Life on two wheels in the Netherlands

I've been back in Utrecht for two weeks, it's amazing how living in probably the most densely populated area of Utrecht, I still have less traffic noise and more trees than in Ely. There's a huge ring road round the corner with massive amounts of traffic, but it isn't a danger - there are plenty of crossings and bridges and fields and country side on the other side, we are yet to explore by bike.

When we ride into town, I can ride next to my youngest, who's 6 years old and I am, in effect, able to drill him on how to ride with me, his concentration isn't great and it's reassuring not to have to shout over at him on the pavement either riding behind him or from on the road. Both boys are getting loads of fresh air and exercise just getting around, exploring their new city.
There's free secure parking all over the centre too.
In the last week or so they've been rained on more by bike than they probably ever did in Ely, as Bertha and the thunderstorms have come over Europe, the first one was a real shock - we arrived at swimming as if we'd jumped in the pool fully clothed. Toby ended up riding home while we stayed at the pool to collect dry clothes. Luckily, the pool is open into the evening, has a pool side restaurant and hanging around for several hours at a Dutch pool is normal, our pool in Ely has a coffee machine at reception.

Do you need to be fearless, have ADHD or a death wish to be female and ride a bike in England?

As someone who had to cycle to school with my Dad on a Tandem from 1979 through rush hour Reading, by that point, my Dad was already saying "if you want to kill someone and get away with it, do it in car" and I saw and breathed it all in first hand. It seemed like madness if you weren't sitting in a car. People thought we were crazy and cyclists were invariably very hardy, intellectuals or just plain too poor to afford even to travel by bus.
I visited the Netherlands for the first time in my teens in the early 80's, I got to ride a bike with other people my age who didn't think I had a death wish.
My Mum's been in the Netherlands since 1983 and she's never adopted the Dutch way and by the time she was my age had crippling thrombosis. I have the same thing but it's never developed because I've insisted on cycling - I see the thought of thrombosis worse than being hit by a car. I've been nearly dead many times, some would say I should probably get tested for ADHD. My mum took her English attitude to traffic with her to Holland and called all the mums on bikes with a kid at each end "suicide mums" it was obvious that to her, with her experience of cycling in England, she couldn't see the advantages of not driving.
She has an amazing road bike still in her shed, a Macleans track bike, I wonder what happened in the 70's to her that she's rarely got back on a bike since then.
Especially for women, you generally don't need many near misses to put you off entirely.
We have lost nearly 2 generations of cyclists to cars and it would take the sort of reforms they've started to use for smoking or child protection, with little or no notice to public opinion or profit to turn it round.
It would have to be unpopular in the eyes of many, before proper segregation and strict limitations on through traffic could return cycling levels to where it was in the 1950s. Public opinion and profit would, of course follow.
Giving all the responsibility to the Local Authorities who are notoriously worried about public opinion can't have helped. That and the way they are funded.
When I move back to Holland next week, give me a few months and I'm going to see what can be done with that macleans, it might take a while, it might end up becoming my eldest son's first road bike. In the Netherlands, not in Cambridgeshire, I'll get to do the sort of bike riding with my kids I've always dreamed of.

Learning to ride a bike

I have a dear friend in Holland, when she moved into a brand new development on the outskirts of her home town and the town where my Mum still lives, I couldn't see the appeal. I didn't have or want kids though. She went on to have three before I was anywhere near ready for marriage. This video is on this very street a few years ago, the little girls have grown up now. The great thing about this video that is essentially to record a four year old's first bike ride without stabilisers. I love the fact that this is how kids roll in the Netherlands, how they can ride up and down their street and the cars are parked away - no on street parking. This was designed in the early 90's and it's still being used and developed over there to this day, while in the UK we still make developments that allow cars to be abandoned on the streets on roads that are essentially trunk roads carrying large HGV's who use these streets every day to do business. Not a place where kids can roam like the kids in this video.

Me and Thaddeus Stevens

This weekend, I watched Lincoln, I've been meaning to for ages. SPOILER ALERT! Tommy Lee Jones plays a politician called Thaddeus Jones and without giving too much of the film away (lets face it we all know, they squeeze the 13th ammendment through and Lincoln gets shot), Thaddeeus Stevens is an old ugly man, very grumpy and known for insulting people. His passion for equality surpassed his interest in the individuals around him in politics. There are quotes like:

Abraham Lincoln: When the people disagree, bringing them together requires going slow until they're ready to...
Thaddeus Stevens: Shit on the people and what they want and what they're ready for. I don't give a goddamn about the people and what they want. This is the face of someone who has fought long and hard for the *good* of the people without caring much for any of 'em. And now I look a lot worse without my wig.

and:

Thaddeus Stevens: Slave is the only insult to the natural law, you fatuous nincompoop.

At the end of the film, finally when the 13th amendment had scraped through by a majority of two, Stevens takes the actual amendment paper, folds it in half and says to the clerk, I'll have it back to you in the morning, with one fold added, or words to that effect. He goes home, his coloured housekeeper opens the door, takes his coat, then you realise there's more to this, they converse as friends and equals, then you realise she took his coat as a wife would, they get into bed next to each other and she reads the 13th amendment to her husband. They had achieved a massive result - the end of slavery and the end to owning another human being.

Steven's passion for freedom and his disdain and indifference for people who couldn't see it, struck a chord with me. Emotionally, he had a wife, who happened to be of colour, but otherwise no difference, he was 100 years before his time. He was criticised and hated for his rudeness, rudeness to people who would have the woman he loved shackled and put to work.

He has to change his pitch in the run up to the vote for the 13th amendment from freedom for all people regardless of colour, to freedom in the eyes of the law (which in effect meant they would free the slaves but so long as the law didn't afford blacks the vote, all the other politicians could vote for the end of slavery without worrying about real emancipation).

He saw the point of amending the truth of his intentions and beliefs to get the amendment through. He had to.

Thaddeus Stevens: How can I hold that all men are created equal when here before me stands stinking, the moral carcass of the gentleman from Ohio, proof that some men ARE inferior, endowed by their maker with dim wits impermeable to reason with cold, pallid slime in their veins instead of hot blood! You are more reptile than man, Mr. Pendleton, so low and flat that the foot of man is incapable of crushing you! Yet even YOU, Pendleton, who should have been gibbetted for treason long before today, even worthless, unworthy you deserve to be treated equally before the law! And so again, I say that I do not hold with equality in all things, only with equality before the law!

Getting the vote for her, both as a black person and as a woman would take much much longer.

I shout at councillors and I don't care for idiots who endanger my kids on the roads in their stinking cars. I find it very hard to tone it down at times!

Emotionally, My kids are like his wife and as they grow up I am sick to my stomach by how kids are confined to houses and cars. There are no kids playing on the streets any more. The 70+ year olds round here may have walked or cycled 5 or 10 miles to school, now kids aren't allowed to walk 200 yards.

I know that ending slavery and cyclist's rights might not be in the same league, but lives are at stake, on many many levels anyone reading this will know very well.

Cars can be very useful but why did it have to come to a point where it's the only acceptable form of transportation. A sledgehammer to crack a nut.

I get backs up in in Ely asking for 20mph, complaining that my kids have no safe route to school and that there's no future proofing happening - 3000 new homes, not enough roads and not enough alternatives to driving on offer?

This is urgent, do we have to wait like Thaddeus had to to get his wife the vote? Or should we be nice to self serving local councillors who won't get on the wrong side of anyone, have no interest in improving matters and certainly don't prioritise the next generation.

What are our priorities? the car or the child?