My local council appear to have a ‘thing’ for Speedbumps; they’re scattered liberally around Slough – it’s almost like their road-roller has a dent in the wheels. Anyhow, they’ve been building some new houses on a ‘cut through’ of mine; I use it late in the evening because this particular set of traffic lights sometimes skip the Right turn cycle, which is obviously a little irritating when I’m waiting (patiently) to turn right. It also used to save me some speed bumps; 4 or 5 actually. which was quite nice. But now, presumably as part of the building of new houses agreement they’ve put in a speedbump of such ridiculous size and height that my poor MZ bottomed out it’s suspension.
At 20 miles an hour (it’s 30 limit) the front of the bike simply went *THUNK* – quickly followed by *BANG* from the back of the bike, descending the speed bump was similarly uncomfortable. I’ve never encountered such a combination steep / tall speedbump before. The ‘zed is designed for dealing with East Germany’s Communist and knackered roads. And *it* struggles with these, that must say something bad.
I hate speedbumps anyway; I find them desperately annoying because most of them don’t limit you to the speed limit. The lumps in a 30 area usually require you to do 20 to get over them comfortably. In which case they should be honest and (try to) lower the speedlimit, rather than the dishonest act of putting in bumps but leaving a notional speed limit which you can’t safely do.
Anyway, that rant over and done with, here’s another; why – why when it says two lanes are closed on the motorway, and you get a mile’s warning, and then the repetitive get-in-lane type signs start at 600 yards do dumb-ass people decide that they’ll try and squeeze in at the last second. Don’t they get that they cause the traffic jams. They’re *why* the traffic flow is so lousy through the road works. Despite there being all of maybe 20 cars going through the set of roadworks on my way home it involved slowing to less than 10mph and dropping into first gear because these moron people can’t merge earlier. *sigh*.
The ranting is, of course, because it rained on the way home. Raining on the way home is unacceptable; not as bad as raining on the way to work…
While I was riding though, I thought things through, as I’m wont to do. I think I ought to maybe accept that my bike needs to be fixed, and also that I don’t have the time or energy to look at it at the moment. I’ve tried to fix the ‘top-speed-is-50mph’ issue before, and clearly it needs more effort. When the car’s back sorted I may have to accept that it’s time for the bike to go be fixed. Still, I can always see if Kathryn fancies a trip into London (of course, once there, if you drop of your bike somewhere there is the issue of what to do with bike gear…oh, and I no longer have spare bike gear; see, I should have bought the stuff at lidl).
Today’s work was odd; having spent a very relaxed morning reading Claire McNab / The Wombat Strategy – which turned out to be annoyingly good – at least, by my limited standards. I’ve long suspected that as with films I’m not actually terribly picky about my reading – I can easily loose myself in an adequate book. But i really did end up enjoying this one, so I think it’s actually pretty good. Unfortunately there’s 4 books in the series, which I get to add to the list of books that I need to read; I’ve finally picked up the final book in the Kushiel trilogy; I’ve got the other two Thursday Next books and on top of this (and perhaps more importantly, really) I really need to start learning about A&E stuff.
Some days it just proves how little I know. And I find myself thinking ‘what the hell am I doing here?! I don’t know enough to do this!’ which is pretty much how I felt a lot of today. But the guy got treated – and was improving – despite his complete unhelpfulness. I hope he’s okay; although after 4 hours I was very glad to be handing him over to the ward.
