Rosemary McLeod: Nostalgia

There's nothing like nostalgia for what you never knew but, if you've ever lived without a car, you won't recognise the picture greenies paint of life without them in a perfect world.
Wellington's mayor, elected with the enthusiastic backing of the Greens, has had to back down over upgrading the city's road network for lack of council support.
For this she may be burned in effigy for all eternity at morris-dancing conventions, but I'm relieved.
I lived without cars until I was an adult.
My family couldn't afford one, and neither of my parents - who lived apart - could drive anyway.
We relied on public transport, which meant it took us five times longer to go anywhere than it would otherwise have done.
I've wasted years of my life in bus shelters, standing at bus stops, waiting for trains, sometimes in small railway stations used by the locals as dunnies, and coping with randy guards on the Johnsonville suburban line.
There was neither glamour nor virtue in those experiences. It was a drag.
My grandmother, the cyclist of the family, rode hers around Masterton, which is flat, until she fell off one night when she was in her 60s, injuring herself too badly to keep it up.
Arthritis swiftly set in, she could no longer even walk to the nearest bus stop, and after that she was dependent on relatives with cars to help her with her shopping.
That is a reminder that bicycles are for the fit and the strong, and probably the young.
Some cities - like Wellington - are not suited to bicycles anyway.
We have steep hills and foul weather.
I've seen the masses of bicycles on city roads in China, loaded down with children and shopping of all kinds, perilously packed.
One average puff of Wellington wind and they'd all be on their backs on the tarseal.
In pre-car days your family shopped separately with the greengrocer, the grocer, and the butcher, and could carry home only enough supplies for a couple of days.
You lived by the bus timetable unless you wanted to walk the few miles to the shops and back, and if you were lucky the bus wasn't running early, or late.
When your shopping was done you once again consulted your timetable, and caught the bus home.
A 10-minute walk later, laden with heavy shopping, you were home, exhausted. It had taken the best part of a day.
For women with small, grizzling children to ferry about at the same time it was no fun.
Meat invariably leaked through what would have been the greenie-approved brown paper in which it was wrapped.
Luckily, milk was still delivered to the gate. You had no refrigerator - maybe a virtue from a green perspective - but you never grew to like the little white dots floating on your tea as the milk went off.
Visiting friends on the far side of town or going to the doctor was a mission, and this was before I lived in a city with sprawling suburbs, which would have made it worse.
A capital city can't run like a small town last century, on some languid summer-holiday time scale, and people won't be giving up cars, no matter how much fuel costs, or how crowded roads may get.
We have them because they are the solution to so many problems of daily life, and in some form or other they're here to stay.
Surely the answer is to have efficient road networks and find substitutes for fossil fuels.
We're starting on the roads, and the rest is beginning to happen. In the meantime, the macho culture of bicycle riding could turn down a few notches.
Smug self-righteousness is all very well but sticking to the road code is a whole lot safer.