A handy guide to French cycling vocabulary before the Tour de France arrives in London this weekend. Sadly (no, I don’t mean that), I’ll be in Paris at the time.
My favourite words: “une voiture balai” – the “broom wagon”, to pick you up when you just aren’t going to make it to the end of the course, and “chasse patate riding between two groups (literally, “potato hunt”)”.
If anyone can explain the last one, please do in the comments!
After 42.5 miles in the Hertfordshire countryside on The Little Green Ride, through Knebworth, Duntingford, West Mill and environs to Stevenage, I can report that the wild roses in the hedges are a little blowsy but still in full bloom, the stems of the grain crops are bent from the weight of the heads, the broad beans appear to be doing very nicely, and most of the ewes are deciding its about time their lambs did without milk.
And after doing 45 miles, including some what were (by my standards) serious hills, in this my first ride of any distance since Christmas, I’d rate my chances of being able to walk tomorrow about 50:50. I think I’m suffering from severe lactic acid buildup in the front of my thighs – any thoughts on treatment would be appreciated…
(Okay, it wasn’t London to Brighton, but close.)
There’s talk of making much of London’s “Theatreland” – Soho and Covent Garden pedestrian-only – sounds like a great idea to me (as long as they leave cycle paths…)
(Found on 32 Spokes, the blog of a new London cycle courier.)
“White trash” is one of those terms that sounds modern, very late 20th century, but in fact it dates back to the 1820s, and had a long and nasty association with the eugenics movement.
A history of “air hostesses” – from the days of snap underwear inspections…
A couple of notes:
* There’s a new cycling shop, Camden Cycles, on Eversholt Road (at the bottom end of the high street, on the left of Mornington Crescent Tube if you’re coming from Camden) which seems OK and has quite decent prices: £30 for a general service and £10 for new brake pads all around. (So now I’ve got brakes again after some time without – have to remember that so I don’t catapult myself over the handlebars.)
* Lock up well if you leave your bike at the British Library. A guard today was warning me that they’ve been having a lot of problems with thefts lately.
Today’s Evening Standard – paper of the Volvo and SUV-driving classes of suburban and commuter London – is splashing (at least in an early edition) with “New Battle for Safer Cycling”, including its very on 12-point charter for safer cycling.
That includes one of my current favourite bugbears – a call for enforcement of advanced stop lines for cyclists – a point I was pondering this morning while wondering if the white van splayed completely across the cyclists’ space – yes that green-coloured bit with cycles painted all over it, not white vans – was planning to go straight ahead or left.
He didn’t have an indicator on, but of course that means nothing, and he was pointed in if anything a rightways direction, but then lots of drivers can’t turn left without first swinging out to the right. So I took the safe(r) option and stayed behind him, although that meant I didn’t get space at the lights.
But still … a double-page spread in the Standard (by Andrew Gillligan) – maybe police might start to enforce the law now?
An alarming headline on The Times website today: Women cyclists ‘risk death’ by obeying traffic lights. I think this first should be read against the stats, not contained in the article, that young male cyclists — who tend to take often gasp-induucing risks — are far more in danger, statistically speaking.
Nonetheless, I think there is such a thing as being too law-abiding as a cyclist, as the article says:
The Times has obtained a copy of the study, which says that 86 per cent of the women cyclists killed in London between 1999 and 2004 collided with a lorry. By contrast, lorries were involved in 47 per cent of deaths of male cyclists…In more than half the fatal crashes, the lorry was turning left. Cyclists may be deceived by a lorry swinging out to the right to give itself room to make a left turn.
The study states that cycle “feeder†lanes, which allow cyclists to overtake vehicles along the nearside kerb to get to the front of queues, may “exacerbate the problemâ€.
It also says that pedestrian guard railings may have contributed to three of the deaths because cyclists became trapped between the railings and the lorry, leaving them no escape route.
All of which does make perfect sense – and is one more argument in favour of far, far better road design. As I was only saying this afternoon to one of Camden’s Green Party councillors, with reference to a letter of mine in this week’s Camden New Journal (not yet on the web), far too often the cycle lane has obviously just been jammed in as an after-thought, with no real attention paid to the realities of the road.
And in the meantime, I’ll be remaining a law-abiding cyclist most of the time, except when it looks too dangerous to be so…
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