Imagine getting something right

The first Imagine Festival was held at the Cleveland Street Theatre, opening on John Lennon’s birthday, October 9, with the blessing of Yoko Ono in a brief but charming email.

The roundabout relevance of this to cycling is that your columnist participated in a short sketch with another performer – we’ll not name names, so let’s say Sydney Swan – who experienced difficulties in rehearsal remembering the razor-sharp repartee as written and muttered summat about what he might say if he were to forget on the night. I told him it’s easier to learn the lines.

His error, creating a complex strategy to compensate for not getting something right, is common. The sprawling confusion of our modern bureaucracies is much about elaborate structures for dealing with what to do when things have gone wrong again and again. Better to get it right.

Here is not the place for deep analysis of the defects of DOCS or the NSW Dept. of Education. Suffice to say your postmodern Sisyphus, rolling his rock uphill, may be plagued by functionary morons amassing mole hills and digging holes.

This is, however, according to my editor, a place to consider the mix of cyclists and motorists on our roads and how expensive and ineffective apartheid policies are. No matter how many separated bi-directional cycleways are built in comprehensive networks across our sprawling city there will be public thoroughfares somewhere motorists and cyclists must share.

No matter how lavishly our Lord Mayor throws money at systems of salvation there comes a time and place our nanny Moore can’t save us any more.

The best of mothers cannot forever protect her child from the world’s wild ways. Better to be blooded to the ‘red in tooth and claw’ than die a naïve death on the first foray forth from the gilded cage of overprotective care.

We require a traffic plan that deals with the splendid diversity of all modes of transport. We must be kind and considerate fellow travellers.

Imagine.

by Peter Whitehead