Have you ever seen anyone nearly killed? I did recently, in broad daylight on a city street. It’s a danger I know has been flagged up by cyclists ever since the tram was invented. And of course it can be avoided by prudent cycling, and sensible cyclists do avoid it. But still it came as a shock to see a woman almost killed by overlooking a hazard that had previously struck me as more theoretical than real.
She was pedalling perfectly sedately across a set of tramlines that ran at an angle to her direction of travel. She must have turned her handlebars slightly (as you do on a bike to maintain balance) so that her front wheel was momentarily aligned with the narrow iron trench that is a tramline. The wheel must have slotted itself into the trench, throwing her off balance. I saw her fall.
A tram was approaching at some speed. She could have fallen either way: under the iron wheel of the approaching tram or just clear of it. The driver braked hard and immediately but could not stop short of her.
Mercifully, she fell clear. The tram came to a halt a couple of yards past where she fell. People rushed to help her up and she was shaken but unhurt. The woman remounted and cycled off in one piece.
Had she fallen the other way, she would have been in two pieces.
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Inventor’s blow
I was looking forward to meeting Sir James Dyson, the inventor of the bagless vacuum cleaner and much else, to record a programme for my Great Lives series.
Dyson — straight-talking, pleasant and to-the-point — had chosen the life of Sir Frank Whittle, who invented the turbojet engine: a machine that today powers your every flight by passenger jet. Whittle’s son was with us too, and I found our recording fascinating — but equally my chat with Sir James afterwards.
Shyly, I told the great man that I was an inventor too and explained to him my design for a parasol that doesn’t buckle or blow over in gusts of wind. He listened carefully and in silence, then asked whether I’d patented the idea. I replied that I hadn’t. “Then you can’t be a proper inventor or you wouldn’t have told me about it,” he said.
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Strike a light
We need an outside light and I undertook to search online: an efficient way to save time, I thought, rather than driving to hardware stores on spec. Online, on various traders’ websites, there were thousands of lamps.
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After more than an hour of scrutinising specifications, looking at pictures and trying to visualise sizes, I was struggling to remember what I had seen at the beginning, but finally compiled a shortlist. At the top was a lamp that appeared to be in stock at a B&Q store just outside Buxton so I set out: a 20-minute drive.
“Do you stock all-weather outside lights?” I asked the friendly woman at the counter. She smiled at the naive old fogey come in from the sticks. “You bet we do,” she said and pointed down an aisle. There, on the wall, was an array of about 60 types, all set up so one could see at a glance how they’d look in situ.
I immediately spotted one that would be right, bought it, and drove home; the whole exercise taking less time than my hour-plus hunched over a laptop screen and resulting in an assured right choice. Online shopping can waste time.
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Exit from planet X
I’ve left Twitter/X. “Big deal,” you may say, “who cares?” Nobody, and that’s the point. It was not adding to my life or anybody else’s. I joined Twitter because I thought it would widen my vista, open me up to more diverse opinion and information, and keep me in touch. But experience has not shown this.
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I fast decided against tweeting much myself because the impulse is immediate but the consequence permanent. And I found I was reading others either for the few minutes’ advance notice of news that one hardly needs, or to confirm my own opinions, or get myself steamed up about the opinions of others. I would rarely quit the site happier or better informed than when I’d accessed it.
So let the Twitter storm rage: I’ve left that planet.
