'A strange, ingenious compound of dulness and danger'

 When the evening torpor has fully set in and there is nothing to be done about it, I often find myself watching 24 Hours in A&E (on Ch4 or its affiliates). On the face of it, this is just another documentary series celebrating the heroic work of those on the front line of emergency medicine, but 24 Hours, I would sleepily contend, is different, and a much more satisfying watch – chiefly because it introduces us to the patients as people, following up on their stories and telling something, often surprising and revealing, of their backgrounds and struggles in life. Sure, it's emotionally manipulative and it shows the NHS in an all too flattering light, and of course it has little to do with the actual hellish experience of waiting your turn in an A&E department – but these human stories are genuinely heartening, and show that we humans are most of us not so bad after all, and some of us positively heroic. Or maybe I'm just going soft in the head. 
  Anyway, week after week, one of the main causes of the often life-threatening accidents that land people in A&E is the bicycle (others are ladders, stairs, motorbikes and alcohol, all of which should of course be banned by our caring government – first step: replace everybody's stairs with solar-powered lifts...). The bicycle was a machine of which Max Beerbhom took a dim view. In an essay, 'Fashion and Her Bicycle' (collected in More), he casts a cool eye on the fashion for bicycling, hoping that it is a passing craze. Fashion, he hopes, 'will remember it only as a horrid penance. Already she has dropped it from her conversation; Rudge, Humber, Singer – she cares no longer to discriminate between machines which are, one and all of them, the devil's own patent. Indeed, she thinks, bicycling was ever the most tedious topic of conversation. It was also the most tedious form of exercise, save walking, known to the human race. It was but a strange, ingenious compound of dulness and danger.' The bicycle, he notes, 'kills some of its riders, and bores the rest'. 
  Beerbohm recognises, however, that the bicycle will endure, even after it has fallen out of fashion. 'Some things were created by Fashion herself, and perished so soon as she was weary of them. Others, merely adopted by her, are more abiding. Golf, for example, as the most perfect expression of national stupidity, has an assured, unchequered future ... and bicycling, as a symptom of that locomotomania produced by usage of steam, will endure "till we go back to the old coaches".' How right he was. As for Fashion, Max wonders what will next attract her attention: 'There are many things for her selection. The concertina is a rather nice instrument. Stilts are not to be despised. Mohammedanism is said to be fascinating, and so are tip-cat and the tight-rope.'