13 February 2010
We’ve been circling the square for over a week now. I can stay pretty close to the white line and am now able to cycle clockwise and anticlockwise. Which puts me up one on the teacher I once had who had to go the long way everywhere when she drove as she didn’t like turning right in the car.
Vanessa and I have outgrown the little square some how, and the Husband is bored of walking behind. So we’ve decided to go to Battersea. I have picked this route as I sometimes run this way, so if Vanessa does run off with me (yes I know she’s a bicycle but I cant help feeling she has some rather equine traits somehow) then at least I know my way home, even if it is three London boroughs away.
We leave the square. I have to cross a main road…main-ish anyway. I stop for the lights to change. I had been coasting along pretty speedily up until that point and was in fifth gear (it took me about four years in a car to get up to fifth, so I think this is quite good progress). Anyway, so I’d been in fifth and had come to a halt. And when I went to pull away when the lights changed it was literally like cycling in cement. Ok, not literally, but it was incredibly hard, like the worst bits of spinning. And on a bike, when you push down very hard with your right foot, the bike seems to veer off to the left. Which means as you are coming to a halt or slowing down, you should change down gears, just like in a car. Who knew? The husband did apparently. He mentioned this gear-changing gem as he rescued me in a withered heap as I’d crashed into the traffic lights.
Second try goes much more smoothly – thanking the bicycle gods that it is some unreasonable time on Sunday morning and so at least there’s not much traffic – only an old guy in a fiat who’s looking at me with some amusement, and another bloke on a bike who passed me in the midst of the collapsed against a traffic light extravaganza and muttered something that sounded like “bloody tourists”. Tourist? Excuse me?
The rest of the journey is less eventful, although in retrospect I regret that I insisted on actually riding along Southbank – on a sunny Sunday morning around the London Eye it really is full of bloody tourists.
