I plan to ditch my car for good this year. My wife and I have been a two car family for years and I've reached the view what is the point! I live in a city, I have a bus pass, the train station is just around the corner, the ferries to France and Spain are just up the road, our city has a well developed taxi service, I can walk, I can cycle, why do I need a car! My problem of course is the habit of it all and all that the car represents. I like so many other people was bought up in an era in which, as a working class person, it was what you aspired to, including buying our own house. We never questioned it, it was aspirational, success, I've made it and so on. Of course it helps to be retired, I've no doubt I would be thinking differently if I was still working.
I did a fairly long cycle ride yesterday and today. I was happy when pedaling along cycle tracks but as soon as I came to ordinary roads, even the small ones I was constantly hassled by cars and vans. I don't think it was my imagination, but I sensed that there are so many more 'white vans' on the road, drivers were were whizzing past as if their lives depended on it, desperate to get so mewher at all costs. During last evening I cycled through an area just south of Tunbridge Wells which I knew well as a child and teenager. It may be my imagination but I do not remember in past years seeing so many 'white vans' parked in very expensive house driveways. A sign of the times perhaps, do you think Ian Hislop has one, or is it that there are more people than I think on zero contract hours, I mean how do we, or what can we 'read' into what we see or think we see? I had hoped that cycling could be an alternativeforward for me but after yesterdays experience I'm now not sure if it is? The overnight camp was fine but I need to give cycling further thought, which includes how to solve sore bottom syndrome, I now seem to have swapped sore feet for a sore backside.
I caught the train back home at Gatwick Airport today, the polltion standing there on the platform was awful! By the time I arrived at Chichester, to save me embarrassment, I jumped off the train an 'threw up' in the station toilet. I came home, slept for an hour and feel much better now.