The Darkest of Times

The darkness has now set in. It’s time to ride with lights every evening, until the clocks change this weekend and there’s a quick window of light again after work. However last night was also the first time I forgot my front light this year and had a semi-lit trip home with my fingers crossed and my senses alert like some sort of stealth rider, only visible after I have passed.



As you can see form this picture, lights are not a lot of use sitting on any mid-nineties VHS tape starring Keanu Reaves, and are much more useful on the front of a bike. The ironic thing is I kept the light out for charging and will therefore probably soon experience the kind of commute where you race your dying lights and always lose, setting off in the half dark with working lights and finishing when it’s fully dark, but with no lights to help you out.

As is codified in the Law of Sod, last night was also the trip where a driver decided to cut a corner inside a motorbiker and come straight for me on the wrong side of the road. She missed me, but I crucially lost the moral high-ground in my mood-lit state.

In the last two weeks I thought I’d covered every type of new indoor cycling machines, but it seems there’s no end to them. Tapping in on the serious end of the market, Honda are bringing out a bicycle simulator to help people, and especially more vulnerable cyclists, to learn to deal with the dangers of the road. You can see it here in what looks like a report directly translated from the original Japanese. It looks to me like one of those arcade games you find at the seaside, although hopefully it won’t eat pound coins as quickly. I think I’d find it very hard not to go looking for crashes on it, experiencing the thrill of hitting a car, without the pain. I wonder if it has a "forgot your lights on a dark ride home" setting?

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