The Unluckiest Cyclist in all of London

Typical. It’s been quiet all week and then three absolutely cast iron blog subjects come along at once, like buses. It’s hard to choose just one but I’ll have to go for the one that will have all of you non-cyclists hopping up and down with glee: for I saw a cyclist getting arrested for running a red light. Yes – in London.

I was walking along Kew Bridge when I noticed a car with its hazards on, slowing down. It hadn’t come to a complete stop when the passenger door was flung open. Blimey, I thought, they’re in a hurry but no, it was just a low-tech equivalent of a stinger mat to bring a cyclist who was bombing along the pavement to a halt. That was when I noticed the Metropolitan police logo on the car door (it wasn’t a proper police patrol car) and the policeman getting out to accuse the guy of running a red light, hopping up onto the pavement and continuing on, presumably all with the police car in not-very-hot pursuit.

I couldn’t see the cyclist’s reaction to all this, but I can only guess that it was one of incredulous surprise. According to Matt Seaton in the Guardian only 4 cyclists in total were prosecuted for running red lights in 2005. I don’t know what the up-to-date figure is but I bet it’s not much higher. Do you think I just witnessed one-quarter of all the red-light-running cyclist arrests for 2007? Or do you think the police – equipped with a special snatch squad of vehicles – are running a new campaign to crack down on what is (according to most of you) the greatest menace to civilisation in Britain today? In truth, I think it was probably just that the local police’s monthly crime figures were looking a little shabby for August, and they needed some easy pickings to gussy up the month end. In that case, catching cyclists running red lights has got to look pretty tempting to your average plod. A quiet morning down by one of the pedestrian crossings would have to rack up some impressive looking totals.

Cyclists of London – we must act, and now. We must prevent the police from their dastardly attempt to criminalise us and our cycling ways. We must band together, present a united front, and commit to a campaign of civil obedience. Think of the disappointment on their little faces as cyclist after cyclist smugly stops at every red, and they see their targets slipping away with every moment that passes…

Maybe that way the police will even be forced to crack down on zebra crossing violating drivers instead?

Those who Dream of Eternal Youth…

… probably didn’t have 15 in mind. I was suffering flashbacks to my teenage years this evening on the train home when I made the mistake of shifting over a couple of seats so a family could sit together for the journey. However, the mother didn’t take advantage of this, choosing a seat across the aisle instead and, after five minutes in the company of her two daughters, I could see why. Once they’d had the sort of argument where one person wants to discuss something her sibling has done while the other person just keeps turning the music up on her iPod, they settled down to a sulky sort of silence and daughter number one decided to put her feet up on the seat in front of her.

‘Don’t put your feet on the seats,’ her mother said and daughter number one promptly put one foot down, while declaring triumphantly ‘you didn’t say I couldn’t put my foot on the seat’, which the mother chose, wisely, to ignore. As did I. If I’d wanted to get into the child-disciplining business, I’d have had some of my own. More to the point, this was exactly the sort of smart-arse answer I would have given at that age, and I know precisely with what contempt I would have greeted any intervention from a stranger.

And besides, she got her come-uppance anyway. Sitting with just one foot up isn’t very comfortable, as she quickly discovered. She couldn’t put them both up and break the letter of the law. And she couldn’t put them both down and afford her mother and the whole unfair petty conventional adult world a victory. So she was forced to keep swapping legs every few minutes from Putney to Vauxhall – where I got off – and undoubtedly beyond.

Thwapp

This story on busdriving reminded me of what I was going to blog about yesterday before I was distracted by the thought of a 50’s style internet cafe. I was heading into Kew Gardens station just as the District Line train pulled into the station. My fate that evening lay with Silverlink so I had time to watch a tourist lady and her tourist husband sprint for the ticket barrier. She managed to get her ticket through the slot and herself through the gate but he was not so savvy. He attempted to run through after her as the gates were closing but didn’t make it. Ouch. Those gates are solidly built, and close with a certain amount of decisive force. And it was only after he’d stopped and slid winded to the ground that the station staff member they’d been consulting with moments earlier decided to let them know it wasn’t their train. Timing is everything.

Anyway, I hope they enjoyed their journey on the North London Line. If my carriage was anything to go by, they would have spent it in the company of a rather smelly tramp, someone eating raw onions, and a parent-and-child acapella rendition of ‘if you’re happy and you know it, clap your hands’ in which, inexplicably, nobody else in the carriage felt moved to join them.

Happy Days…

…and not just because I had to get the Silverlink to Highbury this evening. In fact, not even. It was just that I was walking up to Kew Gardens station when I noticed that the old photo developer place has rebranded itself as a photo printing place and ’50’s American Style Internet Cafe’. Ah yes, those old American internet cafes from the fifties, with their chrome detailing and fins … or was that the cars? No, I’m thinking of those old American internet cafes from the fifties with their tight sweaters and their bobby socks … or was that the girls?

In fact, tell me oh those of you who can remember it. What was the internet like in the fifties?

Motorists, Get Out and Push

Not a sign you see very often, is it? I wasn’t going to blog today, it being a bank holiday and all, but then the other half and I cycled up to Hyde Park to see the new Serpentine pavilion, and we came across the following (click for a bigger image with sarcastic annotations):

Yes, that’s right because cyclists just love to stop, get off, wheel their bikes all of six feet and then get back onto a completely new cycle lane. Hmm. Now who was it used to go on about joined up thinking? It’s not the people who are actually in charge is it?

It’s a shame because otherwise the cycling in Hyde Park is excellent, and with the Mall and Constitution Hill closed for the Trooping of the Guard, or the Changing of the Colour, or maybe it was just the Pimping of the Heritage, there was lots of lovely traffic-free cycling to be had.

And this wasn’t bad, either:

Very Green Cross Code

OK, I’m used to the fact now that most people in London don’t know how to use a zebra crossing, but PCSOs? I’m not talking about drivers here for once. Most drivers who abuse the zebras know – deep down in their stunted little hearts – that pedestrians have right of way on the zebra crossing, they just choose to ignore that fact because that way they don’t have to stop or even slow down. It’s only when I or people like me come along with our stroppy little ways, stepping boldly out in front of them with every indication that we haven’t seen them and will be denting their bumper some time soon if they don’t stop, that they come to a reluctant halt. And half the time, crossing along in my wake will be the small crowd of hapless pavementflowers who had been cowering on the edge of the road waiting for a gap in the traffic, possibly for some weeks.

But those, I thought, were probably tourists, who weren’t to be expected to know the exact rules for bullying drivers to a halt with a confident (but carefully judged) stride out into the road, the sort of stride that says I am related to not one but two lawyers and will not hesitate to sue. So I was a little startled this morning as I headed down for my run to find hovering nervously at the edge of the crossing a couple of PCSOs, in full uniform, waiting in vain for the traffic to stop for them. One car whizzed by while I was crossing the other half of the road and the one behind it was all set to follow, if the squeal of its brakes was anything to go by, had I not stepped out and asserted my right of way in front of it.

WTF? Surely, if anyone, these guys know the law? I’ve not got a beef with PCSOs in general – sure we want bobbies on the beat but more to the point we want bobbies out solving actual crimes. I don’t want to wake up and find my house has been burgled and nobody can arrest the wrongdoers because the real police are all busy walking up and down the South Bank with a measured tread, reassuring tourists and visibly deterring crime for the few hundred yards they can be seen in any direction. But I would have thought at some time during their however-many-weeks-it-is training the PCSOs would have been given a brief introduction into the traffic laws. Or maybe (having cleared up all the easy wi-fi bandwith thefts and with no other more pressing matters to attend to, for after all, nobody’s been shot in the borough for ooh, weeks, now) they were conducting a zebra crossing violator sting operation. In which case, I wish they’d caught the guy who didn’t just not stop but accelerated towards me on the crossing yesterday. In a Lambeth council van, too. I’m pretty sure I didn’t pay my council taxes for that.

My Own Worst Nightmare

Some days – and it’s mostly Fridays in my experience – I turn into the sort of person I usually blog about. Take this morning, when I approached the entrance gates at Vauxhall and did the following: take out staff pass ready to get through gate, realise staff pass isn’t going to get me very far, find oyster card, put oyster card on reader, realise gate was open all along and all the other passengers are giving me funny looks.

But that wasn’t the worst part. The worst part was when I got on the train and it wasn’t until I had found my seat and sat down that I realised the sarcastic ‘Thanks for letting us off first’ and the dirty look through the window was aimed at me. For I had just barrelled onto the train past the guy waiting to get off without even noticing he was there. And I couldn’t even abjectly apologise for my rudeness because he was already gone. I have no excuse for this – there is no excuse for that sort of behaviour – other than it has been a long week and the part of me that would normally notice things like people (or even big red buses) was obviously still mentally in bed wishing it was Saturday. And I can offer no mitigation except that I have admitted my guilt and hope that this will result in a halving of my sentence in commuter purgatory… So I throw myself on the mercy of my own court and hope that you’ll go easy on me in the comments section.

Thank goodness it’s a long weekend eh?

Blindsided

Grooh. Woke up this morning with a stiff neck, I think due to yesterday’s exertions in the wind and the rain. The problem with cycling to Battersea is I have to do a lot of changing lanes, which means doing owl impressions as I try to turn my head 180 degrees to see what’s coming up behind me. I wear glasses, so when I’m trying to look over my shoulder I’m looking through the blurry bit where my glasses aren’t, rather than the nice clear (but rather small) circle where they are. My eyesight without them is appalling – put it this way, I looked over to my left yesterday before changing lanes and suddenly discovered there was a bus in the bit of the road I was planning to occupy, which I hadn’t noticed before. Not a double decker, true, but a bright red London bus nonetheless, and I had to do a bit of nifty acceleration to make my turn without being squashed. As I was recounting this tale to the other half, he pointed out it’s a bit worrying if you find you can’t even see a bus before it’s upon you. And other traffic – grey coloured cars driving along grey coloured streets in grey coloured London – are even worse.

I fear I may have to get myself contact lenses. I tried them once, for a year, but they were hard ones and I found that the best part of the day, every day, was the moment I could take them out, so after a while I just stopped bothering putting them in. Plus there were those scary moments when they would decide to migrate round to the back of my eyeball (sorry, were you eating?) and I’d have to retrieve them very carefully with my fingers. Opticians tell me that contact lens technology has moved on since then, but that’s usually when they’re trying to flog me the things with the same zeal that shoe salesmen reserve for suede shoe protection sprays, and I automatically disbelieve them. Plus I stare at a screen all day and my eyes get dry and scratchy enough as it is. So I guess there’s nothing else to do but make like Hedwig and practice my neck stretches until I can rotate my head round completely, glasses and all. That would put the wind up some of the drivers round here, I can tell you.

Stormy Weather

All right, will all those people who complained about how hot it was last summer please stand up and confess their utter wrongness now? Because the ’summer’ we’re having now is much, much worse. It was bad enough this morning, when the best that could be said about the weather was that it was not actually raining and I found myself crossing Lambeth Bridge trying to hold my line while cycling into a blustery headwind with a number 3 bus rising like a great red wall just inches from my right handlebar. Coming back was even worse: I was climbing over Chelsea bridge in the teeth of the gale making almost zero forward progress while trying to find a gap in the traffic so I could get over into the right hand lane for my turn. And this time it was raining too, just for added unpleasantness.

I know that heat in this country means melting train tracks, hosepipe bans and the visiting of barbecues on innocent party guests, but what’s a little food poisoning between friends when the alternative is October come early? And just to rub it in, a colleague today made the first sighting of a Christmas menu in a restaurant this year. It’s time to sacrifice something to the weather gods and soon. Do you think they take visa?

Stating the Bleeding Obvious

I really should stop catching people’s eyes in London. I was cycling past one of Vauxhall’s younger down-and-outs the other day as he was sitting looking semi-comatose on a bench in the park. As I passed, inadvertantly catching his eye, a glimmer of alertness appeared on his face. I turned my head to catch his remark. ‘On your bike,’ he pronounced, with great satisfaction. I don’t know why this little exchange has stuck in my head the way it has. Probably because it was only as I was cycling off that I realised what I should have said in reply: on your bench. I can’t even get the last word with tramps…

Meanwhile, in other news, it seems my brief foray into film reviewing on Sunday got me onto the WordPress front page under ‘Entertainment’, which did my stats no harm at all. Now obviously, I would never pimp my blog so shamelessly as to write irrelevant film reviews just to see if I could repeat the trick, but if I were to include some films, what films do you think I should include? Brief Encounters? Planes, Trains and Automobiles? Throw Momma from the Train? There’s a rich seam of public transport related movies out there I’m sure.