It's not the job, it's the people...

I’ve had a part-time cleaning job for two years and can still remember the sense of disbelief that it was in the bag. I thought it would be more difficult. Two and a half years later I have to stop myself snarling “I resign!” down the line to my boss. It isn’t her fault. The problem is the series of lazy idiots that I have been obliged to work with. Or rather, whose work I have had to do. We are told that any job like mine is being chased because the credit crunch has meant that we are all looking for extra income. That should mean that the people doing them are worried about keeping them and work twice as hard. Don‘t you believe it.

My colleague was employed by the company I work for to clean an office in the building where I deal with the communal areas. As soon as she arrived she informed me that she had booked a holiday and would therefore be unavailable for over a week. Fair enough, the holiday was booked before the job turned up. Following this holiday, her absences (often unannounced) became frequent and a nuisance. She finally told me what the problem was and it did seem that a close family member was in a very fragile physical condition. What I couldn’t understand was why she couldn’t explain the problem to our boss who is very understanding and quite capable of seeing things from her perspective. It was as if she was setting herself up to be fired.

When she did let us know that she wouldn’t be there it was at really short notice. I kept getting phone calls five minutes before leaving for work telling me that I would have to provide cover. This was a complete pain because, at the time, I was sharing my job with a person who was also in the habit of taking days off without notice. Apart from that she was absolutely unwilling to work on the premises the other person was responsible for as it meant that the people who worked there could tell if she was cutting corners. So I always had to do it.

This meant that my other colleague was earning twice the pay for providing cover when somehow she managed to finish both her work and mine within the same amount of time it would normally have taken her just to do her own work. In fact she got quicker and quicker at it. Cleaning work like this is usually unsupervised, you have to rely on the honesty of the cleaner and the astuteness of the people using the facilities being cleaned. In the past things had to get really bad before a complaint was made. The rising cost of cleaning and maintenance means that people now expect to get what they pay for. These days if the toilets haven’t been cleaned they say so. And frankly, why shouldn’t they?

The skiver was finally sent on her way after Christmas and I was under the impression that the drama queen who occasionally turned up to clean the office would soon be sent the same way. I was a little surprised to find that, following the termination of her office cleaning contract, she was now to be cleaning the communal areas with me. Especially since the words “I don’t think much of her - I’m going to fire her” had crossed my employer’s lips. A year after the day she first began turning up when she felt like it she is still phoning the office at the last possible moment to say that she won’t be in. At the last minute I am expected to keep things going.

She is the third person to have shared the job with me who has behaved in this way. They have in common the fact that they have been dependent on state benefits for years, in fact the latest one was receiving benefit but neglected to tell our company that or the benefits agency that she had a part-time job. She was good enough to explain to me that I might be getting a visit from the said agency as she had been able to read my name on the paperwork that was on the desk of the person investigating her. It seems that my boss had been asked to provide details of someone who could identify my colleague.

Two of the people I have worked with have raised their children on benefit and have only taken jobs because they were forced to. The third came to the UK as a child refugee in need of medical attention and was brought up by a family member who was already living here. She might as well have been brought up in care as she still speaks broken English in spite of living here for more than a decade and while working with me was only interested in finding out what benefits she could claim now that she was over 18. She was under pressure from a family she barely remembered to get them entry to the UK and a place to live. They seemed to be under the impression that, in a country as wealthy as ours, all it takes is a phone call.

I am left wondering if we have denied a considerable proportion of our population the capacity to think for themselves by making sure they didn’t starve. There was a time when people were embarrassed to claim benefit, it was for emergencies only and not a long term situation. I realise that we are now in a situation where many people have absolutely no choice but to claim but my exposure to three people with a strong sense of entitlement to tax payers’ money makes me think that we have screwed up quite badly somewhere. I think it is absolutely right to make sure that children are fed, clothed and educated but I can’t help feeling that there should be more awareness of where the money comes from on the part of those receiving it. I wonder how many in receipt of benefit understand the mechanism that acquires and provides that money. I don’t expect them to grovel in gratitude for it. What I want is that we end up with fewer people who are good at making excuses and milking the system. I would rather that they used that ability to support themselves.

Once people with that attitude are in the workforce they seem to transfer that sense of entitlement to whatever it is they are doing. They’ve been so well looked after that they seem surprised that they are expected to turn up and actually work. And frankly, why should they?

Nasty boys

The story of “Baby P”, the child who died following sustained torture and abuse at the hands of the people who were supposed to love and care for him most, has re-entered the news headlines following the disclosure of their identities. A short life, filled with agony, in the company of two violent men and a selfish woman. I doubt that anyone who has heard about the torturing to death of angelic little Peter Connelly can have felt anything but anger and sadness about it. The official disclosure of the names of those responsible for the dreadful cruelty that he endured have not lessened these emotions but they have given us some insight into how the situation unfolded. It is clear that the events that led to it had their roots in abuse and neglect that took place decades ago.

The aspect of this story that lingers in my mind is the phenomenon of violent young men, in this case a pair of brothers, whose anger and aggression to those around them seems to have been left to fester and evolve into the kind of behaviour that I do not recall encountering years ago. There was a time when you would almost expect it of people brought up in the way that Steven Barker and his sibling Jason Evans were. However I have begun to see it all around me and it isn‘t restricted to boys from “sink” estates. Nice boys do it too.

A few years ago I was in a superstore and an incident that most of the other people there would have missed made me look again at a woman who was shopping with two lanky teenage boys who I presume were her sons. Nothing unusual about that on a Saturday. What made them stand out was that one of these boys had moved in a way that had made it seem as though he was about to strike her to the extent that she flinched. And then carried on as though nothing had happened. The meanness of the gesture struck me, particularly as he was grinning. I was left with the impression that he had done this many times before and was delighted that he had managed to make her jump. Years later I still regret that I did not ask her if I could help because I suspect that what I saw in those few seconds in a public place may have been the tip of the iceberg. There may have been a very good explanation for it, he may have had behavioural difficulties or even Tourette Syndrome which means that the sufferer cannot always control their actions, but my instinct was that this was a display of power. I wondered where Dad was and whether he would have allowed this to happen. Perhaps they had picked it up from Dad.

The aggressive “pretend I’m going to hit you” gesture is something that I have seen a number of times in TV footage of binge drinkers, where police are dealing with troublesome crowds outside bars. Women in these situations seem to accept these actions as part of a night out. I can remember when it would have led to the person behaving in this way being punished by her partner or other males because it was no way to treat a woman. Why do women think that being shown a lack of respect is funny? It’s nothing to giggle about. Are they so desperate to keep that relationship that mock violence is to be tolerated?

More recently I was asked to intervene and protect a young woman who approached me in Ealing Broadway one evening. She had crossed the road to speak to me and a man who was standing nearby because she had been on the receiving end of loud and angry abuse from two young men at a bus stop. I had noticed shouting and that the object of this very negative attention had been a woman but even I was shocked at how terrified she was. It seems that she had found a mobile phone on the ground and had not been convinced when one of these men had told her it was his so she had handed it in to the police station nearby. The time spent waiting to prove his ownership had not improved his mood and he had been taking it out on her verbally ever since. She was clearly afraid that the abuse would become physical as she appeared to know these brothers by reputation.

We told them to shut up and that she had done the responsible thing and eventually they backed off. It wasn’t that difficult. In fact they seemed quite keen to explain their side of the story, proving only that she was in the right. The small amount of moral authority that we exercised that night was enough to put them in their place. Two girls who stood on the sidelines but appeared to be with them looked on silently but seemed troubled. I wondered if they would have to act as shock absorbers for the rest of the evening, having witnessed the diminishing of the power of their men folk. Afterwards I wished that I had asked them if their male companions always spoke to women like that, if they thought that they would eventually treat the mothers of their children in the same way.

I wonder if, had someone been firm with Barker and Owen much earlier in their lives when they threw their weight around, they would have been denied the permission they appear to have been granted to torture to death a 17 month old child. If, in the weeks before they tried to force their elderly grandmother to change her will in their favour by shutting her into a wardrobe, they had been seriously scared by her neighbours into leaving her alone and would therefore have been directed away from the path they took. This isn’t just about punishing bad behaviour, it’s about the attitude of young people to those they are in relationships with. It’s about providing them with a template for their future.

Since that moment in the supermarket I have wondered how many middle class women endure what I saw everyday out of the sight of their neighbours and are too ashamed to ask for support in handling their boys. It could be argued that they are in a far more difficult position than a woman in a violent relationship with a sexual partner as they are supposed to be in a nurturing role. It is possible to walk away from a husband/boyfriend but how can you walk out on your child? Or ask them to leave?

Tracey Connelly traded responsibility for her son for a relationship with a violent sadistic man and his equally nasty brother. Perhaps she felt that this was as good as it was going to get. I suspect she isn’t the only woman who has this attitude. Unfortunately her little boy didn’t have a say in the matter.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2008/nov/11/baby-p-death
Timeline: The short life of Baby P

www.guardian.co.uk/world/deadlineusa/2009/mar/16/rihanna-usa
Survey: Half of Boston teens blame Rihanna for Chris Brown beating

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2009/jun/27/parental-abuse-domestic-violence?showallcomments=true
The day my daughter hit me

www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/womanshour/2003_07_tue_01.shtml
Woman’s Hour: Hitting home

www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/womanshour/2002_13_tue_03.shtml
Woman’s Hour: Fighting boys

www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/womanshour/2004_10_thu_01.shtml
Woman’s Hour: Explaining sexual violence to boys

A fresh coat of paint

The blog has been quiet for a while and that is because I have begun redecorating. In the past this has usually been as stressful as actually moving into a different house, probably because I am made uncomfortably aware of just how much stuff I own. The fact that I have to go to the effort of emptying most of the contents of one room into another that is already full thanks very much is bad enough (twenty-six houseplants in one room). I then have to live with the interesting smells, debris and unexpected results that go with the process. On the plus side it does make me more inclined to part with at least a small proportion of the clutter I regarded as too precious to ditch the last time. What a difference seven years makes.

I have learned to treat redecorating as an activity that requires almost military planning (proper preparation and planning prevents poor performance and all that).
1. Clear room.
2. Cover floor and anything not to be painted
3. Fill and sand down where necessary.
4. Wash walls and wood work.
5. Paint ceiling. Twice.
6. Paint walls. Twice.
7. Paint woodwork. Twice if absolutely necessary and completely unavoidable.

Sounds good but in practice it takes longer to move things out than I thought it would and I keep rediscovering magazines and waste time looking at them. In the past I’ve remembered to save up newspapers weeks ahead but somehow I ended up having to look for them and there is always one little bit left uncovered (that is unavoidably on show) that received a fine spray of emulsion when the ceiling was painted. Of course you don’t know this until you put everything back in place.

The Attached One got lots of brownie points for discovering sugar soap in liquid form as something I wasn’t looking forward to was getting the powdered stuff to dissolve. I suspect I ought to wash and rinse one wall at a time rather than work my way around the whole room and then begin rinsing. I must lead a charmed life as, thus far, I have not managed to soak any plug sockets and electrocute myself. I sometimes wonder what would actually happen if I didn’t rinse after using sugar soap, would the walls start to dissolve? Just how dangerous is this stuff? How quickly should I wipe those drips off my arms?

When it came to the actual painting we thought we might save time and effort by acquiring a Dulux Paint Pod, a product that has been heavily promoted on TV. As we are planning to redecorate the whole house we felt it would be a worthwhile investment, even though it was going to restrict us to quite a limited and “safe” range of colours because it requires special packs of paint. Unfortunately it has turned out to be an expensive disappointment.


It comes with a very dinky brush designed for “cutting in” the corners but as the Paint Pod roller can’t go into corners without scraping the paint off the adjoining wall you really need to use a wider brush for that part of the job. The instructions warn you not to press the button too often in case too much paint comes out. In my experience not enough paint came out no matter how often I pressed it so I had to keep pressing it and put up with the really irritating noise that accompanied it. In order to paint the ceiling we also invested in the “extra reach handle” (another £10) but this made it too heavy and unstable for me to use.

In the past I have been able to tackle the painting myself but after a day with the Paint Pod I had to get The Attached One to paint the ceiling and put a second coat on the walls. The whining noise and the weight of the very small roller left me feeling shattered and he wasn’t in much better shape afterwards either. We have now dug out the old fashioned good quality rollers and brushes that we have used many times before and feel that, for the kind of result we expect, that is what is required. The Paint Pod roller is less shaggy than the ones we would normally use, probably to make it easier for the system to clean it but we still had to put it through twice. We also had to pull it apart to get rid of all the water.


I have refused to use it again so he will be painting the bedroom the fetching shade of pale yellow that was intended for the hall/staircase but we just can’t face the prospect of his reaching up that high while on a ladder and avoiding entangling himself with two cables. Especially if he has to keep getting down to reconnect it. Not using the Pod means that we can now use any paint we want in any colour we want so we are going to live dangerously and paint the staircase a golden yellow. I prefer to have the walls and woodwork the same colour but this has not gone down well with my other half. We have a lot of pictures and I don’t want them to have to compete with what is around them, including the patchwork effect of walls one colour, woodwork another.

At the moment I am just pleased that we have agreed on the choice of a colour for one of the rooms downstairs. It opens onto the garden and is quite gloomy, north-facing, so we needed something that would brighten it up. “Melon Sorbet” looks better than it sounds and will act as a good back drop for the pictures we want to put in there. We have been drooling over a new concept in home decor, the photographic wall mural, big enough to fill most of an average wall. We quite fancy the idea of having a window on a forest facing the window on the garden.


I am absolutely determined to get the whole house decorated in one go and reach a level of completion and tidiness that has so far proved a distant dream. Goodbye carpets, hello laminated wood floors. New clean curtains. Actually putting those pictures it cost so much to frame on the walls. In a way it has been another way of saying farewell to our late lamented moggy, whose fur I keep finding on the yellowing tape on cardboard boxes. He wasn’t impressed the last time we did this with the consequence that we never did it again while he was alive. There was a real danger that, having used gloss paint on the woodwork in the hall, he would rub up against it and then try licking it off. That night we shut him and ourselves into the bedroom along with his food bowls and litter tray. And spent all night awake while he ate biscuits noisily and thought about using his litter tray. Noisily.

Hopefully we will be able to avoid having to do this again for some time but it does get a bit easier with experience. I enjoy fantasising about painting a room purple and the choice of colours is far greater than it was when my parents had to opt for magnolia. At least this time I have managed to get started during the summer. The last time I did this there was a breaking news report on the radio about planes crashing into a building in New York and we were obliged to leave the windows open because of the smell, even though it suddenly seemed a bit too cold for September.

A lttle interaction goes a long way

I spent yesterday afternoon in the company of a BBC radio producer and an expert on the built environment. And then I rushed off to my job as a cleaner. The unusual encounter came about as a result of a comment I made on the BBC’s website, specifically the Radio 4 “iPM” programme’s comment section, regarding CCTV.

Internet access has opened up opportunities for communication that were unheard of just a few years ago. There was a time when you had to rely on the post to get your point of view across to a news programme, which took a while and there was likely to be some editing. Now you can email an opinion and, depending on the time available or the number of emails received, your comment could be aired as soon as it arrives.

The radio phone in show has been a huge success in Iraq, following the fall of Saddam Hussain, Iraqi citizens rushing to exercise their right to express an opinion after years of having to keeping them to themselves. This form of expression seems to have been born in 1940’s America, when some talk show hosts began to take calls from their listeners. Now they take emails and text messages as well.

The BBC has become particularly good at involving their viewers and listeners in programme making. That’s how I came to be standing under a busy flyover on a hot afternoon with two people who were far more confident about what they were doing than I was. We were feet away from the place where a man had died, alone, after being stabbed in a grimy subway. Even before this happened I had felt that this space needed to be used in order to prevent an assault of this nature. The incident had led to calls for CCTV, which I feel would be expensive and pointless, and this was confirmed by Henry, an expert on this kind of problem.

I couldn’t quite believe that I was actually talking to the man whose book I had read in order to give me some plan of action but Chris, the radio producer, had arranged it so that we could discuss the phenomenon of SLOAP (space left over after planning). We hope that the feature about this on a Saturday afternoon radio programme will encourage some debate about the problems caused by these blank underused spaces. They tend to come about when large structures like flyovers are imposed on existing communities by urban planners who don’t go back to see the impact of their creations.

The presence of an expert allowed me to test the ideas that I had for using the space in a positive way. I would probably not have had access to him had I not expressed my opinion in the way I did. Someone at the BBC recognised that my story would have some appeal to other listeners which made it worth their while investigating. Everyone gains.

The Vanessa Feltz Show on BBC Radio London is a very popular call-in, airing between 9am and noon, Monday to Saturday. Charming, funny Vanessa has just won the Sony Radio Academy Speech Radio Personality Award. I think part of her appeal is that she really has been through the mill and isn’t afraid to talk about it. She comes across as someone who gets it when her callers describe their experiences but she isn’t afraid to declare herself if she disagrees with you. Her show is a very good way of gauging the opinion of a cross section of Londoners which is why politicians and other significant public figures are prepared to appear on it and take questions from listeners. The Mayor of London is a regular. Listen online and see if you agree with me.

I hope that my rather rambling comments will lead to a positive outcome in my neighbourhood as a result of my interaction with the media. It was certainly made easy for me by a friendly BBC man with smiley eyes and a man who is (thankfully) obsessed with his subject.

I love the BBC.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0089nbb
http://www.bbc.co.uk/london/radio/presenters/vanessa/index.shtml

Michael, the latest Diana? Err, I don't think so...

I have taken to listening to the Vanessa Feltz Show, a phone-in, on weekday mornings but today I switched it off before it was over, once I realised that it was to be a wall-to-wall love-in for Michael Jackson fans.

One of my recent posts described the unease I feel, since the child sex abuse allegations made against him, if I happen to watch one of his videos. I needn’t have worried. Since the news of his death it has become clear that the overwhelming majority of those contacting bodies such as the BBC to express their opinions are more interested in his creativity than in whether he was a preferential paedophile.

He was cleared of the allegations and, in his defence, he had a very unusual, troubled childhood and was milked for his talent, whatever the psychological cost to him. I expect columns will be written about the form his strangeness took. Body Dysmorphic Disorder perhaps (think of the surgery he had on his face). I have found myself thinking of the reclusive Howard Hughes who probably had Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and the people who took advantage of it to become his best mates.

I suspect that Jackson was, in his mind, stuck at ten years old and this probably did play a part in his need to be in the presence of younger people. The problem is that anyone else less marketable with this mindset would have been told very firmly by those around them that this would not do but there was too much to be gained by humouring him. He was clearly vulnerable if not actually predatory and I feel that, if anything untoward did take place, those who enabled it are as responsible as he might have been.

There is no doubt that Jackson had at least one or two in his circle who would cater to his every whim in order to skim off some of the wealth he generated. They must be rubbing their hands together at the royalties that are rolling in at this very moment as a result of the many tribute shows being broadcast to mark his death. I was astonished that BBC Radio 4’s “Today” programme felt the need to play exerts of a number of Jackson tracks. It won’t make up for the billions they would have made had he completed the final world tour he was rehearsing for.

The moment I heard the news I felt certain that someone somewhere would allege that he is now in hiding, having faked his own death. Read the message boards across the web and you’ll see that this is already happening. I predict that someone will be selling photos of the corpse before very long. For a profit of course. The circus rolls on.

There have been a number of references to the vast amount if money that he donated to charities and while that is to his credit it I would have thought more of him in this aspect if he had paid his own bills first. As it is he died in considerable debt and I have no doubt that the three children that he somehow produced (please, no details) will suffer for this. I expect that they are being watched like hawks to see if talent is genetically transferred.

Alas, the fuss over Jackson has overshadowed the news of the death of the lovely Farrah Fawcett. I wasn’t really a fan of “Charlie’s Angels” but she was such a star that she was everywhere. My neighbour’s teenage son, Jameel, was a Farrah fan and the image of her in a clingy, revealing top, taped to the wall in his room will always stay with me. She epitomised the ‘70’s beauty and millions must have wanted to look just like her. How sad that a surgically deformed man of dubious reputation has taken some of the remaining glory that she should have been entitled to. Never mind Farrah, you’ll always be fabulous babe.

The Goldfish Liberation Front

The Attached One had a nasty shock on Sunday morning when he went to feed the goldfish. Vanessa, the pretty one with the gauzy tail, had died during the night. No obvious reason, she had seemed perfectly healthy and was buried in the garden with some ceremony. It left us feeling very sad that she did not get the chance to live in the bigger tank that we were planning to buy for her and her friend Dennis.

The care that we have taken over the two years that Vanessa and Dennis have been with us, to make sure that they have been happy, is in complete contrast to the treatment of the goldfish that are sold every year by an Iranian grocer in west London. In March those passing his shop are treated to a display of all the items needed for the celebration of Nowruz, the Zarathustrian or Persian New Year. These include pots of fragrant hyacinth and sprouted wheat, but it is the glitter and flash amongst them of many small goldfish in tiny bowls of water that draws customers to the shop.

These are very popular with the Iranian expats, who can be seen peering at the pairs of young goldfish in their ornate bowls as they carry them home. What they do not realise is that these fish are being kept in a volume of water that is a tenth of the amount they actually require and that the traditional bowl denies the fish the surface area necessary to give them the oxygen they need to survive. It’s a bit like shutting a toddler into a cupboard where it can only turn round on the spot and putting a plastic bag over its head so that it can’t breathe properly.

I have been told by an RSPCA inspector that they have tried to stop this practice as the fish sit in these tiny bowls until they are sold and who knows what happens to them after Nowruz. I suspect the sewers of West Ealing are alive with goldfish by the end of April, unless of course there are Iranian households with substantial fish tanks. In which case why do they have to buy more each year? The saddest thing about this practice is that goldfish can live for as long as forty years but these die when they are only a few months old.

Most of the Iranians who patronise this shop are likely to be exiles who fled their country after the revolution in 1979. Even so, I always think of those delicate goldfish in their tiny suffocating bowls as a metaphor for the young people of Iran, suffocated by a regime that criminalises homosexuality and executes teenage girls who are themselves victims of rape and abuse. The death of Neda Soltani will make her a symbol of the youth of Iran and their desire to live in a modern democratic environment, but long before this the situation of young Iranian women has been a matter of concern to human rights activists worldwide.

Atefeh Sahaaleh was a sixteen year old girl with mental health problems who was the victim of repeated rape by a former member of the Revolutionary Guard. When she was five years old her mother was killed in a car accident and this drove her father to drug addiction. She was obliged to care for her very elderly grandparents who repaid her by ignoring her. She would wander the streets of her town, prey for older men who would take advantage of her. The penalty for having sex with an unmarried man in Iran is one hundred lashes. She was given this punishment on three separate occasions.

Eventually she was arrested after an unsigned petition describing her as a “bad influence” was presented to the local authorities, asking that action be taken against her. Under torture she confessed to having a sexual relationship with a married man, in other words, he raped her a number of times. Atefeh’s reaction to the sentence of death passed on her led the judge, Haji Rezai, to make a supreme effort to make sure that the sentence was carried out. Documents showed her age as twenty two even though her family can prove that she was sixteen at the time. Rezai himself placed the noose around her neck and it was later discovered that he had been responsible for torturing her. Her family cannot even visit her grave to mourn her as her body was stolen from it within hours of her death.

Young men suffer equally in Iran. In 2005 Mahmoud Asgari and Ayaz Marhoni were executed, convicted of the rape of a thirteen year old boy, although it has been alleged that they died because they were homosexual and that the “rape“ was a consensual act. Their case gained notoriety when photographs taken just before their deaths were published on the internet. Mahmoud was sixteen and Ayaz eighteen. In the UK we worry that our young men are too rowdy, too interested in drugs, too lazy, too inclined to wear hooded tops. What must it be like to be young in a country where you risk a public lashing for engaging in the kind of activity that we regard as part of becoming an adult? How much harder must it be if you are gay?

I have never been to Iran but the knowledge I have of it suggests that it is a place of contrasts. A country where there is torture and executions are carried out but with a long history of creativity. The ceramic and textile art of Iran has attracted and inspired collectors and designers for centuries. Women are obliged to cover their hair in public yet there are female reporters and sportswomen. Homosexuality is banned but Iranian surgeons carry out corrective operations on transgender people every year. Iran’s government has a reputation for cruelty and repression yet its people are some of the kindest and most courteous that I have ever met.

Cruelty and beauty. Goldfish and hyacinths. I hope that the ordinary people of Iran get the democracy that they long for and I hope that shopkeeper sticks to selling flowers next New Year.
　
　
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/5217424.stm　
　
　

Sad and shocking images:

This means war

I do not cycle. This may be because I grew up in a cobbled mews, the bumpiness put me off although other children living there had bicycles. My lack of cycling experience has not influenced what I am about to say, in fact I have largely ignored bicycles and cyclists. Until now.

My three mile walk home from work between 8pm and 9pm on weekday evenings has brought me into contact with that lower form of life known as the pavement cyclist. I am expected to get out of the way of idiots who, whether they are clad in the most up to date dayglo lycra or ninja black, seem determined to kill me. Trouble is, by that time of day, I am usually too tired to move quickly enough so have to rely on their seeing me in time to stop. On more than one occasion this has been inches away from me.

To be fair, some of them have gone to the effort of attaching what could be referred to as a “bell” to their killing machine but these are usually barely audible and, from my perspective, pointless. The only warning I get is a brief tinkle seconds before one of these morons barrels past me. Sometimes they shout at me before they do this. They rarely shout “thank you” afterwards. The clear message is that they have the right of way and I am a bloody nuisance.

I know that my words will be met with irritation by those who cycle responsibly, the ones who cycle in the road, wearing high visibility arm bands/helmets/flashing lights and actually stop at lights rather than whipping round to the crossing and suddenly becoming a pedestrian. Well, none of you seem to cycle where I walk. So if you expect me to greet with excitement the news that Sky Sports has teamed up with British Cycling to organise “Skyrides” around the UK you will be sorely disappointed. It turns out that the Mayor of London will be leading a Mini Skyride to West London. Oh joy. Boris (who got into trouble for breaking the rules on his way into work on his bike) wants to encourage people to cycle around in large groups, free from the fear of being run down by cars and buses. How about enforcing the law when it comes to cycling on the pavement, Boris? So that I can walk around free from the fear of being scythed down by one of these fools?

The latest incident was on Thursday. I was walking round a blind corner when of these helmeted twits came screeching to a halt right in front of me. I did quite a lot of swearing as he swerved past me and then proceeded to cut straight across a main road, all this in the presence of a police car. I was under the impression that a cyclist could be fined £200 for this kind of offence. The Highway Code says:

145
You MUST NOT drive on or over a pavement, footpath or bridleway except to gain lawful access to property, or in the case of an emergency.
[Laws HA 1835 sect 72 & RTA 1988 sect 34]

Emergencies in most of these cases would appear to be getting home in time for dinner/the football match/a hot date.

I bet this kind of thing would stop if every cyclist was expected to wear an identification number as well as high visibility kit. Some of the people who have almost run into me have been wearing dark clothes and have no lights on their bicycles at night. I’ve seen them swerve on and off pavements, in and out of traffic. Having waited for the lights to change, like a good responsible pedestrian, I was almost run down by a man who thought the traffic lights didn’t apply to him and didn’t even see me. I understand that cyclists find car drivers aggressive and that they are often the victim of accidents themselves (I’ve seen the bloodstains) but I don’t think that this gives them the right to take over pavements. This happens even where there are cycle lanes. The Mayor wants to ensure that there is a network of them across London. Terrific. And are you going to ensure that they are used, Boris? Unlikely.

It has got to the stage where I am fairly sure that one of these days I will be killed or seriously injured by one of these selfish, irresponsible arseholes. Cyclists need to be registered and they need to be regulated. I want to be able to identify the person who has almost killed me. I think that someone who causes injury or death by riding their bicycle should not only be fined but imprisoned and banned from using one ever again. Why should elderly or disabled people be put off walking our streets because they have been frightened by an incident like this?
Please consider signing the petitions to which I have added links.
　
news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7498562.stm
www.livingstreets.org.uk/news_and_info/pb9_pavement_cycling.php
petitions.number10.gov.uk/dangerouscycling/
petitions.number10.gov.uk/IDCyclists/
petitions.number10.gov.uk/NightBikes/
petitions.number10.gov.uk/canal-no-bikes/