Cabaret

Since time immemorial man has found the need to prove himself. He has toddled off into the wilderness and wrestled beasties, undergone ceremonies that invariably involve some aspect of pain, endurance or both, and he has emerged with scars, tattoos, or a least a mild headache, and he has felt himself fit to be called ’a man’.

Your average London male has little truck with such longwinded and tiring activities and it appears some prefer to prove their masculinity in a rather different fashion, to wit: startling female pedestrians by swerving into them whilst driving.

Yes, gentle reader, we are truly living in an epoch of real men. Twice this week two such specimens have beset me. The first incident occurred on Saturday, where my assailant, mounted on a velocipede, rode straight for me, pulled a wheelie and slammed his front wheel down a whisker from my startled person before riding off. The volley of language that followed him, though reminiscent of Peter Cook at his Derek and Clive best, was of little comfort when I considered that a person with more wit and forethought would have pushed on his airborne front wheel and caused him to smash his skull open.

Nursing this thought, Sunday saw me all alertness for sudden bicycles, when meandering up the winding road past the park a car hammered down the hill, screeched into the bend slamming into the kerb and causing me to skip like the high hills. The blighter within then righted his jalopy and took off leaving the scene redolent of burning rubber.

An informative chat over the privet hedge of a neighbour out chivvying her bedding plants put me in possession of the facts. This is apparently a great sport with passing male motorists, whose delight it is to startle women out of a year’s growth by pretending to kill them on dangerous bends.

How very manly. I am presently researching the more inventive practices of far-flung tribes in the hope that I can initiate some sort of exchange programme. After all, there is nothing like a spot of serious pain and deprivation to focus the mind and develop the soul.

Gwendoline Lamour's A Night of Lamour is on Friday, May 15 at Madame JoJo's. See listings

Gwen's website can be found here