The Reader’s Rant

by Rob Hutton

As I lay by the side of the path in the park groaning, and as I sat in Casualty waiting to be treated, and as I limped around work for the following month, the thing that stayed with me was the question the man who’d knocked me down asked: "But where does it say that it’s not a cycle path? "

At the time I just spluttered and felt aggrieved that neither of my dogs had shown any inclination to savage my high-speed, brake-free assailant. For some time afterwards, I felt his attitude - that everything not explicitly forbidden in letters a foot high must be OK - showed how silly he was (an opinion reinforced by the fact that the wretched man had been pelting down the pavement at just below the speed of sound).

But, on reflection, I think that as well as whacking my good knee with his handlebar, he offered me quite a profound and useful insight into the mind of man.

Because, once you realize this is how people are thinking, you understand quite a lot about how the world is. The Greenwich police, for instance, clearly woke up one morning and thought: "Where does it say we have to get out of our patrol cars just because we’re going across the grass through the middle of a park?"

I shall have to stop before I begin to splutter uncontrollably and set my dogs onto the nearest panda car.

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