Week 37: 'Yes, I made that'

Wonder spawned in: 2052.
Wondered into being by: The people.
Wonderspan: Less than 10 minutes. 
To experience this wonder at its best: Make sure you can hear the sound and click 'full screen'.

Today we celebrate the triumph of the bicycle over the motorcar.  You might remember the motorcar as a squat metal and glass box with four wheels - it smelled plasticky on the inside and outside it coughed carcinogenic petrochemical particulates and other chemical nasties 2,000 times a minute, which were bemoaned by mothers of asthmatic kids and responsible in large part for the climate crisis that eventually led to the mass recycling of all motorcars thanks to the sudden and unexpected mass-damascene conversions of first Holland, then France, then Canada, and eventually all the peoples of the world until the very last, haggard but ultimately gratefully carless penitent, whose name you almost certainly won't remember now, but for the record it was the famous author, male role-model, self-styled comedian, noisy lover and go-faster acolyte of road rage, Jeremy Clarkson.  You can find full details of Jeremy's conversion on Wikipedia under 'Bicycle'.

It all began way back in 1997 when one person became suddenly and unaccountably sane.  It was an  ordinary morning when she put on her favourite summer dress, took a flower from her garden and careened around the town using said flora to smash the windows of parked cars, as shown in this archive film from Pipilotti Rist.  It brought such joy to her and all around her that everyone joined in, even the police.

The Museum from the Future picks up the story, explaining in this mash-up of now-ancient footage of early car-licking and the later mass car walk-out of 2018, how the car began to dominate our lives and make us really really fat, and how we confronted this outsized trinket before it destroyed us all horribly with blood and stuff'.  And it came to pass that all over the world, cars were brought from far and wide to create henges in roads and fields so that we could one day remember the momentous change that society was undergoing and to say ta for that.

After 2018, it was discovered that one melted-down car could make sixty-seven point three bicycles although nothing could be done with the fabric seat covers, which were dumped in a huge landfill in Buckinghamshire marked 'Keep Out - Smelly and plasticky' and even though it was fabric, scientists say it won't degrade until June 3723 at the earliest.  Roads were turned over to pedestrians and cyclists, life was less noisy, people said hello and everyone wondered how they had ever managed before.

Making bicycles became a pursuit of true love; odd-bod bicycle-makers who laboured in obscurity for years were now social heroes, and people began to admire how things were made and the care things needed to keep them right, and they liked something more if it could only be done slowly, and they started saying 'If it's not for love, it's not worth doing' and 'If it's made with love, you can ride it with love' and 'If it's for love, it's for me' and things generally like that, as this early bicycle-making film shows:

'It's taking your pride in your work.  At the end of the day you've made something that people appreciate, sometimes love, and you can stand and look at it and think, "Yes, I made that."'

It wasn't long before we were making a whole load of other stuff out of old bicycles, like washing machines, for example, so we didn't need electricity so much, or to buy new stuff, and that was good because it stopped the planet from burning up, which it had been doing pretty badly for a while.  And the handful who whined and said cars were a little bit more fun than bikes and the M6 traffic jam on a Friday night in the rain wasn't that bad at all, never did this.

Thanks to Sunniva T and Will McC for some of the links for today's Monday wonder.  You can see all the Monday wonders on a map here: http://www.tinyurl.com/mondaywonders
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