I still wish that someone...
...had been quick with their phone that day. I realise that it's not exactly schaden-whatsit, but some of you may view it as such purely because it features a cyclist (me) doing himself some unintentional harm. {wavy lines etc}

I ride to work and back on a push-bike. Before anyone starts, yes I do stop at traffic lights, yes I want to clothesline the many cunts who sail past me when I do so and yes I do my best to stay out of 'proper' road users' way. Moreover I believe that cyclists who use the roads should be licensed and insured to some extent in order to cut down on the majority cunt factor that gives us all a bad name. Anyway, enough digression.

I was just setting out for home and picking up speed as I wanted to get through the green light ahead of me. Unfortunately some twat had put a big-ish branch in the cycle lane which I had failed to see for concentrating on the light. I bumped over it and my handlebars came loose, prompting some serious wobbliness. Said wobbliness continued and I spotted the lights start to change as I was a few metres away. Fuck. I needed to stop. Quick. Braking as hard as I needed to at this point would probably fuck up my handlebars even more and dump me in the road so I tried to steer onto the kerb and hopefully come to a more sedate stop a little further on. Sadly my attention had now been diverted from the traffic light, resulting in me shoulder-barging the fucker at the best part of 25mph.

Ow.

I don't remember much of the impact itself, and my next memory is of laying on the kerb on the other side of the stoplight from the road with my bike on the kerb beside me. Essentially I must have hit the light, and with the gift of shoulder-ow, spun right around the fucker through about 250 degrees, dragging my bike part of the way with me. It must have been fucking spectacular. I would so have liked to see how that went down from a perspective other than mine, which is why I wish someone had been handy with a phone at the time.

I had to go to A&E so they could take a look at my badly bruised shoulder, hand, hip and leg and I somehow suffered major grazes on about half-a-dozen places on my body, some of which have since scarred. I fucked myself up quite well, but amazingly with nothing broken. Still, two silver linings exist in that at least I didn't land in the road and get my head run over, and it was the company conference the following weekend - my limping self was excluded from the wanky team-building activities that always fill the day before the black tie piss-up and back-slapping begins. I spent the afternoon in the hotel's bar chatting to a heavily pregnant colleague who had also been pardoned.

It also gave me an opportunity to strike up conversation with the now-other-half who works for the NHS, at the time doing X-Rays of which I'd had at 8 on account of my altercation with street furniture.
(thatblokeoverthere not quite as much an arsehole as I thought, Thu 17 Dec 2009, 16:33, 2 replies)