Apart from the price of tomato plants (75p, or £1 for those resistant to blight), the only serious topics of discussion last weekend in the trading hut of the allotments’ society in my London suburb were Brexit and the two-lane cycle superhighway planned for our high street.

The first of these got short shrift: “Why don’t they just get on with it?” was greeted with general acclaim, as we weighed up the chicken manure pellets. But giving cyclists priority over pushchairs and pedestrians – not to mention over the rest of the road traffic – as proposed locally by Transport for London, provoked an animated and heated debate. How would people get on and off buses? What about pensioners trying to get across the road?