Pedal like hell, but ring your bell.

I always enjoy visiting Germany and find the people very friendly and polite, and the beer is not bad either; but somehow I always have a slightly uneasy feeling when travelling by train. I suppose that it’s a legacy from watching all those old POW escape movies. When standing on the platform at a railway station I half expect to feel a tap on the shoulder and hear a sharp… “Reisepass bitte!”

My unease was brought sharply into focus recently when I was walking along the banks of the Rhine on a pleasant Sunday afternoon, when I was distracted by the sound of a brass band in a nearby park playing a military march. Now all German tunes of that type sound like the ‘Horst Wessel Song’ to me, so I smiled and thought silly me, when a loud voice behind me shouted ….  “ACHTUNG ! ACHTUNG !”… Well I almost put my hands up as I turned to see an old boy on a bike bearing down on me. He swerved around me and mumbled something as he pedalled away. So how come, I thought, that in this well regulated country, this old git doesn’t have a bell on his handlebars ?

Well soon I thought ‘Alles ist’ going to be bloody well ’in Ordnung’, when I read that ”New harmonised European construction standards for bicycles come into force in November this year”, and that new draconian laws may be introduced to punish those who do not have a bell on their bicycles, but then I read that these laws will, as usual, only apply in the UK. So dear old Fritz’s gutteral tones will still be heard along the banks of the Rhine, whilst our ’jobsworth’ traffic  ’obersturmbahnfurers’  prepare for their ‘blitzkreig’ on those highly dangerous, bike riding …

………   enemies of the ‘nanny’ state.