"I didn't see you"...

...common first words of motorists who plough into innocent cyclists, and the lady who ploughed into me predictably came up with them.

50-odd years of defensive cycling have left me possibly smugly aware of drivers who don't have the slightest clue of what is around them, and this is my first experience of being knocked off my pedestal of rather knowing hubris.

So - here I am, after 24 hours of travelling to, waiting in, and being subject to the ministrations of, our (for the time being) glorious NHS.  I have a rapidly-healing dislocated shoulder and various bruises, and my overwhelming feeling is one of great relief that I am in one piece with no lasting damage.

For my new (24 hours old and very expensive) glasses and my (30 years old but hand-built and high quality) bike it's a different story.  But they are things, and replaceable.

So - what happened?  I was going round a small roundabout and made the mistake of expecting a car coming from my left to see me.  My usual practice is to make eye contact with drivers who are in a potentially threatening position, but this time I slipped up.  My attention stayed too long on seeing a gap in the traffic surging onto the roundabout from my right.  So there you go.

Two witnesses pressed their names and addresses on me, and Sam, who was walking past, kindly tended to me.  Two small female teenagers wearing police uniforms soon took control of the formalities and looked after the offending driver, who was devastated.  I sat on a windowsill and clutched my strangely misshaped shoulder watching the world go by through a shimmering mist of delayed shock.

I phoned Katy, who brought the car and she and Sam loaded a pile of twisted wheels and double-butted Reynolds 531 tubing into it, and we went off to Witney hospital.  After a few X-rays and some head-scratching, the team there said that I had better go to the JR . 

After some entertaining people-watching in casualty, my turn came up in the triage and they proposed a series of possibilities.  Some of them involved attractively-described experiments with gas and air, but they said that they would try the low-impact treatment first.  This simple method was to rest my torso on a sloping surface dangling my arm over the end holding a couple of kilos.  The idea is that the gentle prolonged extension of the joint persuades the head of the humerus back to its rightful place.

The result:  one happy DC - it worked!  I was fitted with a sling and given an appointment for the trauma clinic.  I schlepped over there the next day and the consultant said that it would heal well.  I'm waiting for the physio appointment, and realising now that the major focus of my attention has been the shoulder which took most of the impact of the tumble while the rest of my body has been ignored.  Minor scrapes and bruises which have been overlooked now become more noticeable, and I have been exhausted by the process of initial healing.  I am writing this nearly two days after it happened - I just haven't felt like doing much before now.

So - I'm thankful that it wasn't worse, and feeling a lot better.

Coincidentally, the roundabout is one I wrote about in a previous post about a cycle accident.  It's on the approach to what has been since the middle ages the single traffic bridge across the Windrush, currently embroiled in local controversy.

Rant

Once upon a time commercial concerns wanted, and rewarded, loyalty.  The world has changed.  We had an insurance renewal notice for £488.  In years gone by, we would have renewed.  I phoned Churchill (for it is they) - first having looked up their 0800 number on the excellent 'saynoto0870' website - and said that we were looking at competitors.  I was then offered a "loyalty discount" of £166.  Just like that.  For one phone call.

Using comparison websites, I've just bought better insurance for £230 less, and Churchill has lost another disgruntled customer. 

The problem with this evolving state of affairs is that I am taken for a sucker or I have to spend time and effort monitoring all relationships with service providers to make sure that they are not benefiting from the inertia effect.  I suppose that I'm just being old-fashioned, but I seem to spend inordinate chunks of time avoiding being ripped off.  I suppose that it's the way things work nowadays, and it's saddening.

Fallen trees

I've been taking photographs of fallen trees in the Chilterns since 2003. For one fallen tree in particular, I have been snapping multiple shots from the same viewpoint all this time at various times of the year.  It's visible here:

(tip - click on any pic to see full size)

It's difficult to give an idea of the scale, but it was a large specimen.  Indeed, it was visible from space for some time, as this Google Earth image from 2004 shows:

  

The exact location is: 51.749130°  -0.770632°

One problem with taking pictures in a forest is that you can't see the tree for the wood (!) - it's impossible to stand back.  So instead I set up a tripod fairly close to it and take about a dozen shots.

The resulting sweep of individual pics are cunningly stitched together to make panoramas which, although they bear little relation to how it's perceived, can be eyecatching.  Here's one from its first winter:

 

 

 From the second spring:

...and this is what it looked like around 7 years later:

And there are other fallen beasts - another sample:

Inertia

Scene: the queue at Lidl. Opposite me is a guy who is buying two items - one is a 2 litre bottle of some drink or other. He has laid it across the belt. Every time the belt lurches forwards, the bottle predictably attempts to stay where it is and rolls 'backwards'. This comes into conflict with his place marker and once or twice dislodges items from the stack of the person following. Several times, he rearranges the bottle further forward.

I wonder whether he has any notion of inertia, and how he could simply lie the bottle down with its long axis along the belt to avoid this repeated learning opportunity.

At least, he didn't stand the bottle up, and have it fall over each time. There might yet be hope for humanity.