Us and Them

They...

...is becoming my most hated and feared word.

Yesterday, Bradley Wiggins was knocked off his bike and banged up. The national cycling team coach suffered a similar accident. I'm not generally a radio phone in listener, but I caught enough of the debate. The drivers' lobby (we pay road tax (actually, you pay car tax, everyone pays road tax and most cyclists also have cars); we all pass tests and cyclists don't and therefore we're all brilliant and they're all rubbish; there's miles of cycle lanes we've had to pay for that remain unused; so on (they were the most boring, boorish people imaginable) repeatedly referred to cyclists as 'they'. The 'they' as in “they're all tarred with the same brush”.

I realised my dislike of the word “they” in the wrong hands. It never gets qualified. There's never the “a small minority” or “while the majority...”; there's just the “they”.

On the post-Hillsborough 'can you trust the police' debate there was an idiot ex-cop who served in Dover, who actually made the effort to pick the phone up and make an absolute arse of himself:

“...they all would turn up for the ferry, no tickets, no money, drunk...”

Maybe one in a hundred would arrive ticketless, potless, nothing better to do, hoping for the best. Maybe fewer than that. We can all dredge up nutters who would do that. For every one of those there's groups of mates, fathers and sons, decent football fans travelling to an away European game with tickets, sufficient money and some sort of plan about getting there and back. They may be holding tins of beer and having a sing-song.

The “they” suggests “all of them” - absolutely untrue.

So the drivers ignored the facts:

“they won't use the cycle lanes we pay for...”

Rubbish.

Everyone would happily use cycle lanes, if they were maintained, free of glass, potholes and parked cars, and, most importantly, continuous. There's no point providing so many miles of cycle lane when every hundred yards the cyclists have to stop, join the traffic for a bit, then re-join the cycle lane. I would always rather sit in the road than use that sort of half-hearted death-trap. That's not bloody-mindedness, that's self-preservation.

Test or no test, cyclists tend to understand the laws of physics. As a downhill run bottoms out, try for maximum speed and momentum, that helps overcome your natural inertia and makes the climb less painful. Same in a car, but how many drivers hit their brakes then have to drive their engines hard to make the climb?

Some drivers, not cyclists, give me unwanted eye surgery because they can't or won't operate their main beams according to the law. Some drivers, not cyclists, hit their brakes when an oncoming car drives on the other side of the road in the dark. Many have recently started swinging left to turn right (and vice versa) against the Highway Code advice apparently part of that test thing.

To the ranting muslim cleric I'm one of the 'they' who deserve to die for the wickedness of...where to start?

There are, however, some cases of 'them' or 'they' that are, unfortunately, set in stone:

Politicians.

Careerists.

S***s supporters.

Manscum supporters.

Phil Collins fans.

People who refer to [that rubbish] as 'Strictly' or similar and look bemused when, no, I don't know what the hell you're on about.