy of your superior wit and interllect. Could it of been because you and your chums were about to launch into your usual tirade aimed at motorists and nobody was going to spoil your fun. Then you had to continue because you must have the last word .......

So the floor is yours....... are you happy now ?

( I'd take a leaf out of Del boy s book and hit the ignore button if I were you)

 

[dellzeqq]

Remind us all again Adrian why you bothered to engage with me in the first place, it was your choice and why you continue to do so. After all you seem to regard me not worthy of your superior wit and interllect. Could it of been because you and your chums were about to launch into your usual tirade aimed at motorists and nobody was going to spoil your fun. Then you had to continue because you must have the last word .......

So the floor is yours....... are you happy now ?

( I'd take a leaf out of Del boy s and hit the ignore button if I were you)

as Adrian is currently cycling through Streatham (or posting on Informal Rides), it falls to me to tell you that we're each of us here for our own amusement. It's just that Adrian's amusements are more subtle and long-lasting than most.

Talking of which........if you think this is fun, you really should get about a bit more. There are other bits of the forum that are a laugh a second.

 

[screenman]

D, I have the carbon forks. Maybe no enough smugness was fitted when I was made.

 

[400bhp]

it's not a question of the whole car. It's a question of the car in our street, the fumes in our lungs, the noise in our living rooms, the forward projection of the car that means that if I want to talk to my neighbour I must do it on the footpath and not in the centre of the street that connects our houses.............it really is difficult to know where to start other than to say that 'your property' is not indivisible, is not, at a time when it occupies, obstructs, holds sway over, disfigures, commands, and privatises public space, entirely yours, and there are a million accommodations to be made some of which may not be entirely to your liking, but you should console yourself with the knowledge that cars hold sway in our towns to an inordinate extent and a bit of leaning is a very, very small price to pay when the more rational, equitable and enjoyable settlement would be to put the lot of them up on bricks and turn them over to homeless people, cats and itinerant sculptors.

Next you'll be telling us you don't want kids playing football in the street if your car is parked there. You lot are entirely responsible for the national football team being crap and you should be ashamed of yourselves.

It was a question of the whole car because that's the words he posted. He then backed down from this extreme view, Fine

[the highlighted part] Let's clear one thing up. Just because I don't agree with some views here, does not mean I have a diametrically opposed view.

 

[dellzeqq]

400bhp. I'm doing you a favour here, setting out considerations that seem to have escaped your notice. The least you could do is thank me.

 

[400bhp]

see Gods of the Road above. We are the new aristocracy of London's streets. If we feel superior, then, frankly, it's because we are. While others fret in tin cans we swan by, head in air, whistling arias from Carmen or Rigoletto, picking our teeth with one hand and scratching our arses with the other - in fact it's a wonder that we have the time (or the hands) to lean on cars. You should be so lucky!

Is this the royal we?

I don't see myself, other cyclists, or anyone else for that matter, being superior to anyone else. We could have another thread of the UK culture on this. I see it not just in this thread but in all manner of things. It's ugly.

 

[400bhp]

400bhp. I'm doing you a favour here, setting out considerations that seem to have escaped your notice. The least you could do is thank me.

Thanks.

It irks/annoys/saddens me (choose the particular word) that we can't have a reasoned debate on things.

[edit] apologies, not been able to read your posts intently. You generally have something interesting to say and (importantly) do so without malice. Will try to later

 

[dellzeqq]

Is this the royal we?

I don't see myself, other cyclists, or anyone else for that matter, being superior to anyone else. We could have another thread of the UK culture on this. I see it not just in this thread but in all manner of things. It's ugly.

too kind.

 

[dellzeqq]

I'll own up to this. It's a really difficult thing to get people to look beyond simple entities. It's easier to undercut the entities than it is to set out a reasoned proposal for new relationships between people and things, or people and property, or people and each other because the historical pre-amble would be 10,000 words, contain more references to Engels than you could shake a stick at and I'd get bored typing it.

If (and that's a big if) somebody like Green1 starts to wonder about the complex relationship between his car and the outside world because I launch some smartypants diatribe in the direction of wholeness or analogies, then that, for me, is job done. If not then I've wasted my time, but not a lot of it, and I've had fun the while.

 

[simon.r]

correct. And when I put my hand on your car that's an analogy as well

(this is a bit like taking candy from a baby)

Next!

I thought we were talking about cyclists actually putting hands on cars, not using it as an analogy? Certainly the OP was.

I agree entirely with the points made about questioning the whole car culture. I agree that some (a small minority of) drivers have a peculiar relationship with their car. I get irritated when I can't cross a busy junction safely (on foot) near my girlfriend's house because everything is geared towards drivers.

I do not agree that it is OK for people to do things that may damage others property.

I also wonder if some of the points made here are London-centric? I'm told that Nottingham is the 3rd most conjested city in the UK (a recent local radio item, don't ask me to back it up), yet I can still drive across / through / round the city in 40 minutes at rush hour - a distance of 13 miles for a journey I make regularly. Alternatively I can cycle approximately the same route in an hour.

Children play football and other games in the street that I live on quite happily. There are many streets where this isn't the case, but, I suspect, a lower proportion of streets are 'unsafe' for children than they are in London.

The volume of cars on the road can be a problem, but it ain't that much of a problem most of the time.

I now have to tear myself away from this debate to go and do some work and I will not be returning for at least 36 hours!

 

[Boris Bajic]

it's not a question of the whole car. It's a question of the car in our street, the fumes in our lungs, the noise in our living rooms, the forward projection of the car that means that if I want to talk to my neighbour I must do it on the footpath and not in the centre of the street that connects our houses.............it really is difficult to know where to start other than to say that 'your property' is not indivisible, is not, at a time when it occupies, obstructs, holds sway over, disfigures, commands, and privatises public space, entirely yours, and there are a million accommodations to be made some of which may not be entirely to your liking, but you should console yourself with the knowledge that cars hold sway in our towns to an inordinate extent and a bit of leaning is a very, very small price to pay when the more rational, equitable and enjoyable settlement would be to put the lot of them up on bricks and turn them over to homeless people, cats and itinerant sculptors.

Next you'll be telling us you don't want kids playing football in the street if your car is parked there. You lot are entirely responsible for the national football team being crap and you should be ashamed of yourselves.

This is a very reasonable post. It echoes much of what many of us think, but little of what drives our behaviour.

To use a fairly hateful phrase of the 20th century, there may be a case here for some critical cost-benefit analysis.

I spent much of my young adult life in rural and semi-rural parts of the Western Balkans. A more beautiful landscape it is hard to imagine outside Fairy Tales. To this day I think I'm about to meet a giant or a river imp when I'm in the mountains north of Albania.

In the simple houses of the region, wood stoves heated rooms and most people used animal-powered haulage and buses to get to town. Cars were a rarity. In some places they still are. Life was (by our standards) hard. In many ways it still is.

Children played in the street or the hard Macadam that ran between rows of cottages. In many of those towns and villages they still do.

What do (or did) the adults want? A car or access to a car. The kids? they'd rather have a car than the freedom to play in the street.

The pregnant, the elderly, the disabled (particularly numerous after all the recent beastliness), the mothers of young children... They all hanker after the personal mobility offered by cars. It isn't like Balham everywhere on the planet. Which may be a good thing.

I'm not saying they're right or wrong to hanker as they do. I'm not saying I don't howl in despair when visiting my old Central London neighbourhoods and seeing twelve cars where there is room for three along every kerb...

But there is much good that can be (and is) derived from the presence of the motor car and its smoke-belching cousins in our civilisation.

We may (in some metropolitan areas) have tipped the scales slightly too far in one direction. That will always be a matter of opinion.

But (going back to the OP) manners are manners. It is poor form to lean on a car in the street. It should also be quite unnecessary.

If one has an issue with the invasion of roadspace by beastly motor vehicles, it may be a better idea to exorcise any ire through an online cyclists' forum than to lean on cars in traffic to express one's political frustration about the hegemony of the internal-combustion motor.

Meanwhile, I'll just keep riding my bicycle and putting my foot down. If I had any sense of balance I'd trackstand... But I don't.

 

[dellzeqq]

you were doing fine until you got to the manners bit. Manners are not manners. They are the a means by which social exchanges are managed, and not always in a good way - sometimes in a very bad way.

 

[Norm]

Madness, in a thread entitled "He touched my car"!

I'd like to think that I covered that in my post. The bit where I said that I was trying to get to the underlying concepts of property and ownership without the emotion that the car-deprived-but-obsessed seem to feel obliged to bring with them and without their prejudiced blinkers from restricting their views.

Given the obvious lack of respect some, including one who might or might not be cycling around Streatham, show to the property of others, I'm not surprised that the simple question of allowing strangers to picnic in your garden has gone without response.

This thread, after all, comes about because a cyclist who is too lazy to unclip feels they should be free to touch someone else's property, whether a car, bus or street furniture, just because the action of twisting their right heel is beyond them.

 

[Longshot]

Manners are not manners

Genius