For goodness sake – get a move on!

Is it me or has Brighton started to slow down to an idle dawdle? Having just returned from a week in Holland where the pace of life is dictated by the bicycle, home seems to be on a go slow.

You may well ask how fast a world dictated by bicycle pace can be but I can assure you it is fast enough. They’re devils, those flying Dutchmen and women on their chunky bicycles, speeding around ringing their bells and generally menacing anyone who is simply on foot. There were moments when conflicting streams of velocipedes sent me into a whirling spin, like a door or a dervish.

I asked someone in Amsterdam how long it would take me to get to a museum. “Oh, only 12 minutes by bicycle,” was the prompt reply. “But I don’t have a bicycle,” I replied. He explained that distances there are often measured in bicycle time, whether you ride one or not.

Here in Brighton the bicycle often feels like an instrument of aggression, and only too often one being used the wrong way on a one-way street or on a pavement.

But cyclists apart, when did we all start walking so slowly, drifting along as if nothing in the world is of any importance and certainly not haste? Even with my gammy knee and planatar facilititis I can shift when needs be.
On top of the drifters we have those who stop dead in their tracks, causing the person behind to stumble into their heels and cause a human pile-up, how I hate that!

None of this is helped by Brighton’s rather strange and random approach to pedestrianisation. New Road immediately comes to mind. It looks for all the world to be a pedestrain precinct, but after the beautiful granite paving was installed it not only reverted to being a road, but one with two-way traffic. Now it is mayhem, cars getting impatient with pedestrians and pedestrians walking defiantly in the middle of the space. I stick to the edges and deal with the simpler things in life – like advertising ‘A’ boards and chairs and tables.
My mother would say at this moment: “Why are you in such a rush? More haste, less speed.” In many ways she would be right, I know, but it’s simply getting really hard to walk anywhere at a sensible pace.

Whilst I’m in the mood I would also like to call upon those great learning institutions who teach English to foreign students, and in doing so bring much prosperity to our city. Would it be at all possible for you to include in any preliminary lessons, a simple set of instructions on how the British like to queue in an orderly and polite fashion when waiting for a bus? I may well have grown up in St Helen’s, home to one of the greatest Rugby League sides in the world, but it does not mean that I wish to engage in a scrum every time I wish to partake of public transport.