British Military Fitness

The difference is that the people running it are making a lot of money. My issue isn't with people exercising in parks - that all good, it's with a company making sacks of cash and taking over large areas of public space that they're not paying for. If you want to run a festival, sell stuff, have an event, etc. for profit on, for example, Clapham Common, then you have to pay for the privilege. But they don't. That's all. If people get their jollies from being shouted at by someone who's pretending to be a soldier, then go for it. But if they try to tell me where I can walk my dog, then they can and will fuck off (not technically true, the dog's been dead for three years, but you get my point).

So on that basis people organising cyclosportives ought to avoid the public highway or pay for use of it?

Please don't get me on the subject of people who take their dogs into parks in order to crap all over them and don't clean up afterwards.