While not the kind of obstacle you encounter everyday, this impediment to my commute happens more often than you would hope.
Riding through roads you expect to be open you come to the slightly thrilling sight of blue and white tape across the road. Beyond the tape, inevitably are various police cars, throwing film-set blue disco lighting onto the buildings around, and a good percentage of the Metropolitan Constabulary. It's time for a slight rethink in your route, and an internal debate about whether it's ok to look and see what's happening or feign indifference and carry on riding.
If you’re lucky (or not) the crime scene will cover an entire block as it did this morning and you’ll feel like you’ve been close to something exciting and dramatic, rather than the less exciting form of taped off area where only a park bench or post box are enclosed. If the area is large enough then traffic will be backed up all around and you’ll get the additional thrill of slipping past queues of cars as you nip along the gutter. When you eventually get to work (with a ready made excuse if you do end up being late) you have an exciting story to tell, that will interest even the people who don’t get bikes, and something to look up on the internet in fevered excitement to see if you can work out what the commotion was about.
Unfortunately, in my experience, you can never find the information, so my mind is free to wander over all the possibilities that it could be. In very rare occasions it turns out that the police were performing a major raid on an entire road famed for crime (as happened once to me) and you can say “I was there”. You wouldn’t have got that on the tube, would you?
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