The Sky is on Fire!

Just before leaving work I spotted this out of the window, an all too brief natural firework display.

A day of contrasts at work, with a typical situation involving someone having to be found for something not going as smoothly as it should (together with one of my colleagues I'm a fairly regular candidate - not because we've actually done anything wrong you understand, but a witch hunt is pointless without someone being to blame, and my colleague was once told that the fee-earners were very busy and stressed and support staff were there to blame but it was just them needing an outlet... It's a situation I've seen from both sides, having been a fee-earner in private practice working for an associate who was remarkably full of his own self-importance, and now support for a load of economists and the like, and I haven't liked it from either side).

The contrast came as a piece of work that's been dragging along for a while seems to have some light at the end of the tunnel and I can finally get it off my desk.

Aaaaanyway, the sunset tonight was a great sight, and the ride home thankfully uneventful. Although these two days so far there seem to be a lot of impatient people on the road - last night I was almost subject to an extravagant left hook before the person overtaking me in their car to turn immediately left realised that to do so would have meant turning into me to complete the manoeuvre, and discretion proved the better part of valour.

There's one particular road, not the one the above happened at, coming home that's bad for this, and almost every night someone squeezes past, into a downhill road with speed bumps, meaning I sit on their tail, usually without the need to pedal, for the next mile - but of course bikes are slow and so must be overtaken... Someone once wrote a piece for my website saying that drivers must actually enjoy sitting in traffic jams, that being the only explanation for the number of people who seem to be in a rush to get past when there is an entirely visible queue of traffic only 40-50 yards ahead (or less in some instances, my personal record being about 5 yards, meaning the overtaker was then stuck in the queue completely out of position on the right blocking oncoming traffic).

Think of it this way, if you're 'stuck' behind a cyclist doing 10 miles an hour for 200 yards (and trust me, 200 yards is a LOT further than you think) that distance takes 40 seconds; at 30mph that will take 14 seconds, so you lose a grand total of 26 seconds. And 10 miles per hour is relatively slow. I've been riding at 30, the legal maximum for the area, but because I'm on a bike there seems to be this 'need' to get past. Take that same 200 yards which was 14 seconds at 30mph, passing at 40mph means you save a whopping... 4 seconds. And all of those savings are if you latch on behind the bike right at the start of those 200 yards. Half everything if it's in the middle. So for the sake of 2 seconds someone can be willing to pass within a whisker, swerve to avoid a central reservation, having been in the face of oncoming traffic, to turn left at the next road, and pull up two houses down that road at their house. Yep, this has happened to me.

But as our Americans say, do the math.

(you wouldn't think I feel quite relaxed at the mo would you? ;) )

But just to reiterate (in case no-one has seen my bike stuff before) I don't hate cars, far far from it, just inattentive, or dangerous, or negligent, driving. In fact, I love cars.