The View From My Bicycle (COLUMN)

Kiss of Life

With 31 km to go in today's Tour de France stage, I did a triathlon-style transition from Sunday-couch potato to gym rat, and sped off to the gym. My Chrysler's engine revved, and at one intersection I left everyone else for dead while I expertly zipped in and out and then dived into the underground parking at Marble Arch. In the back of my head was this little voice saying:"Is it worth burning up additional energy - this precious irreplaceable stuff - because you want to be at gym NOW?"

And when I arrived there was no cycling on TV. I asked three different staff members to check, but the upshot was that I ended up watching the men's final. Nadal won the first two sets, while around me cyclists came and went. My irritation at missing the Tour fizzled as I became busier and sweatier getting myself humming. And it was interesting seeing that same sort of energy flowing through Nadal, who was playing with confidence against an opponent hoping to make history for the most consecutive Wimbledon wins. The Kiss of Life is when you absorb and accept that the world is exactly the way it is meant to be, and from there you can begin to affect change. Of course, the best place for change to start is on ourselves.

The View From My Bicycle is a succession of billboards along the now obsolete highway of Easy Motoring...advertising 'Demand destruction' or 'Dollar weakness' and what not. We already know that whatever concessions the USA makes in curtailing its demand (some by choice, some by financial limits)China sucks up. China is sucking up all the gains the rest of the world makes.

The thing with demand destruction is also that projects are coming online now and are halfway underway and because the oil price has suddenly spiked doesn't mean they will come to a halt. At least not now. Think of the Olympics, and massive urban design projects in your area. All of these still need to be completed, and people still need to drive to work. There is very little demand destruction even at current prices.

So there will be no demand destruction for a while still, but expect pundits to toss those words expertly and confidently around. Instead we will see a supply crunch. That means that economic apparatus will convulse on increasingly stiff cocktails of high priced fuel, convulse, then wobble, then crash into the other economic furniture.


In South Africa crime is about to surge, strike action is about to become the order of the day. It is still July, and a market crash remains imminent. I was in church today, for the first time in perhaps a year or two. It occurred to me that we need to have faith and hope and appeal to the resilience of our world in the times to come. I also think food - growing it, processing it, selling it, is about to become what electronics is now. How necessary are these gadgets we carry around with us. Convenient yes, but have you noticed to what extent they get in the way of and in fact interfere with ordinary human interactions? I don't know what will happen to electronics. Ask me that question in August.