When I sold my car, I didn’t expect a pat on the head; I wore my halo on the inside, and that was enough. But I did assume that those who had encouraged me to do the right thing – among them, my local council, which supposedly favours the walker, the cyclist and the keen user of the bus – wouldn’t now actively seek to make my life more difficult.
Three years later, and part of me wonders why I bothered. Thanks to low traffic schemes, which benefit only select groups of very lucky people, bus journey times are often twice as long as they used to be, cars having been forced on to the main road. Meanwhile, the council has decreed that those who want their garden waste to be collected, as it has been ever since I’ve lived here, must henceforth pay £75 a year for the privilege – and for a service only half as frequent as before.
Isn’t it obvious what will happen next? Relatively few people, I predict, will cough up. Those with cars will drive to the dump, increasing traffic and pollution, while those without will either hide their dead dahlias in their regular rubbish (which means they won’t be composted), or they’ll simply fly tip (a serious problem in our neighbourhood).
If people can be nudged into good citizenship, they can just as surely be elbowed in the direction of bad behaviour – and this, I think, is a perfect example of that.
Book club for one
I’ve just finished a strange new novel, Practice by Rosalind Brown. It relates a day in the life of a student who’s trying to write about Shakespeare’s sonnets (think Mrs Dalloway mid-essay crisis), and now I badly want to talk to someone about it. Except, no one I know seems even to have heard of it. So now I’m wondering: is there a German word for the floaty loneliness that comes with being the first (and maybe the last) person in your circle to read something?
The singing professor
To a church in Clerkenwell to hear Terry Eagleton, the English professor and public intellectual, deliver a lecture entitled: Where does culture come from? I went for old times’ sake, having never managed to see him speak (or to see him at all) when I was student, for all that I liked to match his famous book Literary Theory, all the rage then, with my black polo neck, and as a consequence, I felt, well… old. (Though not so old that I wasn’t driven round the bend by the two men in front who were keen to signal their mighty intellects by laughing a bit too heartily at a joke about Pope and Dryden.)
Eagleton was in puckish mood, keen to remind us that Coleridge would have thought the overused term “culture wars” an oxymoron, culture then being, in the mind of the poet, the great panacea (I paraphrase). But the coup de théâtre came at the end, when he suddenly broke into an Irish love song of many verses. Afterwards, all the questions were about ideology etc. No one asked what I was burning to know, which was: had he planned his surprise coda, and is he available for weddings?
Denim dictatorship
Yes, it was funny to see Alan Titchmarsh on North Korean TV, his jeans blurred because they symbolise American imperialism. But we’re hardly immune to denim dictatorship ourselves. The previous week, fashion editors told us only baggy styles would do. Last week, skinny jeans were reportedly making a comeback – cue sighs of relief from most women, who feel metaphorically blurry at the merest thought of wearing flapping great sails of blue.
• Rachel Cooke is an Observer columnist
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