A morning ride

Well, here’s something that’s of this fog and of today.

I had a rather eventful ride to work this morning. First I got swooped by a magpie. I had a helmet and sunglasses on, so there is not so much a magpie can do to me, and if it keeps up, as no doubt it will as I ride the same route every day, I might have to take to waving my arm about. I don’t like beaked things flapping around my head, but swooping birds amuse me. I mean, I am so much bigger than they are, with limbs I can raise above my head – how do they think that might work out? I do have a healthy respect for wild creatures that pose a real threat to humans, but birds that aren’t raptors aren’t really one of them (that’s what I’m telling myself and the attitude I am working on anyway). Good on them for guarding their nests though.

Then, I was riding down the side of some cars parked at a red light, when suddenly there was a smashed glass bottle on the road, so I swerved, and I clipped a side view mirror of a car with the handle bar of my bike and flipped it back. I stopped in horror and back-peddled and there was a young guy in the driver’s seat, and I fully expected to cop it for banging his car. He wound down his window and I winced and started apologising and then he says “oh that’s OK, so long as you’re alright”, several times, and was sooo nice about it. It restored a little of my lost faith in the tolerance of Sydney drivers to stupidity and accidents.

Being a little distracted by that however, I then went around the corner on the footpath, before ducking back out on the edge of the road at a driveway, and as I did so a car coming along tooted me. I’m allowed to ride along the edge of the road, and there was room for him to drive right on by, and perhaps he expected I was going to do something else and ride down the middle of his lane, but I probably should have waited. Toot guy might like to take a few notes off side-view mirror guy.

Then, I was riding along, nearing my destination, when suddenly I had to swerve around half a rolling tuna. As in the fish. Not kidding. There’s a guy driving a fork lift along near the path, with the biggest dead fish hanging off the sides of it that I’ve seen in a long time, which I presume was a tuna, and just as I was approaching I believe this fish actually broke in half and half of it fell off the fork lift (it's possible they were two separate fish already, but the rolling piece looked all sort of torn at one end, not neatly cut). So a large piece of fish, about a metre long and 30 centimetres in diameter, flops and rolls a little onto the path. The fork lift driver swore and carried on something terrible at the dead fish, at which point I thought this was all rather amusing. I wish I’d stopped to take a picture. But I didn’t especially want a chat with angry fork-lift driver - I was still getting over angry toot guy. It would have been a good story if I had stacked my bike over a tuna.

I was rather relieved to arrive at work today.