2011: For Auld Lang Syne

A new year has arrived; time to sing the songs and remember those who won't be able to celebrate it. The classic is Burn's poem, which people sing without knowing the words or the meanings.

Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
and never brought to mind ?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
and auld lang syne?

For auld lang syne, my jo,

for auld lang syne,
we’ll tak a cup o’ kindness yet,
for auld lang syne.

And surely ye’ll be your pint-stowp !
and surely I’ll be mine !
And we’ll tak a cup o’ kindness yet,
for auld lang syne.

Chris Hutt's death is was sad for all of us, here we see him talking to the recumbent riders at the CTC stall in the car-free Corn Street day on Sept 2009. That should have been a warning sign there and then.

At his funeral, he was pulled by family and friends, while others cycled behind him.

We've covered this already [1, 2, 3] -it was a fitting memorial to the man.

However, it's been quieter since then. Less stroppy emails. Less troublemakers upsetting the establishment. Something needs to be done.

Which is why we suspect that Chris would have been delighted by the new Cycling Embassy of Great Britain, created to bring mainstream european cycling infrastructure to the country. Accordingly, we in the Bristol Traffic Project have contacted the embassy to denounce them, and given them our hotline contact details so if they need to be denounced again, or have their invalid assumptions corrected, we can do it more rapidly and directly.

But Chris was not the only death this year, and one of the saddening things in our server logs is people searching for details abou t the sixteen-year-old Junaid Nazir's death on Fishponds Road; searching for answers. There's no answers we can give them, which saddens us all.

Crap Cycling in Waltham Forest, our London correspondents, celebrated the new year with a posting that includes the Sid Vicious version of My Way -lovely! We're going to mourn the past year with a video tribute to Junaid Nazir. Bleak, but his family and friends will never forget him, neither should the rest of the city.

For auld lang syne, my jo,

for auld lang syne,
we’ll tak a cup o’ kindness yet,
for auld lang syne.