Igor Clark

So start being a bit more bloody considerate, you towpath-hogging, danger-making, irritation-causing, bell-ding-enrudening, selfish cyclist fucks.

Yes, I know I ride my bike all over the shop; yes, I know I have been less than 100% considerate on various occasions in my life, but: it's pretty clear to anyone with even half a brain that hoofing a bike along a narrow path next to a cold pile of dirty water with lots of people walking on it is NOT a safe or good idea for those people, particularly under bridges, you daft, impatient bastards, so I just don't take my bike on the towpath, even though it would be quicker and safer for me if I didn't have to ride next to trucks and buses.

The thing is, I'm really not an especially non-selfish person; it just seems bleeding obvious - so what's with you lot? Are you different in some way? Do normal common sense, courtesy and decency not apply to you? Do you have a special dispensation from Boris Johnson to piss me off every day? Has he sunk to the level of trying to annoy individual London-dwellers one by one, by proxy? Well, I hope you all fall in. Maybe you'll all get Weil's disease and select yourselves out.

As in every other recent winter, I tried to go clothes-shopping yesterday. Everywhere I went, I encountered a farrago of suspiciously drab hues; mostly sluggish greys, but also mucky browns, dirty greens, shifty-looking blues. What's with all this? We know it's winter, we know it's miserable and raining and shitty and cold. We can hardly avoid knowing it. Surely we don't need to be reminded of this all-permeating fact by the sight of every passing person blending into the next through their co-operation in this conspiracy of crud? I want bright! I want shiny! I want us all to stand out in our rainwear and I want to feel happily dazzled by vivid vermillions and acute aquamarines and day-glo oranges and acerbic lemons and louche lime greens and frightening fuschias!

I must have gone to twenty different shops, in England's London's famous Oxford Street and its nearby Covent Garden, and my eyes were dripping visual rust by the time I could take no more. Are you manufacturers in league with some hidden ministry of moping? Are the Powers that Be using clothing design to manipulate our mood and stifle open revolt? Or, worse, is there some unspoken yet universally-accepted agenda, on which such agency may piggy-back undiscovered, that because it's wearisome winter-time, we're damn-well going to mope about and feel rotten and subdued? Well I won't have it, I tell you. I found one bright yellow shirt, and I damn-well bought it. Have at you, you couturiers of the crappily crepuscular.