Easy Rider - the return

Things have changed and the once sedate streets of Ripon have become a dangerous place – mothers, hold on to your children and woe-betide the unwary. Traffic has increased ten-fold and it’s not just the bling encrusted taxi drivers, the truculent truck drivers, or the racing repmobiles that cause me to leap into doorways lest I be mown down; oh no! It’s the pedestrians……They’ve been motorised! Once a steady stream; now a raging torrent: the river of waist high grey heads race along grinning maniacally and tooting their horns. No need the little tartan shopping trolley now; cast aside the zimmer and the stick. Shopmobility has come to town with a vengeance, and there ain’t room in this town for the both of us. Bruce Springsteen should write the soundtrack to their ‘Re-born to be Wild’ lives and Dennis Hopper direct the ‘footpath’ movie ‘Octogenarian Easy Rider’ Thursday a.m. sees them laying the rubber down in the standing three quarter to the market square – Legs are thrown over saddles (though not necessarily still attached to their owners) and the one horsepower of the apocalypse given full throttle. This is no place to be caught out in the street; it’s the quick and the nearly dead.The once slow march towards the gates of St Peter has become a headlong charge, a terrifying cavalcade of frothing, toothless mouths and waving nostril hair, heading for Valhalla via Carricks fish stall.