Not quite a chip off the old block
In 1936, Pierre-Jules Boulanger asked his engineers to design him a 'toute petite voiture', and they responded in style. They were French, and it showed. They designed a car with flair, with elan, with chic, and with a certain joi de vivre. They designed so well that their little car was still in production fifty-four years later, and won the hearts of millions of people across Europe and Africa. The Deux Chevaux was not only an enormously practical, reliable, adaptable and economical vehicle, it was also the world's most underrated sportscar — more fun to drive than anything else I have driven with the sole exception of a Lotus Elise. I loved mine. It was my favourite car ever.
Which is why the petite voiture which sits outside my house now is another Citroen: a C3 Pluriel, a car whose design pays conscious homage to the Tin Snail. Less characterful, perhaps, blander, the curves rounded off into something closer to a child's toy aesthetic, but echoing the high-arched roofline and the bulbous curving bonnet. And echoing the original in other ways, too — in it's folding canvas roof, in its claimed versatility.
I've lived with mine for nine months now, for ten thousand miles. I like it very much. But it has to be said that as a replacement for the Deux Chevaux, it fails.
John Knox stirs in his grave
OK, let's start at the beginning. My party — the Scottish National Party — has introduced legislation making it an actual crime for girls under sixteen to have sex, and is now proposing to make it a crime to have images of 'rape'. These two matters are not distinct, they're linked. And to talk about why they're linked I want to start by agreeing that, yes, there are public policy issues here.
Young people are vulnerable to older people. When very young, they're very vulnerable; we teach young people to view adults as authority figures. Most of the time this is a good thing. But it means that young people are vulnerable to sexual advances from older people, sexual advances which they might have rejected from someone who did not have perceived authority. And, young people inevitably have less experience of sexuality than their elders; they don't have an appropriate repertoire with which to respond, and this too makes them vulnerable. So young people do have to be protected, and it's right that, as a society, we have rules which prevent adults predating sexually on children.
Sex, adolescents and the law
Adolescents have sex.
This impacts on their lives negatively in a number of ways — certainly under-age pregnancy is now a very serious matter for public policy concern and the spread of sexually transmitted diseases among the young is also worrying. It's obviously undesirable to have adults predating sexually on children. It's also highly undesirably that young people of either gender should be pressurised into sex before they're emotionally ready.
But that's precisely the point.
Medals, counting and chauvinism
The BBC has a predictable story this morning about whether Scotland will have its own team at the London Olympics. Which is a silly season story, a slow-news-day-story, a non story. First of all, it is quite possible that by 2012 Scotland will be irrevocably on the road to independence. We should have had a referendum before then, but even if the unionist parties block it we will have both Holyrood and Westminster elections before then, and it is entirely possible under present circumstances that the SNP will gain an absolute majority of Scottish seats in both.
In any of those cases, of course there will be a separate Scottish team at the London olympics. On the other hand, if Scotland fails to choose independence, of course there won't. It's as simple as that.
But there's a deeper, nastier chauvinism behind the story. The British media — the BBC inter alia, although they may not be the worst offenders — have been making a big deal about 'Team GB' coming fourth in the 'medal table' as if that somehow reflected credit on the second most obese nation in the world, the nation of lard arsed couch potatoes whose nearest approach to athleticism is the five-metre waddle from the double yellow line to the pizza counter.
It's not cricket!
Look, lets stop fooling ourselves. The London and Edinburgh velodromes have both been sold off to developers — the London one, supposedly, to help pay for the Olympics. We have Chris Hoy because when he was developing in the sport there was a velodrome in Scotland for him to learn the ropes. Now there isn't — so where is the next Chris Hoy coming from?
There's someone else from Scotland who should have been winning medals for us at this Olympics. Jason McIntyre should have been doing for us in the man's time trial what Emma Pooley did so brilliantly in the women's. But Jason couldn't be there — because some careless motorist killed him while he was out training this spring (and was fined a derisory five hundred pounds in punishment).
Cycling doesn't have too much spent on it. Cycling doesn't have nearly enough spent on it. Every medium sized town has an Olympic size swimming pool. Every city has a running track. And we have one — count them, one — indoor velodrome in the whole country. In no other of our elite sports do we turn promising young athletes out onto the roads to battle it out with speeding motorists too busy with their mobile phones to pay attention to where they're going.