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[12 minute read ]

Award for Outstanding Contribution to Social Change by a civilian

A friend I have, knowing that I have a sympathetic ear, cornered me at a conference, with the following thinking as part of his belief system:

       ‘We all live in a rapidly changing world that somehow always manages to be one step ahead of us, at least technically. If you want evidence of this, you only have to look back to the Industrial Revolution and the invention of the steam engine.’

       ‘I’m listening,’ I said.

       ‘I had a model steam traction engine made by Mamod, when I was a child.’ he said.

       ‘Hmm. My brother had a steam roller.’

       ‘Given the right tools, I could build a rudimentary, but still viable, steam engine to power something that requires only a relatively small amount of power. I could even use a flywheel to maintain the power between piston strokes.’

Yeah, not difficult, I thought.

I am not an engineer; not in the strict sense of being someone who has formally studied engineering; electrical, mechanical, chemical, physics, or whatever. I am definitely not a scientist, such as we think mathematicians are and people who work out out how big our universe is. Yet, all of us can be in one or the other of these camps of thinking; I have mentioned this before when explaining a priori and posteriori. An engineering mind takes the facts that scientists have discovered and uses those facts to solve problems in the real world.

When we were at school, we worked in teams. Ostensibly, this was to make the brightest kids in the class take the role of assistant teacher; let’s face it, those brain-boxes had intelligence to spare anyway, and end of school results needed to look good. A communist might be happy with taxing the rich to give to the poor. Schools have done this for decades.

Quentin went on; I knew he would.

      ‘Of course, poor achievers in life have a right to think they should live in luxury. The nanny-state from 1948 to the present has consistently robbed the poor of opportunity, recently.’

Well, I didn’t expect to hear criticism of the Welfare Act 1948 today, but with Quentin, anything is possible.

      ‘When I say ‘poor’ I mean the one’s who received the most help in school from the richest or brightest person in the team. In 1765, James Watt came up with an improvement to Thomas Newcomen’s steam engine. This ‘light-bulb’ or ‘Eureka’ moment could only have come to someone like Watt. People like him are the ones who brought improvement to modern poor people’s lives through the subjugation of their ancestors in weaving mills.’

Blah, blah, blah, I thought, Get to the point!

    ‘James Watt, in a modern school, would be the bright kid helping everyone else in his team to make the leap of discovery or realisation to understand how to come up with a solution to a problem set by a teacher or textbook. Schools then rely on pupils’ memories to be able to award level two and level three qualifications for students at, what is it, sixteen, eighteen years old? After that, Watt would go on to invent things to make himself rich and make utilisers of his inventions rich.’

I wasn’t averse to Quentin’s thinking, and he knew that. I didn’t always agree with him, but I had half-cooked ideas of my own, which left on the back-boiler, were always ready for a stir and some seasoning.

I moved my quite forgotten stew of juvenile thinking forward. In the 1980s, the UK Government decided that everybody should be allowed credit, pending credit checks of course. This meant that the class society was gradually taken from the UK populace. A communist would say ‘Good, Share the wealth and support the people.’

I chucked in Quentin’s mix, piece-meal, and tasted it. A class-less society means supporting people who falsely think they could have been a modern-day James Watt or Thomas Newcomen and are somehow equal to genius or successful risk-takers. ‘I know, I will get credit and be equal to the people next door’. Those people next door, they did not realise, have everything they need without credit. With no credit interest to pay, there is better utilisation of their available income. The ‘haves’ get richer, while the ‘credit-ridden’ get poorer; poorer because they somehow believe they have a right to luxury because the modern ‘James Watt’ helped them at school, and gave them a false sense of hope based on their end of school examinations which are a result of their achievements IN A TEAM with excellent thinkers in it. Take away the spark of initiative, and what do you have?

Quentin watched and waited. I nodded in a head-lolling way, raised my eyebrows, and grunted. He smiled.

Why did, Quentin, my friend, tell me this? It turns out that Quentin has a great deal of money, enjoys amateur dramatics, and has another friend, Alec, who went to the same private school as him, but has always been an under-achiever in the modern world. Alec had, Quentin told me, moved to the very same village I now live in, only two years ago. I had never knowingly met Alec.

Quentin told me that the last time Alec had won something without coming up with a formula to fleece bookmakers at horse races, was when he had bought a single raffle ticket and it was selected. Apparently, he wasn’t a popular sixteen year old in his home village and there was an array of prizes which the master of ceremonies had had to spend considerable time scanning to find the least valuable, or least useful, item. Eventually a sushi rolling mat was chosen against a bottle of wine, a small food hamper, a box of chocolates and about five other expensive things.

       ‘This is what matches your ticket number!’, Alec was supposedly told.

So, when Quentin, in sympathy for Alec’s life of inadequacy and disappointment, ear-holed me at that conference to ask for my help, I came up with an award for his ‘Alec’. Everybody has their ‘Alec’ and nobody likes a Smart-Alec. I congratulated myself on that one, despite it being a little mixed up in its relevance.

Quentin told me that, as a result of our combined efforts, Alec had been nominated for an award, sixty years  after his raffle win. Alec didn’t know what to expect. Of course, he now lives in a different village to his youth, and the locals, by dint of his age, automatically consider him to be greater than any unruly teenager. Of course, I had to meet him and he is, truly, still unbelievably dim. Yes, I am one of those bigots who classify people and thereafter use heuristics to keep them there in my mind. No-one can change their spots or class position. Once a teenager, always a teenager, as far as I am concerned.

The event was to be held in our village hall after the monthly screening of an obscure film by the local film club. After a couple of yawning hours, the crowd cheered up and some were woken by their immediate seated neighbours. At last, the moment that they had came for; the ‘Award for Outstanding Contribution to Social Change by a civilian’. No-one in our area had ever been lauded or praised so highly, quite simply because there never had been this award before.

       ‘And now the highest award for Outstanding Contribution to Social Change by a civilian’

      ‘The nominees are Anna Clarke for arranging Council funding for the local Brownies’ trip to Offa’s Dyke, last year; David Brown, our local farmer, for contributing to the new East/West railway with the donation of his farmhouse and re-development of it into a local train station; and Raymond White, for the clear instructions he gives for which side of a cyclist he will overtake on, while on a cycle path.’. That’s me! I realised.

The crowd sat up a little more.

       ‘And the winner is….Raymond White!’

      ‘Bravo’, called the crowd as they threw flowers at me, at ME!

      ‘No!’, I shouted above the din, ‘It should be Alec!’

For years, cyclists had been troubled and confused about which side the faster cyclist approaching them from behind was going to pass them on.

The UK Highway Code under: ‘Annex 1. You and your bicycle

Information and rules about you and your bicycle’, states that:

‘A bicycle should have a bell.’

It does not say must have a bell

Many pedestrians, particularly the older type, think that is law for a bicycle to have a bell. I have always liked to prove that a bell is no longer suitable in the modern world because people wear ear-buds and are listening to music that may include notes of the same frequency of a bicycle bell.

This is what I told Alec. Quentin’s plan was to use his wild bunch of amateur dramatics-loving friends to create a scenario that Alec would unknowingly interact with. I had told Alec to call out, ‘Passing on the right.’ each time he overtook another cyclist on a cycle-path. After a couple of weeks, actors would, unbeknownst to him, race to catch up with Alec from their hiding places along his route back home from work. As they approached him they were to call ‘Passing on your right’ just before overtaking him. The plan was to cause Alec to think that the local bike-riding population had recognised his efforts to be clear and safe, as being something they wanted to adopt themselves. Alec would then pat himself on the back. The award at the village hall was to cement his pride; after all false pride in someone so old as Alec wouldn’t be much of a problem for the young people of today.

I thought that Alec would think this was a sound idea because I already did something similar; to make sure that I was noticed when I approached pedestrians from behind I called out, ‘Bike’, with an expectation that the person in front would move to the side of any shared pavement for pedestrians and bicycles. When they do not hear me I then shout, ‘BIKE BEHIND’. A standard bicycle bell sound cannot be turned up, my voice, of course, can.

According to my diary of near accidents, I have saved over two hundred lives by shouting at pedestrians. But, the best part of shouting at pedestrians is when they stand still and shout back. That way I know they have heard me and I have saved a further one hundred and seventy eight lives because they will not be suddenly stepping to one side or the other.

On occasion, I have had to pick myself up off the floor with a sore face because the clumsy pedestrian, usually men, in turning has allowed one of their hands to fly out from their body at face level. I realised that these accidents could impact on the fomenting of good manners, so that is why I decided to also do what I had told Alec to do.

      ‘Passing on the right!’

Now, in my area, there is no sound of bicycle bells, only calls of intent. Many people are now safer.

According to my log of near accidents, scenarios I have witnessed which I keep at home; all told, I have vicariously saved one thousand, five hundred and five lives in my area by introducing good clear manners to young cycling people.

Alec was grinning ear-to ear.

A woman came over to me and introduced herself as a talent scout from the UK Highway Code legislators. She warmly shook my hand.

       ‘I am going to recommend that the UK Highway Code has an entry that states that cyclists should shout at pedestrians and pedestrians should stand stock still and control their children so bicycles can move smoothly on pavements, unimpeded and safely.’

     ‘This is a breakthrough in progress!’ gushed her companion.

The cheering crowd carried me out of the hall on their shoulders and right back to my house. The next day, I walked back to the village hall to collect my bicycle, and thanked all the cyclists shouting at me as they approached me from behind. A few of them held up a single middle finger to show their support for my first award. They seemed to think I was wearing two hats, at least that is what they were shouting, though running the words together.

The elderly cyclists held up two fingers in a victory sign, but most couldn’t seem to remember whether the palm should face the recipient or not. Perhaps they were showing their support for me to win a second award.

      ‘Thank you so much’, I gratefully called. 

I didn't realise that Quentin had set me up. It was just a joke; a joke on me. Most of the people in the village hall were actual residents in my village.

Quentin has never liked me.