Senofou, here's my cycle today: went to the local charity shop with a big bag of clothes and a big bag of bags; continued to the bottle bank and dumped jars and bottles; continued to the hardware shop and bought a mop-bucket, two of those plastic bags with vacuum yokeys to compress and put away my winter woollies, a bunch of scourers and a solar lamp; continued to Lidl for steaks and spinach and yogurt and bread (pumpkin seed and crispy white loaf) and croissants and chocolate and can't remember what else, and a nice spinny thing for the garden; at this stage I managed to cram it all in except the spinny windmill thing, so I took that out of the packet and put it together and cycled home with it spinning in the air above me.
There are few things I can't get on the bike. My neighbour and friendly local handyman brought me to Ikea yesterday to get a bookcase with glass doors, which he then put together for me - but at a pinch, Ikea could have had it delivered.
As for bad weather, it feels much worse in a car than it does on a bike. What's a pleasant mizzle, moistening your face and refreshing you, on a bike seems like a downpour in a car. As for hot weather, cycling is refreshing as the air rushes coolingly past.
Sad for the driver who ran into the unlit cyclist - but quite honestly, when I was driving I never drove fast enough that I couldn't see one of these ninjas in time. Of course the cyclist should have had the legally required red light in the back and white in the front, and if she or he was in a country area then a reflective belt might have helped - but a lot is down to drivers. I'll never forget driving through Ranelagh in Dublin with a friend and screaming at him - "Paddy! Look out!" - he was about to go into a cyclist (lit up and hi-vizzed) whom he had simply failed to see.
Part of this is due to an effect of the human eye - here's an interesting (to me, anyway) article by an RAF pilot about it. I'll always be grateful to this writer for introducing me to the wonderful word "saccade".
I'm sorry for leaping down the throat of Jim Carroll; I don't find jokes about people trying to kill me (or rape me either) funny, and have often been accused of a lack of sense of humour by people who do.