Matthew Parris

A festive custom we could do worse than foster would be stringing piano wire across country lanes to decapitate cyclists. It’s not just the Lycra, though Heaven knows this atrocity alone should be a capital offence; nor the helmets, though these ludicrous items of headgear are designed to protect the only part of a cyclist that is not usefully employed; nor the self-righteousness, though a small band of sports cyclists on winter’s morning emits more of that than a cathedral at evensong; nor even the brutish disregard for all other road users, though the lynching of a cyclist by a mob of mothers with pushchairs would be a joy to witness.

No, yet another cyclist-generated horror – and a new one – has come to my attention this Christmas. They’re chucking their empty cans of hi-energy drinks into hedgerows as they pass.

Bin-liners in hand, a group of us, infused with the seasonal goodwill that illuminates this column, of course, decided to walk a mile of a pretty and winding lane that had become particularly badly littered this winter, and collect it all. It’s amazing how much of the stuff there is when you start looking, and we ended up with a whole sackful. And what was the principal offending item? Plastic bottles and empty cans of Lucozade, Gatorade and other blood-sugar-boosting products were lodged high in hedgerows at cyclist level. Forgive me, but pedestrians were not the culprits here.

What is the carbon footprint of a panting, sugar-gulping, chocolate-chewing, Lycra-clad leisure-cyclist? a) His or her journey is totally unnecessary; b) whole convoys of cargo boats steam the Atlantic to bring the molasses to be energy-intensively refined for them; and c) the chemical processes that generate the vile materials that clothe, shoe and helmet a cyclist – not a man-made fibre among them – will be poisoning entire provinces of China.

But it’s the bad manners one cannot forgive. Driving or walking, don’t you just hate the way that, riding two or three abreast, they shout and curse at you or whir their angry little bells, as though it’s your problem that they need to clear the way? In just one little posse of these monsters there are levels of self-satisfaction that could power a small religious crusade.

Does cycling turn you into an insolent jerk ? Or are insolent jerks drawn disproportionately to cycling?

— Scores of my family have arrived from Spanish Catalonia to stay for Christmas. Amusing to hear them discussing house-prices in Catalan. They’re still talking in pesetas! This bizarre and unwieldy currency, reckoned (for even quite modest sums) in millions and hundreds of millions (a smart house in London costs more than 250 million) was abolished more than five years ago in favour of the much easier-to-reckon euro; yet for big purchases, people in Spain, including my younger nephews and nieces, are still confronting a price in euros, then translating it in their heads to pesetas for a feel for what it really means.

In 20 years’ time, perhaps, a generation that never knew the peseta as legal tender will still be multiplying euro prices by about 160 to get a mental grip on them, and wondering why.

— Such is the pressure of numbers in our house this Christmas that I’ve yielded my bedroom to a brother’s family, my office to another brother and his dogs, and retreated into the sitting room, where a huge, soft sofa makes a wonderful bed.

I’ve never slept in our sitting room before: I’ve known it only when full of light, and people, and music or television.

But when the lights are out and the door shut and the house suffused by the silence of the small hours, a ghostly personality emerges: alone with itself, humans departed (except for one silent spy under a quilt on the sofa) the room comes into its own. Timbers shift and creak. There’s perhaps a mouse under the floorboards. Dying embers in the fireplace hiss. From an appliance on stand-by – the TV, maybe, or the CD-player – comes a faint hum I’ve never heard before. A red LED light – maybe from the appliance – glows with soft insistence. They all know each other, these signs and signals. Small sounds impinge, dim lights swell, tiny movements rivet the attention. It must be like this in here all night, every night. I’m meeting a personality I’ve lived with for 30 years, but never met.

We walk about, wrote George Eliot, “well-wadded with stupidity”. We have to. But “if we had but keen vision and feeling . . . it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence”.

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