There are approximately 75,000 daily cyclists and an impressive 8.6 per cent of all mid-town traffic is made up of bicycles. This is also the city that invented the cycle courier.Baby carriage, IndonesiaIn the Indonesian city of Bandung, passers-by gather around two tiny, abandoned babies who have been discovered on a humble carriage constructed from old bicycle parts.Luxury wagons, VietnamThere are no official statistics for bicycle ownership in Vietnam, but in the cities, the average family will own two to five and use them to go absolutely everywhere. In the poorer rural areas they are considered a luxury and many people are forced to walk long distances. Adaptations of the humble bicycle are used to make deliveries, carry produce to market, and transport children..

You know Ian Pollock's illustrations from magazines and newspapers, including The Independent. The colours are bright, liquid and luscious, while his figures are raw and distorted, the stuff of nightmares. The trouble with commercial illustration, he says, is that editors tend to want more of what they have seen before. So in his spare time he has illustrated the Bible's 40 parables, in watercolour, ink and gouache. An attempt to get away from the horror? Hardly. The biblical world of the parables, he discovered, is full of violence and rough justice "This has been my way of keeping my edge rough," he says "Sometimes I feel quite in awe of the parables They are nasty stories, damning and unforgiving. The Bible addresses the harshness of nature, the culling of the inferior, the condemnation of the failure to procreate I like the idea.

It's so wicked."Artists of the past, even the Old Masters, have preferred the story of the crucifixion to the parables. That said, the prodigal son, the good Samaritan, the rich man and Lazarus, have been depicted many times before, and Bosch and Brueghel knew how to paint horrors.Pollock, 49, who graduated from the Royal College of Art, claims to know nothing of past parable painters. But as a child in Manchester in the Fifties he experienced the kind of harsh judgements of nature that the parables seem to applaud. His father made clay pipes, loading 40 or 60 gross into his coal-fired kiln every month - and sometimes the lot was ruined."He would come back covered in soot and say either, `We've had a good burn' or `It's gone wrong.' If it went wrong there would be a dreadful atmosphere in the family for weeks."A moment's inattention, the wrong temperature, bad coal, or a gusty wind, and nature took its unforgiving revenge, just like in the parables. Is that why he took to them? "If you sat me in a psychiatrist's chair," he says, "things might point in that direction."`The Miracles and Parables' by Ian Pollock is at the Eich Gallery, Humberside University campus, Hull (01482-462-060), until 14 January. www.eichgallery.abelgratis `The Watchful Servants', Luke 12:35-40"Happy are those servants whom the master finds on the alert when he comes," is the message of the tale.

"So interesting, this master-servant hierarchy," muses Pollock "The waiting is a kind of subjugation It's still the case - the weaker wait for the more powerful. Employees wait for their employers, students wait for their teachers. It is a vulnerable state." His pair could be prisoners doing time, down-and-outs waiting for Godot, or, Pollock suggests, laboratory animals waiting for the vivisector.`The Rich Man and Lazarus', Luke 16:19-31Bad news for the rich. The starving Lazarus goes to Heaven and the rich man who denied him even scraps to eat goes to Hell "It's that hierarchy again," says Pollock.

"It's endemic in the Bible." His Lazarus is painted with fervour - a crouching blob of flesh covered in sores with protruding bones The dog licks the sores, as do the dogs in the parable. "It's even more disgusting when you update it to contemporary times. I was reminded of the beggars I saw at the gates of Fez, Morocco They're not erupting in revolt They know their level. But just what is it that makes one man a beggar and another a Bill Gates? "I feel guilty if I give to a beggar because I believe that people should use their own initiative - but then I feel guilty if I don't. Is there nothing one can do except donate downwards? I'm part of the hierarchy too; there are people much richer than me, yet there's always somebody in the next bed worse off than yourself."`Vineyard and Householder', Matthew 21:33-42Pollock found this parable unfathomable. Jesus asks his disciples what the owner of a vineyard would do if its tenants murdered his servants and then his son.