Brian Viner: We'll always have Paris – and our bikes

It has sometimes been hard, down the years, to arrive back in this country from a holiday abroad and not find immediate, grumpy fault with everything. To stop myself venturing down Victor Meldrew Avenue, as it were, I have sat on trains halted by the latest points failure just outside Didcot, or sat for hours on motorways with two lanes inexplicably closed in both directions, or joined the great mooching multitude on the London Underground for one short, horrible journey costing £4, or simply listened to a series of very loud mobile phone conversations, pointedly reminding myself of the many reasons why I enjoy living in Britain.

This process is getting trickier. On Monday my wife and I arrived back in London by Eurostar after a three-day trip to Paris. We walked from St Pancras to Euston, and couldn't help contrasting the hopelessly overgrown, litter-strewn lawn outside Euston station (though "lawn" is pitching it a little strong) with every immaculately tended green space we passed in Paris. We also watched a cyclist come within a hair's breadth of spending his summer in traction, and thought just how grimly poetic it would be if London's new mayor, such a champion of the bicycle, were to have his term cut short by a recklessly driven delivery van.

Paris, for so long considered by the British to be the very crucible of dangerous driving, is now manifestly safer for cyclists than London. Since I was last there, the city's streets have been revolutionised – not for the first time, of course, although this time by the humble velo.

It is almost a year since the Velib (a fusion of the words vélo and liberté) scheme was introduced, whereby 10,600 bikes for public use were stationed around Paris. There are now more than 20,000, and Jane and I, and our friends Kim and Will, spent most of Saturday on four of them.

It was a revelation. We even cycled insouciantly across the Place de la Concorde, an activity which used to provide one of Europe's great life-or-death adrenaline rushes, like running with the Pamplona bulls. But with Velib users everywhere, Parisian motorists appear to have calmed right down. Admittedly we were a little saddle-sore by the end of a very hot day, walking a bit like cowboys coming off the Oregon Trail, but it was a fantastic way to see one of the world's most beautiful cities.

In fairness, London has been looking and learning. Ken Livingstone pledged to introduce something similar, and Boris Johnson has already expressed great enthusiasm for the Velib. But would it work? For one thing, there are no helmets dished out with the Velib bikes, surely an unacceptable affront to our increasingly litigious, risk-averse culture. For another, in Paris there has been negligible vandalism or theft of the bikes. London, I fear, would not be so obliging.

Whatever, the Paris effect was just beginning to wear off yesterday when we learnt from our friend Joanna that at the weekend she tried to buy two bottles of spirits from our local Morrisons supermarket, and was turned away. Joanna is 46 years old, but a member of staff at Morrisons thought that the alcohol might be intended for her son James, who was with her. James, a medical student at Manchester University, is 19 years old. Nevertheless, Joanna asked James to leave the shop and presented herself again at the till. But still they refused to serve her, on the basis that her son, who wasn't even there, might be under-age. To paraphrase Victor Meldrew, incroyaaable!

Even for studs, the horseplay must end some day

Sadler's Wells, the celebrated racehorse, has been withdrawn from stud duty at the grand old age of 27, on account of his diminishing fertility.

With one of the great stallion's daughters, Playful Act, having been sold only six months ago in Lexington, Kentucky, for a whopping $10.5m, I imagine that strenuous efforts were made to find an equine version of Viagra. Sadler's Wells was a fine runner himself, but it is for mounting, not as a mount, that he has won immortality in the horse racing world.

He has sired over 200 winners, including the marvellous Istabraq, and another son has a decent chance in the Derby next month. His name is Curtain Call. We can but hope.

* My paternal grandmother died decades ago, but before she expired she was one of the more challenging residents of a nursing home in Southend, crossing swords with the matron, with whom my grandma enjoyed a relationship that was less cut and thrust than lunge and parry. She might have been happier at the Corpus Christi retirement home in Melbourne, where 16 residents, all over 80, are being given fencing lessons to sharpen their reactions. With extreme old age in vogue following the success two years ago of the BBC documentary Young At Heart, which featured a concert by a choir of American pensioners, and the subsequent impact of the British copycat band The Zimmers, I wonder whether there might be some TV or even movie mileage in this? After all, Zorro was created in 1919 by the writer Johnston McCulley. If he were still alive, he'd be 89.

b.viner@independent.co.uk

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