I was cycling home, lit up like a Christmas tree as I generally am (your archetypal cautious cyclist), just started off from traffic lights, when a small car accelerated past with a hand's breadth of space to spare. I swear I felt it sucking me into his slipstream. I swerved away from him and wobbled around for a few seconds before getting back on track. With heart pounding and adrenaline shooting through my system. Was is that he didn't like me starting off in front of him at the junction? Was his manhood compromised? Was he scared by a cyclist in childhood? Was he texting and didn't see me? Was he just hungry and thinking of the beer and microwave ready meal waiting at home?
Ironically, I was cycling home from an archaeology evening class, all about the people who created some of the most enduring and impressive monuments in Scotland. People who, 5000 years ago in the Stone Age, built the village of Skara Brae, with kitchen cupboards to display their best dinnerware on, and indoor plumbing, no less (3000 years before the Romans! What did they ever do for us?). And Maeshowe, one of the finest Neolithic chambered tombs in Europe, where the builders cannily lined up the long dark entrance passageway so that the midwinter sun shines straight down the passage and hits the back wall of the tomb for 10 minutes before sunset. These people were no brainless grunting savages. To build places like Maeshowe, they had to work together for a common aim. They had community, and individual and communal responsibilities. OK, so I've got my rose-tinted glasses on now. Presumably the Neolithic had its share of aggressive, selfish, unsocialised numpties. But right now I feel there's something to be said for a society where people knew each other; lived and worked together for common aims; felt kinship and responsibility for each other; and only tried to kill the tribe that lived in the next valley. At least they didn't have cars.
The fabulous Skara Brae
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