Yeah, I know the title doesn't scan very well, but you'll see why I've done that if you carry on reading!
Today is a cycling day. It isn't really supposed to be a cycling day, it is supposed to be a swimming day, but I did today's swimming on Sunday and didn't do Sunday's cycling, so I'm doing Sunday's cycling today (got it? Good.) I wasn't all that keen on getting out of bed this morning and that meant that I didn't leave the house until gone 8.30. I thought this was going to be a problem because Sunday's cycle was meant to be a long one, and even though the two rides today (into and home from work) would add up to roughly the right amount of time, I felt like I needed to do a little bit more.
As I mentioned in a previous post, the presence of a circus and a fair in Finsbury Park precludes circuits at the moment, so scooting around there a couple of times was out. Then I remembered the deer in Clissold Park and decided I would go and say good morning to them. This turned out to be a Good Idea, as I got up this morning feeling very nervous for some reason - I can only presume that it was nerves about cycling that did it as there isn't anything else that I'm nervous about at the moment. I managed to get myself to Finsbury Park, then realised that, yet again, I had forgotten to start my Garmin sports watch, so would have to add a kilometre onto my morning's recorded distance.
I was still feeling a little nervy by the time I got to Clissold Park, but it is amazing what the sight of a few fallow deer prancing about (literally - I'm not even joking) in their bucolic pasture can do to calm the spirit. I'm trying to work out how I can go and see the deer over and over again, but without ever losing the feeling of how special it is to be able to see them in the middle of Hackney. Maybe I should only go and see them every couple of weeks. I don't know, I'll figure it out.
It was a good job that the deer calmed me down, because it was just after I left the park that I came across the life-form referenced in the title of this post - the Pave-Dwelling Troglodyte. Now, if you've been reading this blog for a while, you'll know that I am (or, at least, I try to be) a law-abiding cyclist. I stop at red lights, I don't ride on the pavement, I have lights all over me when riding at night and so on. I also try to be courteous to other road users, partly because it's just the right thing to do and partly because I feel I need to redress the balance a bit against all those rubbish cyclists that give all us good cyclists a bad name with drivers and pedestrians alike. I'm the first to admit that I don't always get it right, but my intentions are good and most of the time I do get it right. Until now, there has been a steady stream of cyclists on my route into work who have decided that traffic lights just don't apply to them and have gone straight through, regardless of what else is going on around them. I've seen a couple of near misses and seen one car shunt another because the front car had to brake suddenly to avoid a bike.
However, there now seems to be a new way of light jumping. I say "new" - I'm sure it isn't new at all, but this morning I noticed it in volume for the first time. I saw no fewer than 12 cyclists this morning who mounted the pavement just before a traffic light that was on red, cycled across the pedestrian crossing (on the green man) for the perpendicular road at the junction, onto the pavement on the other side and then rejoined the road on the other side of the junction, all before the lights for the road they were theoretically travelling on turned green. In their minds, this works because they are, technically speaking, not jumping a red light, because they are not on the carriageway. However, they are still breaking the law by riding on the pavement and they are being Bad Cyclists in any event because they are scaring the bejeezus out of the pedestrians trying to use the crossing that has been put there for their safety. This displeases me greatly.
There are all sorts of arguments about whether cyclists should be able to cross junctions or turn left or whatever on a red light but, until someone decides to change the law, jumping a red light is illegal and no-one should do it, driver or cyclist. To my mind, saying "I think the law should be that I can jump a red light, so I'm going to do it anyway and that's OK" is a bit like saying "I think the law should be that I can steal stuff, so I'm going to do it anyway and that's OK". It's not OK, don't do it (either thing, that is!)
The rest of my journey was fairly uneventful, but when I got to the place where I get off my bike to go to the office (the one way system means I have to stop on Moorgate and then walk through a passageway, I happened to glance up at a clock on a bank building and saw that it was only 9.14. With my little detour through the park, I had expected my journey to be quite a bit longer than normal, but when you add my first kilometre onto the 38 minutes showing on my Garmin and take into account that I didn't leave the house until gone 8.30, I think it only took me about 42 minutes including the detour to get into the office. I may need to go and see the deer again on the way home to make sure I've done enough today...
This morning's cycle was 8.66km, taking my cycling total up to 82.27km.
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