A nice peaceful few days until today* when a nice person in a large Conway tipper truck decided they'd been called to some kind of dump truck emergency and came roaring up behind me as I prepared to scoot by a few parked private hire vehicles just after Clockhouse Station. Noting that the driver still had their foot to the floor and the engine was furiously buzzing like a Doppler-shifted house-sized bee on a 12000cc motorbike I let discretion persuade valour to take the day off and baled out behind the first taxi with a distinct lack of panache and significantly less brake block than I had a few moments before. Given that there was oncoming traffic, I suspect that any continuance of my trajectory around the three parked cars would have resulted in a underwear-endangering event and possibly the loss of one or more of my three dimensions.
I'm not sure if the driver simply didn't see me or was a bellicose idiot. Neither is reassuring for the driver of a vehicle that substantial. I have verified that I am indeed not blessed with the gift of invisibility (on second thoughts, I should have established this with a mirror before I ventured into the women's changing rooms).
Before anyone asks, I wasn't lurking in the gutter like the chewed remains of a McD meal, I was already in primary position as the gathering of motorized fauna around the taxi office is a given. The rail bridge by the station is shallow and anyone in a truck cab would have excellent visibility of the road ahead. Given the grim statistics for such vehicles and their interactions with cyclists you'd think an organization like this would have stressed safety and courtesy to their drivers. Managing Director of FM Conway, I do believe you have mail. I apologize if it jabs you in the eyes.
*I did forget the interaction with a car passenger a few weeks back - the usual same old story: approaching a junction with a main road, me following a car in front with about twenty metres of gap, another car behind. Single lane traffic, so no real room to overtake. Beep. Beep. Beeeeeeep. There's nowhere to go in front of me even if the car can squeeze by, so whatever, go crank up your blood pressure. The car had just pulled out from a house about 75 metres from the from the junction so it's not like I had been holding it up. A few seconds later we all arrive at the junction behind the first car and the usual melody of random abuse drifts over from the car (a Jaguar, the evident pater noster of the Bromley chav wagon family tree). I've no idea really and I generally can't be bothered arguing with living and breathing refutations of Intelligent Design but we were stuck waiting for a gap in traffic and to be honest, I was minded that they'd do something stupid when we did pull out, so I reasonably pointed out why I was in the middle of the road. In doing so I noted a lady was doing the driving and seemed to having none of it, and belligerent was actually the passenger, a typical wild specimen of a male Homo throbbingtemplicus. Anyway, another chorus of abuse followed. I do try and usually succeed with the zen thing while cycling but sometimes, well, sometimes even the mightiest effort just isn't enough. Let's just say he didn't appreciate my references to Chewbacca (or for that matter my assertion that he might have been a 'hairy assed monkey fucker') and I will plead guilty to a momentary bit of pavement cycling. I expect the real Chewbacca, in his day, had a bit more fire in his legs.
