One day, all but a few trickles of oil will be gone and only the super-rich and politicians will be able to afford cars. Wind power driven electric cars will have been revealed as the useless dud they are and instead we shall all be getting about on bikes.
And as we cycle down abandoned motorways, past rotting vehicles discarded by their owners, our grandchildren will ask us what it was like in the olden days, when everyone had a car.
We’ll take them to the old motorway service stations. Once teeming with motorists, busily on their way from one identikit town to another, now slowly crumbling into the ground, brambles growing through the pumps, nettles poking through the tarmac. Where once people sat and ate McDonald’s finest cheese-burgers, now rats and mice skitter about, scraping a living from slowly decomposing packets of tortilla chips and ancient bags of wine-gums.
But they still won’t understand what it was *really* like, back then when motorists ruled, when the whole of society was organized around the car. So we’ll cycle through dilapidated towns and abandoned countryside, past rusting signs for the M62, picking our way past collapsed motorway bridges until eventually finding the Single Track World Museum. We’ll join the crowds thronging that revered place, the one true home of cycling, and feel the thrill of once again reading those ages-old forum posts, preserved for posterity by the high priests of the Server Room (only allowed to ride single speeds, for religious reasons). Finally we’ll go to the souvenir shop, where we will buy some genuine agent picolax, and then, tired but happy, begin the long ride back home.
Then our grandchildren will understand what was lost, and what was gained.
