Live long enough to be a problem to your children, they tell you. But what if you have no children? Of course, you could just live long enough to be a pain to your colleagues. I have been trying. It is not very satisfying, and not much of a challenge. I needed a new ambition, and now I have it: I must live long enough to see the end of the tyranny of the motor car.
My father lived so long that he had seen the first private car in the village where I was born, bumping about the high street on an uneven limestone cobble surface which I can remember being tarred over for the first time on one of the back lanes. Before he died he came to this Detroit-with-Spires a couple of times, to witness a moderately pretty city quite destroyed by the motor vehicle.
If the Evil Empire can be built in one man's lifetime, then it is almost certain that it can fall in only one more. The only doubt is whether that one is mine. I have a dream: I see an Oxford for standing back to get a good look at the clever curly bits on that tower, without risking being flattened by the traffic. I see the Oxford in which all streets have two visible sides, not ones like these where there are always buses in between. There will be fun fairs in the streets and cyclists will bimble blissfully down the middles of the roads. Above all else, we will be able to breathe again. This Oxford will no longer reek of vehicle fumes, it will once again stink of the fermenting Cherwell and the horse-dung on the High.
Bloody Hell, that Police helicopter is noisy. If I had wanted to sustain the impression that I was living in Belfast, I could have moved there to live, damn it.