Now I know the Evening Standard is mildly obsessed with the "Boris Bikes" even managing to tie them into house prices going up:
But recently it's just got ridiculous.
After a series of stories about the bikes "beating the tube strike," raising money for charity, and saving the universe, a new columnist is given space for eight incomprehensible paragraphs comparing the Velib and "Boris Bike" baskets:
"You are walking through the stalls of the Place du Marché Saint Honoré in the premier arondissement in Paris. Four hundred grams of aged comté cheese. Six daffodils. Two daurades royales that you are going to bake in sea salt from somewhere like the Camargue. A pistachio macaroon. What is the essence of this experience? It is choice. It is freedom. It is participating in the most inefficient purchasing process known to man — shopping with French artisanal producers. And the thing that gives you this glorious freedom, that allows you to roam at length? It is the basket. Wads of cash, yes, but you need the basket.Does this experience have any deeper political impact? For Guy Debord, intellectual leader of the Situationist movement that overtook France in May 1968 (and would have succeeded in revolutionising the Republic had the students not discovered that it was August and therefore time to go on a three-month holiday), there was only one way to escape the stratified, commoditised and alienating experience that he termed “the society of the spectacle”. He called it “la dérive”, the wander."
Eh? Is anybody able to translate that? Who wrote this drivel?
Leo Johnson is co-founder of sustainable finance and a partner at PWC.
...oh and Boris Johnson's brother. Funny how the Standard forgot to mention that.