Peds, Petrol and The Past.

Pedestrianism is now a protected industry. After all, a motorist is only a petrol-propelled pedestrian; and a pedestrian is bound sooner on later, to become a motorist, either in sorrow or in anger. The streets are only bits of land reserved from sale so that people can get from one place to another without climbing over buildings. Certainly some of the streets look as though they were preserved only by sheer luck. Most of them came into being as cow tracks anyway, and there was always the chance of some go-getter running up a public house in the middle of them so that travellers had either to go round it or through it, the hypothesis being that no sane person would go round a pub if he could go through it.

No one would be surprised if the city road-holers or perennial bitumen-bur-rowers were to dig up the ossified remains of a pre-petrol man, with a pint pot in his hand, caught by the internal-combustion era in the centre of Willis Street There may be other interesting relics of the past awaiting discovery under our streets, such as a pre-traffic policeman still on his beat, just as he stood when the city was overwhelmed by the great motor inruption. If we dug sufficiently deep we might even find the complete remains of a boy without a bicycle or a bullock-driver being reprimanded by a city father for reckless driving.

No doubt, in those days when the pedestrian strolled down the centre of the street with a horse breathing on the jback of his neck, many people were-caught and overwhelmed by a sudden onslaught of progress.

But what would be the use of disinterring the pre-petrol past? It would only cause us to envy the time when a street-walker was not a toe-dancer with a swivel eye, a ball-and-socket neck, and two-way feet.