Not many people know that I cycle to and from work every day - a six mile round trip that takes me through suburban streets, a busy town, and into the countryside. The journey affords me a rare chance to think, and provides a seperation of sorts between work and home - an inbetween time that’s mine.
I am often spotted by colleagues in their cars - I whistle past while they sit in queues of traffic. The greater part of my hometown was built by the Victorians, and while they built picturesque streets, they didn’t figure on 18 wheel articulated goods vehicles being invented. A morning delivery of barrels to one of the many public houses in town typically causes gridlock.
Over the years I have been cycling through town, I have learned a number of truths;
The great majority of people you ever see riding a bike on a footpath are old, and should know better. They also never wear cycle helmets, and never have lights on their bike.
If you are riding a bicycle in busy traffic, you are more or less invisible.
If you are riding a bicycle through traffic that is returning home from work, you are invisible.
Given a big enough (and expensive enough) car, the footpath is a perfectly legitimate extension of the road surface that can be used regardless of anybody walking along it.
When crossing busy junctions, unless you have made eye contact with the drivers of cars approaching a junction, they have not seen you.
When drivers deliberately “not see you”, they will never, ever look at you, because they know damn well what they’re doing.
I could carry this list on for quite some time, and convince you that I am a bitter, twisted, curmudgeon. The reality is that the close shaves and near accidents have become normal. I struggle to recall particular incidents because they are no longer noteworthy - I almost expect car drivers to do the unexpected (hmmm… if you expect the unexpected, it’s no longer unexpected, is it…).
If cycling is so stressful and dangerous, why do I continue?
I sit at a desk all day wrestling with quite hilariously complex and often bewildering software development problems. Sometimes I sit on trains for hours on end to visit far flung clients. I often return home and sit all evening designing websites and/or developing web applications for freelance clients. Notice the common theme here…
Sitting.
If I didn’t ride the bike, I would probably have a backside the size of Texas, a belly large enough to balance pizza boxes on, and would probably not be able to walk up and down the stairs without breaking into a sweat. It’s actually quite nice to be fit enough to run the kids ragged on a weekend, chasing a football around the park. It’s nice to be able to go swimming with them and not worry about how I look.Without the bike, neither of these things would be anywhere near as easy.
Something else that was nice? Taking part in the Timberland Mountain Bike challenge in the middle of Keswick last summer after being arm-twisted into it by the girls, and recording the third fastest time they had ever seen. The smile on our eldest’s face when I staggered from the bike was priceless.