What has gone wrong with the world?

Caroline and I are in France.  This afternoon, we were driving past a Carrefour supermarket when she asked me to pull in and park there because there were “a couple of things” she wanted to buy.  Pretty sure that meant three or four bottles of wine and knowing that would take no longer than 10 minutes and I didn’t need to accompany her, I did so without demur.

After 40 minutes of sitting in a parked car in heat of 33°C (91°F), I was becoming slightly fed up.  I was parked opposite a row of about 30 bicycle racks and there was a constant flow of mainly young people using them.

What interested me much more than the cyclists themselves was that every single one of them, without exception, locked their bike to the rack so that it wouldn’t be stolen.

How different that is from the days when I cycled regularly.  From about the age of 8 until I was 16, I rode my bike whenever I left the house without my parents.  At weekends and during school holidays, my friends and I rode everywhere: to each other’s houses, parks and playing fields, the swimming pool, a youth club and to the railway station to catch a train to see Norwich City play.

Not once did I or a friend, lock up their bike and never was one stolen.  What has gone wrong with the world?

I virtually stopped riding my bike when I was 16 and bought a Vespa motor scooter.   That scooter was started just by treading on the kick-start lever.  That was all you had to do.  There was no ignition key that had to be turned on.  When it was parked, whether in the town centre or in a cafe car park, anyone could have just walked up to it and driven off on it.  But no one ever did!  

What has gone wrong with the world?