Last week I was involved in a bicycle crash.* I was hit by a metallic painted smoked glass windowed BMW at at about half ten at night as I cycled home from climbing.
I was riding through Camberwell in the bus lane, having just passed a bus, and was now on the inside of a line of traffic waiting at traffic lights.

The car in question decided that he didn’t want to wait in line and could use the bus lane to slip up the line of traffic and he was going to turn left anyway so that made it all right. I haven’t checked the hours of operation on that bus lane, I don’t remember it being a 24 hour one.
So he pulled into the left lane, which was a problem, as that is where I was.
Now I my spider senses had tingled so I had a very small window of realisation of what was going to happen, so was already slowing down and swerving towards the left hand curb as he drove into me. This vastly reduced the seriousness of the crash, (I’m not going to say accident, as it was clearly his fault) so I wasn’t knocked off my bike.. I had time to yell out a short warning before we made contact.
Not that it prevented the inevitable crash, that just meant that a lot more people got to see it..

Not that there was much to see, it is not like I fell off or anything. I just bumped my shoulder against the side of a car, wobbled a bit and stopped. The car drove on for another 20 feet before the driver realised that he was going to have to stop before he could lean out of the passenger window to ask if I was ok..

Given that I hadn’t fallen off, there was no bleeding and apart from my shoulder being a little tender I was fine, so I told him to be careful and carried on home.
I wasn’t badly hurt there didn’t seem to be any mileage in doing anything else.

So I have spent a week with a sore shoulder, there are still some actions that are achy, so I will have to take it easy for a little while yet.

Anyway the point of this post was to try and talk about the language and the conversations that have happened in the following week. I have dealt with several..
“Cycling is so dangerous”
“Were you wearing a helmet”
“you’ve got to be so careful”
“you just hear so many bad stories”
“you have to watch out out for lorries”

I’ve been trying to explain that basically I am fine, just a bit stiff, and it is not that bad. You ride carefully, but if the people in the cars are not paying attention, they are going to catch up with you from time to time.
But that doesn’t mean that cycling is a bad idea.

And I just have no idea how to articulate that.

* Spoiler, I am ok, there is no need to worry, nothing broken with either me or the bike, but I am a bit achy.