... with their central heating...

Normally I'm pretty good on the roads. Well, maybe not brilliant. I mean, I have a driving license. Behind that bold truth are the little footnotes that
a) I've been in a driving seta for less than half an hour since my test
b) I passed on the third attempt, having had my previous two tests terminated after dangerous faults.

I think I've found my niche in the food chain of Oxford's urban area. Oxford is like a coral reef, it's numerous traffic barriers and inexplicable bollards keeping the big predators out. You'll never see a vast lorry cruise by, on it's way to a distant destination, singing it's ululatory song. The biggest things we get in here are the dusty-white predatory Transit vans, barking and growling at rivals to their turf, scattering Fiestas and Cavaliers in their path. Below those colourful denizens come my kind: the cyclists. We have dedicated lanes, but often use those assigned for others higher in the hierachy than we, much to their annoyance.

As we are to the car drivers, so pedestrians are to us. They are the plankton, floating, seeming motionless. They ebb and flow, seemingly without any rhyme or reason, though they are thickest where the flow of traffic is slow.

The situation is an odd one, because as any Sun-reading, Yorkie-bloated Transit driver will tell you, the identification of pedestrians with eukaroytic photsynthetic scum is an accurate representation of their perceived hierachal standing. And yet they have control of the roads. If, unlike me, they have the nerves to wander across a busy road, it's beholden on everyone else to make way for them.

And so the cars and vans have a duty not to run down us cyclists.

This morning was the exception.

Solzhenitsyn said "You can't expect a man who's warm to understand a man who's cold". Never has that been more apparent to me than at half past 8 on a rainy tuesday bank holiday morning.

Gits.

Song in my head: "Little America" sung live at Glastonbury by REM