Staff Blog: Please don't kill me

Well that was the scariest, most bum-puckery, head-duckery moment I’ve had since I got back on a bike in the Spring.

Casually riding south on the A1, thinking about whether to make one more overtake before reaching the exit that leads to the MCN office. Yes, there’s loads of room to pass a dawdling Audi. Check mirror, indicate, aim just to the left of the squashed animal carcass in the outside lane and move out.

Then suddenly my vision is filled with a highly unexpected early morning view of a bird’s undercarriage.

The winged predator had been hovering above its easy prey and clearly had seen enough Tufty videos to know to wait for a space in the traffic before diving for its breakfast. But my lane switch interfered with its plan.

All I could do was duck and hope this massive, glorious beast would pull the ejector cord. It did, leaving me to contemplate what it would have been like to headbutt a kestrel, which is what I suspect it was.

A pigeon’s bad enough, as I’ve found out twice before. One came coasting into my path and just about gave me enough time to brace myself by hunching my neck into my shoulders before it glanced off the top of my helmet, leaving me a bloody present to clean off the AGV afterwards.

The second one came zooming out of roadside trees and I rode square into it with my forehead. That blow properly rung my bell, and I suspect the pigeon did a few 360-degree spins on its route to the gutter.

It seems my winged episodes seem come every four years, so hopefully I’ll have better luck with them until 2017 at least.

 

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Photo by: Fir0002/Flagstaffotos, Used under GFDL v1.2 Licence