It's September 11th, I'm passing out of Gare du Nord, Paris' infamous and foreboding northern rail station, returning from the now splendidly irradiated expanses of Picardy. The time, 7.13pm, and I'm headed downward, toward a comparatively calm gehenna of the 9th arondissement (district).

It's evidently the first day of summer, and a whiff of  rotating veal-ersatz, being shaved right here mitten drinnen in a kind of calf's blubber-smeared post-mortem, performed by an apparently quite burly Kurdish hairdresser, bestorms my nostrils, perhaps somehow coating them with a novel form of sealant, and providing a long-awaited pollution filtering solution, as yet unexplainable by science.

This is the real Paris, the bright side... and, as if ensconced by a blue-sky tornado, my eyes and thoughts whirl up from Greeky Turks, and leeky urchins, rising headily, skyward, splash onto the ether, tracking vapour-flecked, soaring steel birds, "Ô far-flung Rome, thy ruin approaches...."  "Herrlich...," I hear myself murmur, perhaps in Coptic Silesian.

"Ô far-flung Rome, thy ruin approaches...."  "Herrlich...," I hear myself murmur, perhaps in Coptic Silesian.

At once, Helios’ searing chariot, rashly aflame, acrest Aeolus’ coursing current, westward flies, into Zephyr’s waiting folds awing, ushering a new era, and an old one, out, and out!

What’s the way of the future?

Bing! Bing! Woooosh!!!! Rudely, I'm snatched back to the hubub, in a characteristic surge of adrenalin, buffeted in wake turbulence caused by no fiery chariot, but that fleeting cyclist, that cloned Tour de France wannabee, skimming my toes, coasting the sidewalk, not the cycle path, home-bound downwind, against the grain.

A "Vélibber," an individual using one of the new government-sponsored rent-a-bikes, thus after “Freedom Fries”, now “Freedom Bikes” (Vélib = “Vélo” + “Liberté”)?

Future generations will be eating their crash hats in gratitude for the ecological benefits the green bicycle craze will no doubt have conferred.

But who has weighed up the nefarious symptoms caused by schlepping quasi-Amsterdam-rivaling quantities of two-wheeled units from outpost to outpost, after dark, in those roaring, pollution-belching charabancs? And what about the inherent loss on the part of eager, businesswear-clad cyclists, waltzing-a-weaving through the furnace of eye-tingling fumes, pursued all the while by dastardly road-raged villains who could easily have been cast in Tarantino's Death Proof?

Now that bicycling has been officially sanctioned, have riders been subjected to a lengthy, theoretical, written course in the Cartesian semantics of bike riding, like their automobile-encased counterparts?

TBC…