Cycling is for the brave

My newly reconstructed left foot has been through several hundred rounds of physiotherapy and it is almost, almost there. Not quite. My left toe, straighened and properly aligned with the line of the foot for the first time since my teens, is still restricted in how far it can bend. And that makes cycling a little bit of a hazard. If I have to make an emergency stop on the bike, and frankly if you cycle on the road your life is one emergency stop after the other - idiots who open their car doors without looking first, drivers who pull out of side roads without looking first, or in the case of a pair of hooligans who trailed me last week, people who wind down their window and shoot at you with a water gun just for the hell of it - and if you emergency stop you need to put your foot down confidently to stop yourself from falling off the bike. My toe does not do the job I will bet most of you have no idea it does, which is to lead off on balancing the entire foot, and because it lacks that one tiny but pivotal function, it means that whenever I make a sudden stop on my bike, I fall off. It is very tiresome. The trick is to cycle sedately enough not to have to stop at speed. Sometimes I cycle so sedately on my local towpath that people pushing buggies overtake me, which would seem to defeat the object. But cycling at speed can be a real hazard and not for the most obvious reasons. I do not think I realised until I started cycling regularly at weekends, once I managed to get enough flexibility back in my foot to be able to get on and off the bike, how many plonkers out there see cyclists as fair game. My reference a few sentences back to the pair of colossal Neanderthals who thought it would be funny to shoot me between the eyes so I couldn't see anything, were driving a hire car at the time. In other words, they rented a car deliberately to drive around picking off cyclists for a laugh. Like, this was a credible pastime for them. And on the towpath, the number of dog walkers who derive their daily hilarity intake from exhorting their dog to "kill, kill" when I cycle past them is pretty staggering, particularly since on the whole larger dogs tend to take their owners at their word and make a beeline for me at worrying speed. At which point, sedate cycling goes out of the wiindow and I am competing with Chris Hoy to outstrip the enthused Doberman. I have been reading the almost daily articles in the Times which is running a very laudable campaign to get people cycling in the city, with a certain grimness. Article after article dredges up sports celebrities who insist we are all fatter because we take public transport and if we all only cycled to school or work then the UK would not have an obesity problem. Maybe not. But I cannot help noticing that all these advocates appear to be either mostly men, or the very few women who step up are competitive cyclists who presumably cycle on Olympic tracks andn do not have to run the gamut of men who see women on bikes as fair game. Yes, every single obnoxious incident I have encountered has been perpetrated by a man. And it is interesting that my partner, who cycles in teh same area as I do to more or less the same places, has not experienced a single incident. Well, it won't stop me cycling locally. But it certainly stops me from cycling as a commute. Never mind dedicated cycling lanes, we're going to have to get cycling police on the road before I turn up to my place of work on two wheels.