Went shopping at the weekend on bicycles. What a fabulous way to shop; we had to take a road out to the end of Cossington but after that, it was all leafy lanes, canal tow paths, the sides of lakes, edge of Syston playing fields and then along the brook to the village centre. There are cycle racks at the side of the brook and the world’s best butchers just over the road.
To all of those ‘serious’ cyclists who race past me doing forty miles per hour and sneer a little, at the way I give cyclists a bad name by not wearing a cycle helmet, can I just say that I’m doing about twelve miles per hour on a canal tow path and so I’m unlikely to sustain much more than a scrape when I fall off. Secondly, I’m not frightening the bejasus out of pedestrians and anyone trying to step off their own boat! Pedestrians tip their hats to me and thank me for having a bell to announce my presence. People seeing you tend to dive into hedgerows. People not seeing just lurch sideways and clutch at their chests. If you do forty mph round Watermead Park and had any desire for the good name of cyclists, you’d have to provide crash helmets for all pedestrians. Its not yourselves who are in danger of head injuries here.