Cycling is for the stupid and/or idealistic

(UPDATE 2014: Cycling is no longer stupid. It’s beautiful. My new bike is also lovely.)

Cycling is for stupid people. My brief love affair with the humble bicycle officially ended tonight in Cambridge. There is something positively Darwinian about the concept of getting on a 30kg skeleton of poles and axles and thinking it’s somehow okay to share the same piece of tarmac with one-tonne lumps of steel travelling at 40mph (with Ordinary Human at its helm). It’s not. It’s a bloody stupid idea and I’ve learnt my lesson.

To the taxi driver on Mill Road who didn’t bother to pull out when overtaking me tonight, I really, really appreciate that you didn’t kill me, and it was good that you stopped and calmly wrote down your details for me as I was in shock, however driving into me in the first place, when there was absolutely no obstruction on the other side of the road, was stupid and careless in the extreme and you must be really damned stupid because I’ve never not given a cyclist a huge wide berth when driving in MY car and overtaking a cyclist.

And to the passenger of the taxi who got out to tell my girlfriend who was ahead of me on the bike, before I had even got up from the pavement, that my lights were obviously not powerful enough: you are a horrible insensitive woman and I hope our paths never cross in the future.

(To the nice girls who crossed the road and told me they saw what happened and gave me their numbers… thank you.)


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