>On my way to work last weeek someone
>zipped past me on rollerskates, and i thought "Hmm. That must make life dead
>easy, cos you can get anywhere you like dead easy without the need for
>cumbersome bicycles or having to go on horrible scary big roads". Obviously
>someone like myself buzzing around on skates and falling over a lot would
>remind people of them hippoes in Fantasia, and for small children to shout
>"Mummy! Look at the funny old gentleman on wheels!" but maybe attitudes are
>more liberal in the cosmopolis?
This unfortunately is most definately not the case. In London there is a roller skate byelaw whereby if you dont look like a Young Swish Stylish Capitalist Agent of The Man Yuppie Boggin Sassenach, the police nail an 8 foot builders plank to your face, and make you drink washing up liquid. Then they give you a pet baby squirrel which becomes your friend. 10 years later when you've forgotten all about the incident and are living happily with your pet squirrel, and have got the last of the nails out, they visit again, pour kerosene over your squirrel, and laugh as they set it on fire. then they give you back your roller skates. Then, right, you might say get a job restoring traction engines, or you might go and work in a beach bar in Sardinia. But! you are still not necessarily safe because the London Fashion police have you on thier computer, and anytime you might think of adopting a squirrel, they might come round your house and put loads of broken glass in your shampoo. then, everytime you wash your hair it's a horrid gory mess of mangled skull, which alarms peopel as you drive down the coast road in your traction engine with your t shirt flapping in the breeze BUT the police have put oil on the brake pads and you career off the road, completely crushing the beach bar in the process and you have to sell your shoes to get a taxi to the other side of the island where hopefully no one knows you and a huge duck over 12 feet long lands on you and bounces up and down until your head is wedged up its bum. it clenches its buttock muscles and flies you all the way back to england ans drops you back in covent garden. the whole process takes some 24 years.
THATS what its like in london.