RAC visiting the White Bear

We like coverage of pubs, today, the White Bea, which:

1. is in the student quarter
2. has free wifi
3. has a big white bear statue in front of it and one painted further up the wall.
4. has an RAC van up on the pavement in front of it next to the "no parking" signs

What's interesting about the RAC van VN07KYA is it is parked over new double yellow lines, as this area becomes residents parking in three weeks time. This will make driving to the White Bear trickier, except that as you can park free for 15 minutes in the zone, if the bar staff are nippy you've got time to park, grab a couple of pints, then carry on.

Bristol your Bristol

A reader, one of those tax dodging cyclists, emails us:

"As I write, highly civilised people are pulling their buses into the lanes occupied my bicycle, trying to kill me

They do not feel any enmity against me as an individual, nor I against them. They are ‘only doing their duty’, as the saying goes. Most of them, I have no doubt, are kind-hearted law-abiding men who would never dream of committing murder in private life. On the other hand, if one of them succeeds in running me over with a bus, he will never sleep any the worse for it. He is serving FirstBus, which has the power to absolve him from evil."

Well, that's right. He is trying to kill you. He is engaging, as Chris Hutt puts it, in "anti-terrorist activities". It is everyone's duty to fight the war on bicycles. It's for your own good. Now put the bike down and start saving up for a car.

When George Orwell wrote the essay that has been misquoted above, he was trying to define what Englishness was: cups of tea, "old maids hiking to Holy Communion through the mists of the autumn morning ", etc. No mention of bicycles. They are a foreign invention. Possibly even Scottish. No, what Orwell celebrated included "the to-and-fro of the lorries on the Great North Road", windy country roads, and the motor car. Admittedly he wrote it at a time petrol was being rationed, and if you did have any it would be for an Austin Morris vehicle whose quality control issues were a warning sign of the break down of the British factory system, a precursor to the economic problems this country has today. You could go out on your vehicle for a spin round the lanes, but you wouldn't know if you would get back.

Times have changed.


In the 1940s, a trip by car would have been an unusual event, the breakdown an adventure. Nowadays, its how you pick the kids up, the breakdown a crisis if it happens at 15:00 on the first day of school. You need help, you need an organisation that cares about you. Hence, the AA, here seen double parked on Whiteladies road as part of such a support call.

According to Wikipedia, the AA was founded in 1905 by a collection of motorists who wished to build a list of where speed traps were. This shows that the nanny state has been interfering with our rights for over a century -and that the AA has been standing up for them.

This week, the AA are pushing out a report, warning that the recession is threatening what it means to be be British.

Increased costs of motoring means that drivers are looking at ways of making motoring more efficient., This means we are more likely to question if we need to go to that meeting, can we avoid rush hour by going to work earlier or staying late, can the kids walk to school?

 The AA's president Edmund King said

"The motor vehicle is an integral part of British culture we rely on - whether getting to work, taking the kids to school or delivering goods. So when times are hard it is with reluctance we look at ways of cutting down on car journeys."

The report brought the shocking news that not only are some people walking and cycling to work, the increased cost of driving is encouraging people to work from home, or even to postpone their journey times to avoid peak hours. Some people have discovered that the unfair tax regime in the country now means that it is cheaper to walk your children to school.

The AA were quick to condemn this, and understand that people look at these options with reluctance. Being stuck in a traffic jam on the M32 is what defines us, and it brings in money for the government and the phone companies. If we did not spend an hour a day stuck on the M32 flyover, we wouldn't be funding the government. Or the AA.

Working from home, walking the kids to school, the AA are right to demand the government acts to stop these. Orwell's dream of a maid walking to communion has been replaced by the Honda CR-V sounding their horn at the bike in the way while the kids in the back argue over which DVD to watch. This is the dream of Britain that Cycling City is losing touch with. We must all support the AA in their campaign to focus on the real problems of the country: roads that aren't wide enough, and not get distracted by other issues, like the fact that we have got the next decade's governments forced to introduce scathing cuts to all government services through a year's worth of printing money and nationalising banks with a bigger exposure than our entire annual Gross Domestic Product.

If we do not fight the bicycles, we lose what it is to be British. We will be Dutch, or worse, Scandinavian.

Product placement: AA

Some of our viewers come from Abroad, where Abroad means further afield than Wales or the Isle of Wight, and these readers leave notes saying "what the zig-zags we keep mentioning".

Zig-zags are the lines before and after zebra and other pedestrian crossings, which indicate that under no circumstances should you ever think of parking there. Because of that restriction, they are not normally used for commuter and resident parking.

This leaves them as the primary short-stay parking area in the inner city. The tendency of zebra crossings to be placed near schools and shops makes them key locations for short stay shopping or parental dropoff.

Today, we see a yellow van EU06NUY with flashing lights up on one on Cotham Brow

From the side, you can see that it is an AA van helping broken down cars. Someone further down the hill appears to have run out of petrol; the AA breakdown van is on call to rescue them.

Although this seems to endanger pedestrians, it doesn't really, because while it may make it harder for approaching vehicles to see people about to cross the road, if the drivers are not going to stop for pedestrians anyway, it makes no difference whatsoever.

Once you recognise that, that zebra-markings are just a quaint memory of a distant past when children walked to school, it's then clear that their sole remaining use really is short-stay parking. They have no other purpose in our fair city.

Breakdown on Hurlingham Road

Regular contributor KL sends in this photo of someone pushing their bike up the hill, past the car J417LFJ parked entirely on the pavement of Hurlingham Road, St Andrews, just off Ashley Down Road.

From the front of the vehicle, you see the sign "Sorry, broken down, "

KL asks "why is it more acceptable to block the pavement than to block the road? Or was the car already parked on the pavement when it broke down?"

Actually, that bit of Hurlingham Road is a pavement that the cars have to drive up and down to get past the cars in the other direction. It was probably driving up the hill when it broke down, much to the annoyance of all the cars driving up the pavement behind it.

Incidentally, we hear a rumour -just a rumour- that Hurlingham Road is likely to be closed to through traffic, and that the closure will be at the top of the hill, not the bottom -which must mean near the junction with Cromwell Road. More details on this would be welcome.

Who tows the tow trucks?

Nobody, by the look of things

You have to fix it wherever it breaks down.

Fortunately, the Eastern end of Fairfield Road, Montpelier is wide enough to sustain trucks, camper vans and caravans on both sides of the road, so it is not inconveniencing anyone.

What is scary is that someone was under this vehicle last night doing repairs, at night. Look how safely it is held up: bricks and a couple of bits of metal, and imagine what would happen if a passing vehicle were to accidentally clip it, all of that would come down on top of anyone unlucky to be underneath. Not good. This is why garages have lots of equipment to life up vehicles or pits to get underneath them.