Keep A Lid On It

I don't want to die. There, I said it.

Of course I accept that it's bound to happen sooner or later (although if my plan to have my brain scooped out and placed in a robot body comes to fruition I'm aiming for a lot later), but that's not to say I want to gamble with it now.

With all this warm weather we've been having recently (and with all the physiotherapy I've been having for my accursed gammy wrists) I've decided that this is the week that I'll dust off my bike and start cycling to work again. I've even considered signing up for one of those Boris Bikes that seem to be filling the streets of late; bringing a certain continental joie to vivre to our busy, ill-tempered and overcrowded road network.

Image: UPI news pictures

The problem is that the joy of the Boris Bike (for me) is the idea of carefree opportunistic wanderings through the Summer streets of London. I want to be walking down the street, see a bike rack and take off for a jaunt to explore strange new sights and possibly find a market or something else suitably decadent.

What I don't want is to have to be carrying around a bike helmet at all times, just in case. As it is I watch these blissful free-spirits wheeling past me with a mixture of envy and pity as I see the sunshine on their faces and the Reaper on their shoulders.  Figures from TFL show that 34 people were injured riding Boris Bikes within the first 2 months of the scheme commencing, with 13 requiring emergency services. While this, of course, represents only a tiny fraction of the journeys made, it still leaves me unable to see a passing Biker, wind blowing in their carefree hair, without feeling a powerful desire to scream at them “Get a fuppin lid! For the love of God!”

A former colleague once told me, in hushed tones, that the whole bike helmet thing is an industry-led conspiracy and that in accidents in which one falls sideways off their bike and hits the side of their head on the edge of the pavement a helmet is actually more likely to result in a broken neck. I told him that I would note this and would henceforth promise to daily curse the charlatans who had sold me a product that would only protect me if I were to be involved in any number of more conventional accidents or one day headbutt an oncoming van.

Anyway, where was I?

Ah, spontaneity, yes. So the other day I got to thinking about how, if at all I and others of my lily-livered ilk might be able to hop on a bike without lugging a lid. Having dismissed bike-mounted helmets (hygiene, size and theft problems) and futuristic force-field-generating headbands (not real) I got to thinking about whether anyone had managed to create a decent portable bike helmet. And it seems they have, with varying degrees of success and plausibility.

Image: Ribcap

www.ribcap.ch

First up is the Ribcap beanie, which is essentially a padded hat. Designed in the first place for snowboarders, it is, even according to its own publicity, on safer territory protecting you from a tumble in the snow than a tarmac stage-dive. At £60 a go, however, that’s quite a wad for something that’s essentially “better than nothing.”

Image: CyclingChat.co.uk

For those looking for safety above style there’s the funkily-monikered Dahon Pango folding cycle helmet. This is a “proper” bike helmet, with sides that fold up to make it more portable. In fact, according to the manufacturers it folds down to half the size of a traditional helmet, but since this is practically all in terms of depth it’s still going to take up a fair amount of space in your bag (in fact practically the whole bag used in the demonstration video) and at a cool £80 it’s none too cheap either.

Finally then we come to a jaunty offering from France, with a collapsible helmet that really meets my personal brief. If you, like me, want affordability, economy and above all portability, why invest in padded wool or funky new-age plastics? What you want is wearable origami.

Image: Yanko, via Treehugger.com

Created with an eye to the Paris Vélo (the absentee father of Boris’ Bikes), this helmet has been produced by designers Caroline Journaux & Adrien Guerin to be the perfect solution for the opportunistic cyclist. While there is no mention on the Yanko site of exactly how much protection it would offer in the event of a fall, or even of when (or if) it will ever be for sale, this is a product on which I will be keeping a close (and careful) eye.

Image: Yanko, via Treehugger.com

And in the meantime, if anyone comes up with a bike that fits in your coat pocket or that headband-mounted force-field I’ve been banging on about, please let me know. I’ll be the one sitting on the bus, wishing it was a bike.

Welcome to the World of To-Meh-rrow

Last week Google's regular novelty banner featured an interactive image celebrating the 160th anniversary of the first World's Fair, known as The Great Exhibition and held in the purpose-built Crystal Palace in 1851; a showcase, inside and out, for the best the world had to offer - not just the cutting edge of the day, but a spyglass through which ordinary people could glimpse the world of tomorrow.

Image - Google

Last night I found myself talking to a friend who had just come back from a day at Grand Designs Live. "I don't know what I expected it to be," she said, "but it was just a load of stalls selling paint. I wanted to feel inspired; I wanted to feel... something..."  It turned out that she'd gone to the show in the hopes of finding rather more inspiration than she'd expected from the Ideal Home Show ("Yeah," put in another friend, "that was shit."), but it turns out that's simply not what these shows are about; they are trade shows, pure and simple. This may come as no surprise to anyone (it certainly didn't to me), but it got me thinking about what we, as a society, seem to have lost.

Earlier in the day we had been to visit the Dirt exhibition at The Wellcome Collection; a history of dirt, grime, disease and the ways in which societies have sought to tackle them. In one corner there was a collection of posters & other materials from the first International Hygiene Exhibition, held in Dresden in 1911.

Image - Franz von Stuck (via Deutsches Hygiene-Museum, Dresden & Wikipedia)

Image - germanhistorydocs

Here was a gathering to showcase the pinnacle of medical science from around the world, organised by the owner of a mouthwash company, who would a year later go on to found the German Hygiene Museum. And although, yes, many of the exhibits were products for sale, the Exhibition represented the idea that by bringing together and sharing these ideas we could create a better world (Sadly in this case, the same museum and even the same spirit would later be co-opted by the Nazi regime to spread the "science" of racial medicine, until it was bombed by Allies during WW2. It has since been rebuilt and returned to its original purpose of spreading genuine medical knowledge.).

All of this got me wondering what had happened to the spirit of the Great Exhibition and the World's Fairs that followed it. What happened to the moving walkways, the walking, talking, smoking(?!) robots and cities under the sea? What even happened to the World's Fair?

Moving walkway, Paris 1900
Image - Brooklyn Museum Archive (via Wikipedia)

Underwater City, Futurama, 1964 New York Word's Fair
Image - Jeffrey Stanton

It turns out that the World's Fair is still alive and supposedly well (competition is well underway to decide the host for 2017/2018); it's just that, well... nobody cares any more.

In the 1950s London rebuilt its South Bank for the Festival of Britain and people flocked from around the world to marvel at what was possible and what they could expect to see in the future. In the year 2000 we got the Millennium Dome which, as far as I remember from my visit, was notable for having a 2-storey McDonald's with a lift (and some kind of machine from BT that would have put your face onto a little 3D Elliot cycling E.T. across the sky, if only it had been working at the time).

So what changed? Maybe not enough. Maybe after more than 150 years of waiting for the walkways, the robots and the bubble-cities we simply became too cynical. And not just we, the public, but the corporations that used to sell us these visions of the future that inspired short-term dreams but ultimately long-term bitterness at their undelivered promises. Perhaps it was safer to rip up the beltways, send the robots to Butlins and let us all literally watch paint dry until we gave up caring about the future, unless it was in terms of mitigating our impact on it.

Titan the Robot
Image - Butlins

Maybe I'm completely wrong though. I'm sure there are plenty of people ready to point out that there are many more trade shows now annually than we would have had in a decade 50 years ago and that events such as E3 and MacWorld continue to draw crowds of millions a year to marvel at the shape of things to come. I know this because I looked it up. I know this because of an army of friendly geeks on Twitter. But I won't be packing up a picnic to go check them out with my grandparents, my mum and my fictional dog.  It seems that, for now at least, the World of Tomorrow is a thing of the past.

A Blog In The Ocean

When I told my girlfriend I was starting a blog her first question was "What's it about?". This gave me pause, because I hadn't really intended it to be about anything really. I had envisioned it as being something like Seinfeld, but without the jokes, or characters (she hates Seinfeld anyway), but bearing in mind I actually couldn't think of anything to write about the project sort of stopped there. Until I got all pissed off about the Grand Designs Home Show and decided to throw a pebble at the internet and see if it skims.

Here are words.