I was taking the long route to the shops, and doing a few circuits of Oliver's Mount, when I rounded a bend on the top circuit to find the road effectively blocked by a parked car with it's door wide open while the driver chatted to a man standing in the road nearby. It was clearly a very important car - low, shiny and with personalised number plates - and the man standing nearby looked as though he was being duly impressed. Meanwhile, I'd just got to one of the good bits in Beethoven's 6th Symphony and really couldn't be bothered to stop, pull out my earphones and politely ask if they'd mind moving out of the way. Instead, in the second or so it took to assess the situation I thought "f**k it, the standing man is so in rapture to the shiny motor car that he's not going to move any closer too it" and, without any warning, just went straight through the gap.
Luckily I got away with it, but one of the things about cycling, or walking, is that it gives you time to think and as I rode on I began to regret what I'd done and tried to figure out why I'd done it. To cut a long story short - see Situational or Dispositional to get the gist - I was responding to the car rather than to the people who were associated with it. It could have been, for example, that the car was simply being tested as a favour to the real owner and that the driver and his conversant wouldn't normally be seen dead in such a vehicle*. But at the time my imagination didn't stretch quite that far and, in all probability, the person driving the car was the owner and part of the reason for owning it, along with the personalised number plates, was as a status symbol. So, I hope he'll forgive me if I was wrong but there is every reason to suppose that I wasn't.
A recent report suggests that, despite the fact that for the last decade that the BMI (body mass index) of the average American has been stable, their waistlines are still expanding. Now you might think that the owners of large bellies would try to avoid drawing attention to them. Wearing Lycra, for example, you'd think would be a no no. But I wonder how many of them have noticed that, from the perspective of a pedestrian or a passing cyclist, modern cars with their aerodynamic sloping windscreens actually provide a perfect display area for, what a friend from Ghana in his West African way refers to as, their responsible bellies.
A few years ago the then prominent Labour politician Roy Hattersley withdrew at the last minute from a popular satirical TV program "Have I got News for You" . Because they couldn't get a substitute at such short notice, and because he's a bit overweight, they chose to replace him with a tub of lard. So now, when I'm getting grumpy with the traffic, I tend to refer to certain types of cars - usually inflated 4 x 4 s that have never had a bale of straw or a sick sheep thrown, I mean delicately placed, in the back - as Lardbuckets and the sort of car I encountered on The Mount as a Tossmobile. (those unfamiliar with UK slang see Tosser )
I prefer to think of the use of these terms simply as ways of relieving stress rather than as wholehearted value judgements. You, of course, are entitled to think as you please.
Photo courtesy of the Richardsons Cycles web site
(they have not endorsed the terms used in this blog)
*Among the many tasteless jokes that circulated after the Princess of Wales' death in 1997 was "What's the difference between a Mercedes and a Lada? " "Princess Diana wouldn't be seen dead in the back of a Lada"
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