On Yer Bike
OPHIR'S BICYCLE THEFT STATISTICS put me in mind of a conversation I had
with my mother about thirty years ago, when I was trying to explain to her that
something she'd read in Daily Mail was - well, if not a load of rubbish, at
least some distance from the situation as balanced people would be inclined to
accept it. `But why would they put it in a newspaper if it wasn't
true?' she somewhat plaintively responded.
It may well be that the Cambridge Evening News printed the figure of 4500 bicycles being stolen in Cambridge every week. The logistics thereof are as I said - truckloads of bikes coming in and going out - an average of 642.85 daily - tomaintain the balance of supply.
That doesn't even allow for the wastage - the wrecked and abandoned bikes seen around the town. I know that there is a river full of the things too, but I think it has probably reached saturation point by now. Anymore would be causing punts to run aground - or a bike, if there is such a term; so I think we have to leave the river out of the calculations. Or alternatively, the same number per day is being stolen by the truckload, fenced and stolen again, at the same daily average figure, which would make Cambridge a town - sorry, city - full of riders of stolen bicycles within a few weeks. Or some mixture of the two: bikes constantly traded in and out, bikes fenced, bikes bought. You'd have bikes being hawked on street corners - wanna buy a bike, guy? -- or at the very least you'd need an illicit market place - perhaps there is such a place but I don't know where is. Either way, it would make Cambridge a city of criminal bicycle obsessives, either as perpetrators or receivers. You'd be hard put to drive round Cambridge without observing some fairly frantic bicycle acquiring of/ disposing of activity, assuming more is happening at some times of the day than others. Anyone with boltcutters ca a bike rack at 3am would be likely to attract the attention of any gentlemen of blue flashing light persuasion, for example
Moreover, the liberal democratic party have just released figures stating that a bicycle is stolen in Britain every five minutes. This is 288 per day, 2016 per week, 104,832 per year. those Evening News figures have the veracity my mother would ascribe to such things (4 per week, so 234,000 per year) and the Lib Dem's are true too; then Cambridge is in a More parlous state than any of us had previously realised: to whit, that more than twice the number of all bicycles stolen in this country are being stolen In Cambridge!
Why isn't anything being done?? Clean up Cambridge, and bicycle crime in the UK will be slashed, by an amount of more than twice what is physically possible in the universe as we understand it. Tina Jost, on yer bike and get your party some publicity by getting something done. It'd be a major publicity coup, and I'd like to hear what the Physics dept of Cambridge University would say, but I claim to be the first to postulate the theory that dark matter in the Universe can be accounted for at least in part by the number of bicycles being stolen in Cambridge: you read it first in the Crier. I will add that I recently visited the Astronomy bit of the 'versity on Madingly Road and was struck by the astonishing beauty and serenity of the place. But that's not the point. They had a photo of Einstein sitting on the bench in the garden with the director of the Physics dept who'd proved his theory of Relativity. I'm saying now that when they prove my theory, I want my photo taken on that bench too.
Alternatively, as I dared to suggest previously, there is the remote, inexplicable possibility that that set - or worse still now, both sets - of figures are as I put it to my mother, are somewhat wildly off the mark despite being published in a newspaper. (I should add that I never found a way of explaining to her why or how this could be, that she was able or willing to accept).
I half considered phoning Parkside Police Station to ask them what the figures are for bicycle theft in Cambridge. However, it occurred to me before I reached the phone that there is a prosecutable offence entitled Wasting Police Time. Excuse enough not to risk it, I thought.
PS I am also deeply indebted to the correspondent on the letters page of the Guardian on July 6 who responded to the Lib Dems' figures, observing that if a bicycle is being stolen every five minutes, its owner must be getting extremely cross.
PPS Statistics are sneaky, devious little beasties. Best avoided in any serious matter, but quite fun to play with if you don't want anything useful out of them.