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Her turn to lose control so he could, in turn, be controlled
[ 4 minute read ]
Never mind him, she is important
When I got knocked off my bicycle by a car, yesterday, the passenger harangued me. Neither the driver nor the passenger were concerned for my health. While I was talking to the driver trying to establish what went wrong, his wife stood to his side.
'I saw what happened. I am a witness!'
'You should have given way to the van, which would have meant you wouldn't have hit me.'
'I am a witness.'
'It is not important what you saw. It is important what he [the driver] saw, or didn't see.'
She just wanted to continue to confound the issue with accusative venom.
'I am a witness. I saw what happened. I am a witness! I am a witness! I am a witness! You......! You......!'
Plainly someone nearly being hospitalised is less important than her view of herself in the grand scheme of things.
If I had not braked, the car would have hit me side on. That probably would have broken my leg and put me over the bonnet and even over the roof (I have a high saddle on my bike so the bike and me has a high centre of gravity).
There may have been a strong element of rightful blame attributed to my risk-taking cycling. However, that would rest on how accurate my estimation of driver skill is, and not necessarily whether I made a potentially fatal mistake.
If I put myself in the driver's position, I am pretty sure I would have braked in order to allow any cyclists to clear from my forward progress. Yet, if the driver didn't see the van he ought to have given way to until it was too late to stop, and he just carried on going onto the roundabout, he may have accelerated to avoid the van rear-ending him, and concerned, may have been looking in his rear-view mirror. It is possible that he was distracted throughout the whole event by his wife talking. Certainly, he looked pretty brow-beaten when he got out of the car to find me picking myself up and holding my arm. He didn't even get a chance to talk before his wife interfered with her idea of what happened. He may have deserved a telling-off from his wife and the accident occurred during an argument. Who knows. Certainly, the woman was emotionally assertive in her approach to me.
There was a cyclist who asked how I was. He just stood by until the driver and the passenger drove away, watching me fruitlessly trying to talk to the driver. We talked for a while, analysing what just took place and how the accident may have happened. Both of us were keen to understand how to avoid being killed. Unfortunately, the driver and I never had that conversation and he will, invariably, be told that he should not add the event to his experience, I suggest.
The rest of my day had a series of accidents in it and I started to wonder who had put a hex on me. Fortunately, I have fast reflexes and caught glass jars before they hit the kitchen floor but missed the graphic pencils spinning through the air. I can't catch six all at once. I found five and searched for the sixth only to discover it when it seemingly fell out of the air and noisily landed, twenty minutes later.
I couldn't help thinking for the rest of the day that someone invisible, was either out to get me, or was making sure I learnt a valuable lesson, 'Pay attention. You are making mistakes.'
I always think that people are possessed at infrequent times and they serve as automatons of destruction. I can never spot who it is in time to avoid them, though.
Last night, lying in bed, the screeches of the passenger, 'I am witness! I am a witness!' were louder in my head than the pain in my neck, arm and back. I woke with whiplash aches in my neck and shoulders, and a memory of a shrill voice.