You’re riding along, fast and smoothly, trusting that cars will stay where they’re supposed to be and that people walking will stay on the pavement. Noone’s giving any indication of wanting to cross the road and there are no designated crossing points, like zebra crossings or any of the other animals, so you think you’re good to go. And then it happens. Someone jumps lemming-like off the pavement and directly in front of you. In the best case you miss with a squeal of brakes and tyres and a surge of adrenaline, in the worst you hit them. Mostly it’s somewhere in between and the result is some mess of bags, swearing, metal and flesh. Whatever the outcome, somehow it never seems to have been the cyclists fault. Having dived under your wheels the pedestrian is convinced you appeared from nowhere, perhaps riding the magical invisible cycle path in the sky and dropping in neatly merely centimetres from them. Perhaps the cyclist was in his invisibility shorts and therefore unseen to the human eye, only the pigeons can see him and flap free. It doesn’t seem to matter what you wear, I’ve had it happen while I sported the orange-est top in the world (although on those occasions I may have simply burned their retinas out and left them unable to see me arriving) as often as in less garish colours, and more often in bright sun than in bad visibility.
Having realised it’s entirely the cyclist’s fault the pedestrian in the wild reacts in many ways. Mostly it’s swearing and language you wouldn’t expect from the respectable lady you just avoided by millimetres. However, knocking a drunken man’s kebab out of his hand in the same way seems to result in much more violent grabbing around the throat, which wasn’t so easy to ignore, or ride away from. It seems as with any wild creature, retaining their food is of paramount importance. Who knows what’ll happen if I ever get between a mother and her child? My blood could be staining the streets of North London.
A fellow cyclist commented that you wouldn’t get it if you were in a car, but I think you’d be surprised. Only yesterday I was driving (within the speed limit – there was a speed camera coming up) and a pedestrian stepped off the pavement in front of me, making me swerve and brake. Perhaps it’s not only bikes that can be invisible, but then the lemming never seems to blame the car in the way that the cyclist gets berated. Maybe it’s simply that pedestrians weigh up the balance in the fight and think they can take on the cyclist. They might be right. Coming off a bike fast and off balance will probably leave me more broken than the person I missed.
For those of you eagerly following my repairs and asking yourselves “so, what did happen to the front mech?”, I have good news. A large amount of some evil degreaser and GT85 combined with a lot of wiggling and it’s working like new again, saving me £15 for a new one (as long as I ignore that the degreaser cost a tenner anyway). Let’s hope it holds up for Sunday’s adventures.
See, it works!
A
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