Wow, sometimes I feel completely redundant. My main function on this page is to make stupid jokes and poke fun at public figures in the news. My only tools are exaggeration, sarcasm and lampoon, but all too often they have been rendered utterly inadequate by the sheer absurdist comedy of real life. There seems little point in trying to irritate a member of the great and good by jabbing him (it’s still usually a “him”) in the ribs when he is shooting himself in the foot that is in his mouth.

Which brings me to Sir John Armitt, the TfL board member and chairman of National Express who looks like the three-parent offspring of Rupert Murdoch, Norman Tebbit, and Breaking Bad’s Bryan Cranston. “I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again — I would say the biggest danger to cyclists on the roads in London are actually themselves,” Armitt chirruped this week.

Never mind the appalling grammar, or the “I say I say I say” formulation that recalls the days of music hall. Never mind that, as former chairman of the Olympic Delivery Authority, Sir John might be expected to encourage cyclists rather than collude in their demonisation.

The real, blackly, bleakly funny thing about Armitt’s pronouncement was that it came days after TfL announced segregated cross-London superhighways for bikes to protect them from motor traffic. And hours after one of Armitt’s National Express coaches was involved in a collision with a cyclist at Marble Arch. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again — I would say the secret of comedy are (sic) actually timing.

There is a serious point behind all this, though. The cyclist in the Marble Arch incident was injured but apparently, thankfully, not seriously. Two bike riders have already died in collisions on London’s roads this year, though: Stephanie Turner with an HGV and Akis Kollaros with a tipper truck.

I’ve seen people cycling carelessly. I’ve also seen tipper trucks and coaches driven with a heedlessness that borders on the psychotic, by people who — cocooned in metal and with a false sense of importance derived from the size and speed of their vehicle — think they have a greater right to the road than more vulnerable users. I’m pretty sure which of these is the greater threat to cyclists, and indeed to pedestrians and other motorists.

Much of what supposedly constitutes “aggressive” or “dangerous” cycling is just an assertion of the rider’s rights, to stop motorists pasting us over the kerb. The root of the problem is a psychological wrong-turn in thinking that dates back at least to 1912 when a Kansas City law against “jaywalking” gave motor vehicles precedence over everyone else, conveniently forgetting that roads predate the combustion engine. While the segregated cycle lanes are welcome they are still a stopgap, protecting “us” from “them”. We’ll have a truly civilised city when all road users respect each other equally and segregation isn’t needed.

Sorry if the above sounds familiar; in three years filling this slot, I’ve found that some subjects simply never go away, like Prince Charles, posh boys complaining about prejudice, swivel-eyed drivers and those wilfully offended by swearing: three years ago I wrote about Gwyneth Paltrow calling her grannie a “Jeremy Hunt”, and this week everyone’s banging on about potty-mouthed Kim Sears.

This is my last regular column here, though I’ll be writing elsewhere in the paper. Thanks for letting me tell bad jokes, voice incoherent opinions, and bang on about London. Especially south London. Cheers.

Brad and Angelina would eat Ryan and Eva for lunch

Star Magazine reports that Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie have had new parents Ryan Gosling and Eva Mendes over for lunch at their LA mansion. This has been portrayed as an extension of the former couple’s polyethnic Brady Bunch home life.

Brad and Ryan buddied up on new film The Big Short and decided to sink a few beers while the gals cooed over baby Esmeralda, Eva having always “admired” Jolie (who is a year younger).

In fact, can you picture a gathering more riven with rictus-grin awkwardness? You can imagine the more stellar couple’s conversational gambits. So, just the one kid rather than seven, huh? No directing projects so far, huh? No easy composite to be made out of your names — Meddling? Ryvita? — huh?

I picture Mendes reaching nervously for a brined olive and Jolie’s blue-green eyes widening as she says: “Wow, you’re actually gonna eat that, huh?”

May I just say that is so wrong?

Judgment call please — is it OK to intervene in strangers’ conversations? This has exercised me for more than four decades, since I overheard a family in a swimming pool trying and failing to name the female villain in Blake’s Seven but felt unable to butt in while wearing trunks. These days I feel a particular urge to correct idiotic mistakes about London.

There were the two blokes recently, occupying both front seats of a number 9 bus, reeling off a totally erroneous route they expected it to take. Even worse was the young American blithely telling a girl that a tunnel outlet in the Lambeth Embankment — actually the mouth of the buried Effra river — was an egress point for MI5’s midget submarines. I didn’t want to spoil his chances. But part of me also didn’t want him to breed.