My Material Void

This morning I woke up, got dressed to get on my bike and walked out the door, I could hear sirens outside, but I thought nothing of it, unlocking my bike I realised I was not wearing my glasses, so went back into the house…

…Five minutes later I was out the house, with glasses, cycling up my road. When I got to the top I realised that there was an awful lot of traffic, but thought nothing of it. At the round about I could see police cars and an ambulance, by this point I was coming down the left hand side of the traffic and got the full view of what was going on.

There was what appeared to be a cyclist lying in the road being resuscitated with a lorry in the road. This is not the first time I have experienced cycle deaths in London, there are always bikes and flowers at the road sides, and I once saw a tent put up to shield a cyclists body after a lorry incident.

I carried on with my trip to work shaken up and finding myself extremely angry every time I saw a cyclist jumping a red light or pushing up the inside edge of an HGV. I had to hold myself back from shouting at them, I did not want to see another incident.

Normally I wouldn’t write about something as morbid as this, but I was googling the incident to see what information I could find out when I came across a blog that made me really angry.

The writer proudly posts that they had tweeted at the Mayor of London “WE WANT A BAN ON RUSH HOUR TIPPERS AND CONCRETE MIXERS”.

This made me incredibly angry – in my five years of cycling it is becoming more and more glaringly obvious that the worst culprits on London’s roads are actually cyclists themselves – they love to blame anyone but themselves.

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