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Inattentiveness
[4 minute read ]
Opinion (hyperbole)
I knew it was going to be 'one of those days' when the cyclist who had just crossed the motorway slip road cycled in the middle of the cycle-path towards me on my bike.
'Pay attention!' I shouted, hoarsely because I was so angrily loud. Just before I was about to brake and pull my bike out of the way, he moved slightly left, which still gave me little room. He turned his face to me, his identity hidden behind a beard and sunglasses.
I could, in retrospect, say that day started in my village at a T junction I have to turn right at, onto the only road through my village. This means that there is a double chance for some happenstance car driver to inhibit my smooth maneuvering. Every time I need to do it, which isn't daily, a car or van prevents me pulling out, even though there is only a single car or two per minute that passes on that road. On 'that' day, however, it was a bus. Despite the unusual appearance of a punctual bus, supposedly hourly, there has to be a sequence of bizarre incidences before I am alerted.
If I had been my normal uber-observant self, which includes self-scrutiny, I should have recognised what was about to take place throughout that day, and immediately turned around and gone home, but I had an appointment in the city; my mind was occupied with avoiding only bodies of mass and broken glass, and my attention was firmly placed on not being late; I hate being late.
Somehow, all the ripples in the footpath / cycle-path at the outskirt of the city had conspired among themselves to act like bumps; they normally only do this when I am heavily-loaded on the way back from the city. I dared not let one hand off the handlebars and I was a passenger on my own bike with no rider to help me. 'Relentless!' I cried loudly out, 'Relentless!'
Car drivers and cyclists alike played 'chicken' with me. Despite having my right arm at ninety degrees to my body on the approach and on the mini-roundabout, and plainly favouring the inner side of the mini-roundabouts, I had to stop on mini-roundabouts to avoid being hit by cars when I was turning right. In the UK, when we are turning right on any roundabouts we have the 'right-of-way'. The 'right-of-way' unless the car driver refuses to look for cyclists, then they have the right-of-way, of course. Another strange law is when a cyclist is heading towards another cyclist: 'If one cyclist does not want to see the other cyclist, then this cyclist has the 'right-of-way.'
On that day, pedestrians on shared 'pedestrian and cycle paths' kept their heads down or stared straight through me; which is fine with me because I can go around them. Not all of them did this though. Some of them without looking at me beforehand, deviated by a couple of steps to claim a different space; a space that I was likely to enter in the next two seconds; all the time watching my hands to see if I was about to brake. As soon as they realised I would definitely be able to stop before hitting them, they stood still, as though they had won some kind of battle in which the winner was not the possessor of contested space, but was instead, by their own rules and understanding, the contestant who caused the other contestant to hesitate.
The few streets into the tiny city centre, after the park, had seven puddles of shattered glass fading from the roadside gutters for the next forty feet of road. Heavy motorised traffic on the roads into and out of the city, meant I was unable to keep swerving to avoid the glass. I had to stop and rest one foot on the kerb each and every frustrating time. I imagined the drivers grinning; winners every one of them; by my rules of engagement, to possess a contested space, I miserably lost, because according to The Highway Code, as the smaller of the traffic in the hierarchy of vehicle categories I had the right of way, and as a cyclist, I had legitimate claim to six whole feet (1.83m) of the road width from the kerb outward. They laughed, because I played a different game to them, and they won because I hesitated. They, of course, never saw the glass; the sun was in the wrong place.
Someone in chains sat on the other side of the desk firing unimaginative questions, so I talked in every available space during the appointment. In any case, I had, by now, figured out what game everyone was playing; 'Inattentiveness'. The pedestrians, cyclists, and car-drivers were not laughing at me; they were flimsy and shallow, and absent of higher function thinking. They never even had sensors that detected any future beyond their singular prosaic life. They could not predict a future in which all the observable features of their known world may be rapidly re-positioned in geographical space; that cyclist (me) may be in a different space the next time I open my eyes. They had simply become complacent, unimaginative, and lazy.