by Pedgerow » Thu Mar 05, 2020 10:14 pm
Over the past couple of weeks, I have experienced some pretty swift karmic retribution, and it's all down to cycling in bad weather. Heading home from work last Tuesday, it was raining hard, really hard. The rain turned to hail. At this point, I was effectively being pelted with gravel continuously. This must surely have been some of the worst weather I have ever experienced, and it might even have been too terrible to cycle home from work in. Unfortunately, I'd left my magic turn-bike-into-a-comfy-warm-car ray at home, so on I cycled, down a big main road. The visibility was about as you'd expect when having fistfuls of ice thrown directly in your face during a storm in the dark. Most parked cars were parked either up on the pavement, or on their driveways, but some wise old sage had parked right in the middle of this road. I saw his car, and swerved to avoid it, but I did not swerve around it quickly enough and rode into the back of his car. Whoops. Obviously, in a car crash, you'd exchange insurance details, but bikes don't have insurance. So I stood there awkwardly for a bit, in the driving rain. The next thing would be to apologise to the driver, but the car was parked and the driver was at home, presumably, in one of the houses. So I couldn't do that either. I looked at his car, and I had broken his rear reversing light, but otherwise his car was fine and my bike was fine. I guess I could have rung every doorbell on the street, but what then? Give him the money in my wallet? I had about £12 on me. I don't know what it costs to fix a car's light, but it's probably more than that. I'd basically be ringing doorbells, in a famously rough area, offering strangers not enough money to fix a small amount of damage I just did. So I reluctantly just rode home rather than stand in the rain any longer.
I want to make it clear that I really was very considerate, but I totally did a kind-of, sort-of, hit-and-run. And that's bad. Over the next few days, I wondered if I could track the owner down. I got a load of cash out of a cash machine, and even wrote an anonymous letter, made a note of the car's number plate, and wrote it on an envelope so I could leave some money under the windscreen wiper next time I passed that car on my way home. The envelope got wet and disintegrated, and various other excuses happened, and they're not good excuses but the owner of this car never got any money from me.
One week later, I was cycling in to work, in more rain because it's been raining for weeks now, and there's a big roundabout that's an absolute death trap. I've only ever witnessed one crash there, but it often feels perilous, and a couple of times I have had to swerve to avoid buses that pull out without looking to join the road approaching this roundabout. Damn those buses. They straight-up do not give a shit about cyclists. And don't worry; I didn't get run over by a bus as karmic retribution.
I got run over by a van instead. My new bike, which I have been riding for less than two months, had its front wheel bent into obliteration when a van driver T-boned it, but I myself was unhurt and the driver was very apologetic. He drove me the rest of the way to work, and gave me some money to replace the wheel. So it's all good now - depending on what happens when I replace the wheel, of course; I have never had to do this before and I have no idea what a bicycle wheel costs, and if there is more damage to the bike, that will be very frustrating. It was a new bike, after all. I bought it to replace my old one, which was stolen last year from my work. And, you know, it was a close thing. If another car had been overtaking, and if I'd been a couple of seconds earlier, I could have been killed. That would have been much worse than accidentally breaking a headlight. But I wasn't killed, and in the end, this all seems like an odd mirror image in terms of level of catastrophe. Cycling damage happens to someone else due to inclement weather, I go the thoughts-and-prayers route for making amends, and almost exactly one week later, cycling damage happens to me in inclement weather. How utterly spooky.